Many people have a vague fear of future employers. What if they say something that one day prevents them from getting a job? So they watch what they say online, where statements get saved and often still exist decades later.

This fear dramatically affects people's lives. Many people are quite scared and won't speak their mind in public. They hide their values from the world. Some people won't even speak their mind in private to friends.

People make a big deal out of this. Large numbers of Facebook groups – with hundreds or thousands of members – are "closed" and have rules that the content is all private. This privacy is illusory (sharing secrets with a thousand strangers doesn't work), but people are so fearful that they really want this comforting lie in order to be willing to discuss their ideas.

The issue is not only fear of future employers. Some people are scared their friends or family will find out their ideas about parenting. People are scared of all kinds of true information being had by others, so they hide it. The employer case is especially common.

---

Some people have concrete fears. For example, they have a job and a secretary. They are afraid of getting in trouble for sexual harassment if they ask her out. Or you're worried that if you tell a particular idea to a particular friend, he'll get mad at you.

As long as you're thinking about specific actions right now, and you have concrete reason to believe that fear is reasonably likely to happen, it's a concrete fear. That may be bad, you may be making a mistake, but it's not the topic of this essay.

This essay is about hiding values with no specific knowledge of a concrete danger. It's about vague fears of what could maybe happen in the future. It's about thinking your values don't have a chance in the world in general.

---

The issue with future employers is: one day I might want to trade with someone who doesn't like my values and won't trade with people with significantly different values. Therefore, I'll hide my values for my whole life, just in case.

People hide their values from the world, for their whole life, not out of any concrete fear, but just because of some vague maybes.

And people go through their whole lives that way, keeping their values out of their life. They keep their values hidden away in their head. It's very sad.

(One reason people hide their values is because they think morality and pragmatism conflict. So by sharing values, they must damn themselves as either immoral or impractical.)

---

Hiding values destroys them. It involves living by other values lots of the time. And it involves avoiding discussion of your values. So you don't get to learn more about your values, and discuss how to best follow them, and get criticism when you mess up. By hiding your values, you make it much harder to improve your values or deal with errors in your understanding of them and how you act.

And if you aren't trying to live your values at all times, every time you violate your values can be excused. It really blurs the line about which deviations from your values were a mistake or a strategy.

Fear is a bad sense of life to live with. And more subtle things, like hesitation worry or stress, are bad too. One should be proud of one's values. A good life is proudly confident in one's value, one's values, one's mind, one's judgment and ones ability.

---

When you apply for a job, there is a fact of the matter of whether you are suitable and would be a good hire. If you should be hired, an employer who rejects you due to something irrelevant is mistaken or acting irrationally. He is harming his own business. Why do you want to work for an mistaken or irrational employer that has something against your values in particular?

Why would you want to hide your values from someone for the sake of having ongoing interactions, 40 hours per week, with someone who has values incompatible with your own? Why not find something better to do with your life than get a job where your values aren't wanted?

There are other jobs. Or you could start your own business. Why do you imagine you'll be so desperate for one particular unsuitable job in the distant future? Why do you expect your life so be so fragile and to have zero other good options? And why harm your life, today, for fear life will never work out? By making your life worse now, you're actually causing a worse life situation in the future – the very thing you feared.

---

The underlying mistake here is the malevolent universe premise. People think their values have no chance in the world, and the best thing to do is suppress their values so they can get along with the evil world they hate. And they are so fearful and pessimistic, in the face of vague potential future danger, that they don't even want to try to live a good life and see if maybe that can work out after all.

People may not recognize this applies to them because it's hard to live while hating and fearing the world and one's life. So people come up with rationalizations. People start telling themselves their life is OK, and the rest of the world is OK. And they start changing their values to more conventional ones.

---

If someone doesn't like your values, it's good that you communicated your values. Now you both know you have a clash of values, and can look for more compatible people (or, perhaps, discuss the matter and try to figure out the truth). That's much better than having an ongoing clash of hidden values that confusingly blights your interactions.

(Or if the values in question are irrelevant to what you want to do together, you can continue anyway and drop the irrelevant issue. But note that if someone is unwilling to drop it, they don't consider it irrelevant. If you disagree with them about what's relevant, that is itself an incompatibility between you.)

---

Don't let vague fears that the world is a bad place, and something bad might happen to you one day, ruin your life now. Don't live in fear and hide the very values that could create a better world in general, and a better life for yourself. Don't hold a malevolent universe premise.

Do your best to figure out good ideas and good values. Stay open minded to rational criticism. Then deal with the world proudly, confident that a moral and rational life is practical. We don't live in hell. Don't give up without trying. A good life is possible, it can work.

---

Update: I found a great comment to add from a mini Ann Coulter biography article:

"... there's nothing more conformist than to just talk about the college rape epidemic as being America's biggest crisis. But to be a woman who's going to go on TV and just declare the college rape epidemic to be a load of crap, that takes guts."

...

The first time Coulter told me she was punk rock, I thought she was joking, but this time, she wasn't trying to make people laugh. While the rest of us save our most provocative thoughts for private moments, worried we'll be fired or offend someone, Coulter has purposefully built her life so she can speak her mind without fear about employment or financial repercussions.

"I didn't get the gene that makes you afraid," Coulter explained. "I really am the freest person in America right now. I can say anything."

I think people impersonating me in blog comments is confusing.

The following author names are now reserved only for me: "Elliot Temple", "Elliot", "curi". They are case sensitive. People can still use names like "E1liot Temple", "Curi", or "elliot". If they use a reserved name, their comment will show up as from "Anonymous Impersonator".

This policy is only retroactive a few minutes, there are still a few recent impersonations in comments. I am not the only one being impersonated, but I think it's more confusing and problematic to impersonate the admin.

Edit: Harsher anti-impersonation measures were taken due to people putting effort into workarounds.

Edit 2: Only the 3 literal names are reserved again. They are now colored green and bolded if they're definitely real. So people can make stuff that looks identical if they want, but it won't have the special font.

Discuss how to do paths forward (summary blog post), including details like how to use text that isn't your own (so you can have positions on every major issue which you're responsible for), and how to deal with references from other people (like how to skim for a relevant part and reply when you have a criticism or problem, rather than reading the whole thing, and how to do this in such a way the discussion can still make progress).

What are all the practical ways people mess up discussion? Stuff that prevents them from doing the right thing of having this permanent body of knowledge that keeps getting improved, with recorded, public answers to all the issues that's all open to criticism, progress, error-correction.

Harry Walton writing on the Open Oxford Facebook group (to me, prior to the addition of a rule against external quoting):

Sure, I never said [Burke] didn't use reason. I just said he disliked the enlightenment and disliked liberalism.

But you wrote, "Individual reason was something that [Burke] held disdain for."

I sure don't think you meant Burke liked collectivist reasoning and was anti-individualist! That'd be ridiculous and I didn't see other claims along those lines from you. So, I read it like you said Burke had disdain for (proper) reason.

"Burke tried to explain to people how actual progress and reform work, how to go about that"

I mean, I like Burke so I'm going to agree that he showed how genuine progress and reform ought to go about. Could you give me a description of what you believe he argued for/said?

http://fallibleliving.com/thinkers/burke

"A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve ... would be my standard of a statesman.” – this interest in improvement is not conservative"

Firstly, it is important to note that it is the 'disposition to preserve' that is the important part.

No, the point as a whole is the important part, it's about having those two things together. Did you check the original context before making this claim?

http://www.constitution.org/eb/rev_fran.htm

A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.

I think that clears it up. But read more context and tell me if you still disagree.

Maybe we could put it like this: you think the "disposition to preserve" is the important part, so you're a conservative. Burke thinks the "disposition to preserve" and "ability to improve" need to go together, so he's a liberal (and me too). And then, some people care about "ability to improve" without much/any "disposition to preserve", so they are dangerous radicals, revolutionaries, utopians, etc...

It's the basic part of conservative thinking. My favourite essay by Oakeshott is useful to put here. It explains what it means to be conservative. If you have some spare time you should read it. It's probably the best way of describing conservatism I've seen.

http://faculty.rcc.edu/sellick/On%20Being%20Conservative.pdf

replies to this are at the end

"Seeking progress rationally is how liberalism works"

Liberalism is an ideology that has a set goal of 'freedom' as a value that it wants to pursue. Burke has no such value put forward first except for maybe tradition. The goal of liberalism is to maximise freedom. The goal of Burke is just a vague. One of the main reasons Burke likes change is because he believes it is necessary towards preservation of the nation state. I think the only person who you would see as 'conservative' would be Maistre.

This concept of liberalism is mistaken. That helps explain why you don't see the connection between Burke and liberalism. I think a lot of our confusion is because the opponents of liberalism have spread a lot of lies about what it is, and now most people don't have much understanding what liberalism is actually about.

And the claim Burke only wants change for preservation is silly given I just quoted him, and you requoted him, saying he wants *improvement*.

For understanding liberalism, start with:

http://fallibleliving.com/essays/rational-politics/100-liberalism

and read especially

http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1463

then you could find out what liberalism is – according to actual liberals! – before trying to claim and deny things about it.

---

Liberal means things like: open to improvement and change, tolerant, favorable to individual rights and freedom, pro-liberty. All of those apply to Burke. Liberalism involves being willing to question and change tradition (which Burke was).

Conservative is a kind of pointless word if you define it such that someone is liberal and conservative, at the same time. It's perfectly possible to do that. The "conservatives" in the US today are pretty liberal (and the "liberals" are largely illiberal).

But if Burke is a "conservative" in addition to a liberal, then what do you call the tories? What word is left? Burke was a whig, the *liberal* party, who opposed and politically fought against the more conservative tories in many things. Burke was one of the reformers standing up to King and traditional authority – calling him a "conservative" is therefore confusing, since he put so much effort into politically battling the conservatives of his time.

Declaring Burke conservative and non-liberal would also get into awkward questions like whether you're going to do it to William Godwin too.

Besides liberals and conservatives (meaning stuff like those tories Burke frequently opposed), another big category to be aware of and complete the picture better is *radicals* – the people who want revolutions, utopias, reimaginings of society. Radicals are the guys who don't respect tradition or piecemeal progress, who want replacement with their latest flakey idea instead of reform. (Objectivism does not use the word "radical" this way, but I do. I'm open to ideas about better word choices.)

So you get:

conservative – keep things the same
liberal – value tradition but seek progress, reform, improvement
radical – sweep away the cobwebs of tradition, replace with something new

or in programming terms:

conservative – the software works well enough, no new versions

liberal – let's refactor a bit and fix some bugs, and occasionally even add new features that we carefully think through

radical – i'm not satisfied with some of the design choices for our software, let's start over from scratch and do a full rewrite

again: if you want to define "conservative" differently, whatever. but then what word should i use to convey ideas like this? (pro-stasis?). can you see the logic to using words this way?

i think a big part of the issue is basically there aren't conservatives anymore. no one in the anglosphere wants *stasis* now. but in the past, lots of people really have wanted stasis, which is something moderns find hard to understand. there's still traces of people wanting stasis today, and problems there, but it's hard to find significant strands of thinking which are very thorough about stasis. and if you go further back in the past, or you look at other worse cultures, you get a lot more pro-stasis stuff. (have you seen David Deutsch's book, the beginning of infinity, and his discussion of the static societies of the past?)


http://faculty.rcc.edu/sellick/On%20Being%20Conservative.pdf

say it IS possible to

elicit explanatory general principles from what is recognized to be conservative conduct

good.

The general characteristics of this disposition are not difficult to discern, although they have often been mistaken. They center upon a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be.

Saying this isn't difficult is bad. It insults people who have difficulty with it, and doesn't add value.

Burke often wanted something else, something that "may be" – e.g. a different policy towards America, France, India, Ireland.

What is esteemed is the present; and it is esteemed not on account of its connections with a remote antiquity, nor because it is recognized to be more admirable than any possible alternative, but on account of its familiarity: not, Verweile doch, du bist so schon, but Stay with me because I am attached to you.

Where does Burke say we should hold the present in high esteem because we're familiar with it? I don't think he thinks that way.

In short, it is a disposition appropriate to a man who is acutely aware of having something to lose which he has learned to care for

Burke does have this. I am not denying that a fair amount of Burke's ideas have some overlap with some conservative ideas. But that doesn't stop him from being thoroughly liberal.

Now, all this is represented in a certain attitude towards change and innovation; change denoting alterations we have to suffer and innovation those we design and execute.

This idea of thinking you have to *suffer* alterations is just the sort of thing I would consider conservative. But Burke thought some alterations were good, not things to suffer.

The part about innovation has a grammar problem, I'm hoping to figure out what it means later.

Changes are circumstances to which we have to accommodate ourselves

averse from change, which appears always, in the first place, as deprivation

change is a threat to identity, and every change is an emblem of extinction

Changes, then, have to be suffered

This attitude is like, "stasis would be nice, but we'll have to figure out how to deal with a few deviations from stasis".

The idea of innovation, on the other hand, is improvement. Nevertheless, a man of this temperament will not himself be an ardent innovator. In the first place, he is not inclined to think that nothing is happening unless great changes are afoot and therefore he is not worried by the absence of innovation.

Burke was an ardent reformer, a vigorous seeker of improvement.

Further, he is aware that not all innovation is, in fact, improvement; and he will think that to innovate without improving is either designed or inadvertent folly. Moreover, even when an innovation commends itself as a convincing improvement, he will look twice at its claims before accepting them.

This is true and wise, and is also believed by liberals.

This essay stuff is a mix of stasis, of disliking change, of strong, old conservatism. And then also of liberal-compatible stuff. Whereas Burke is a liberal who had only the liberal-compatible parts of conservatism, but wasn't some kind of stasis-sympathizer.

For discussion in comments about marketing, promoting and spreading Fallible Ideas.

Some people claim they find email a hassle to use, and email quote formatting a burden.

They seem to like places like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit where they can write stuff more quickly.

OK, guys. Here you go. I've always had blog comments that are even easier than that. You don't even register an account. Write whatever you want and hit submit. That's it.

There are no format rules in blog comments, no worries that you're sending people a bunch of dumb emails. Just write and hit submit, that's it. Just as easy as Facebook, etc. Better, actually, because of no stupid stuff like post length limits. My blog comments actually keep it simpler. You can use them like IMs.

So go ahead, write in the comments on this thread all the stuff you would have posted to FI list if only it had lower standards and no formatting rules. It's just blog comments. Say whatever. Who cares? Let's go!

Edit: (Re-edit) I had a link to a subreddit here. But it turns out reddit doesn't let you keep discussing stuff that's 6+ months old, so fuck that.

Edit 2: Note there are now more than 100 comments in the discussion. (Which took under half a day to reach.) Join the discussion!

Edit 3: So if you don't know how to use the site, you want to use the Recent Comments page to view the latest 50 comments. The link is in the left sidebar, so you can find it normally. And at the bottom of that page is a link to view ALL comments.

Having a Twitter discussion about how I don't believe almost the same things as Stefan Molyneux.

But Twitter length limits are super annoying, and he didn't want to use FI list, so I wanted to move to blog comments here.

Open Oxford (OO) is a Facebook discussion group (with some IRL elements) which claims or aspires to be a free speech zone, but there have been some large discrepancies and problems. There are many other groups with some pretense at liberalism which have similar issues, so I think this is worthwhile even if you don't care about OO.

Here is a representative example of what Open Oxford falsely thinks of itself:

... no one is made to feel unwelcome for their opinions, and every viewpoint, no matter how controversial, can be expressed freely and without fear ... value the free exchange of ideas, and not to restrict on the basis of the opinions ... to create and nurture a culture of open debate and pluralism.

... If all ideas cannot be debated, without fear ... how is our society supposed to be organised by reason and understanding rather than groupthink and prejudice?

1)

Admin_1 deleted 5 posts which he claims were "spam". They were not in the category of things everyone agrees is spam, like links posted by a bot advertising viagra, online poker, etc.

Rather, what Admin_1 deleted was a different style of discussion than he's accustomed to and prefers. He reinterpreted a disagreement of ideas (about how to discuss, writing styles, etc) as something else other than a disagreement of ideas (in this case "spam". In other cases various other things considered illegitimate are used like "trolling" or "harassment".)

A major tactic against free speech is portray it as something else. E.g., reinterpreting speech as trolling, spam, hate, obscenity or profanity, as an excuse to censor it. In the same way that unwanted/dislike (by the parent) behavior of children must be seen as disagreement (not misbehavior, sin, willful troublemaking, etc), so too must unwanted/disliked speech be seen as disagreement (not misbehavior, sin, willful troublemaking, etc)

Admin_2 and Admin_3 don't understand free speech either, see (7) and (8) below.

2)

A poster was doxed and consequently left (preventing his free speech, because Open Oxford is not a safe space).

Doxing like seen at Open Oxford is initiation of force. The standard purpose of doxing is:

A) IRL violence, harassment, intimidation or other force

and/or

B) Threat of (A), making people feel unsafe or threatened

and/or

C) Incitement or aid for others to do (A) or (B)

Doxing can also violate property rights over the information in question.

Force like this is or should be a serious crime. It is incompatible with a free society and free speech. Initiation of force – via intimidation tactics involving harassment or threat of harassment – must not be allowed in a discussion.

There is no outcry, nothing is being done to prevent it from reoccurring and make people feel safe from force at Open Oxford. The doxer wasn't banned, and rules about doxing were not clarified. In fact, the doxing was openly supported by many posters, including an admin. Open Oxford has a dangerous mob atmosphere which is actively suppressing discussion.

(FYI, the dox comment was deleted.)

3)

Admin_2 admitted he deleted a comment because he didn't like it ("For the record, I deleted that comment because it was borderline abusive."). Here is the comment:

Context, discussing dating ideas: "Eww, fuck this shit."

Reply that Admin_2 deleted: "You sound cute, what's your number?"

That is speech. That is a discussion style – responding to hostility with a joke. It's super mild, but it shouldn't really even matter what it is. Shouldn't Admin_2 be the one explaining himself? Why hasn't he posted full written documentation of all his moderator activity – including his reasoning – like some other Facebook groups do?

Flaming someone's comment as abusive is low quality discussion, not justification of censorship.

But Open Oxford doesn't even have clear and accurate written documentation of what the moderator policies are in the first place. The result is as expected: arbitrary rule of man, rather than predictable rule of law. That isn't free speech or open discussion, it's unpredictable and unaccountable censorship.

To make matters much worse, the comment Admin_2 deleted was the very same comment the doxer had targeted. So Admin_2 sided with a thug and censored the exact thing the thug didn't like, giving the thug what he wanted.

4)

Admin_2 threatens to ban people from the discussion merely for posting ideas Admin_2 doesn't like. Admin_2 feels no need to give clear reasons for his threats, or clear criteria for what would constitute adequate obedience not to be censored.

Demands like to stop being "needlessly obnoxious" or stop making "offensive personal remarks" are hopelessly vague. That's arbitrary power.

5)

Open Oxford lacks intellectual leadership. No one is setting a good example and leading the way. No one is teaching new members how to participate more productively. No one is making essays or videos explaining how to have a productive intellectual discussion. Without teaching, demonstrations or leadership, how will the community improve and grow?

And Open Oxford's goals are vague. Is there any intention of creating new knowledge? Is this about objective truth-seeking? Is anyone expecting to actually resolve any issues? Or is it just joking around and feeling better about ourselves because we're associated with something that partially pretends to be intellectual?

6)

Open Oxford's missing moderation rules are replaced by the unpredictable oppression of vague social conventions and pressures. Where you don't have clear rules, people mostly do what feels right to them, rather than actually tolerating everything. Without clear distinctions about what crosses a line, you have everyone (including admins) making up their own lines about what is open discussion and what is somehow line-crossing. This has worked out, as should be expected, largely along conventional mob-mentality lines.

7)

OO admin Admin_3 repeatedly demanded the dox victim be banned from the group, because he interprets speech he disagrees with as abuse. People writing ideas he doesn't like, he writes, "literally just abused the policy" – referring to OO's policy of free speech. He added that he felt people were being "needlessly stubborn" about the issue of whether to ban anyone who expressed an opinion he doesn't like.

8)

Admin_2 posted, "if you make any more offensive personal remarks I'll remove you from the group. Even if you don't, you're causing people completely needless upset by arguing in this deliberately offensive way. It would also be nice if we could all try to engage with the actual ideas in this thread. Why don't you restate your argument in non personal, non emotive language?"

Let's go into detail on this. There are important misconceptions about free speech and reason here:

What's "needless" is a matter of ideas people can disagree about, not a fact.

Being deliberately offensive is a style choice that some people actually consider a moral duty. Again, there are ideas in dispute.

The demand for non-emotive language (also called "tone policing") is a requirement to write in Admin_2's style, or a range of styles that seem OK to Admin_2. But don't use other more different styles! This is a way of suppressing certain types of speech (emotive language) without realizing there is a disagreement of ideas involved, and that it's suppressing ideas. (When people write emotive language, they frequently believe that's good and right and proper – they have different ideas about how to think and discuss and communicate than Admin_2 does. Which is completely fine until someone starts demanding that other people conform to his discussion standards without understanding that he's suppressing ideas.)

Emotive language is important. In Cohen v. California, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of a man who had a jacket that said "Fuck the Draft". That's a good reminder of what free speech means – it includes emotive and offensive speech.

It's unclear what Admin_2 thinks constitutes a personal remark. But it is nevertheless clear, in general principle, that people may disagree about what remarks are personal, and that Admin_2 is threatening to ban people who have and follow certain ideas about that topic. Again the theme is Admin_2 does not seem to be aware that it's a topic where people have ideas which disagree with his. He doesn't seem to recognize many topics as potential areas for debate and open discussion.

It's unclear what Admin_2 considers offensive. Trying to disallow offensive speech is a particularly well known and egregious way of suppressing free speech. People routinely find the ideas of their debate opponents offensive. So what? If we can't post unpopular, offensive things here, then Open Oxford is a joke.

Admin_2's concept of how to engage with ideas in discussion is another view he's trying to impose on others, without seeming to recognize it's a controversial topic. When Admin_2 demands people "try to engage with the actual ideas", it's a demand they do it in such a way that Admin_2 would agree that's what they've done – he's demanding actions fitting his own ideas about discussions.

To sum up, Admin_2 has many ideas about how to have a discussion. That's fine. Rather than explain them and try to persuade others of why they are wise, Admin_2 takes them for granted as facts of reality, and threatens to remove people from the group if they think differently than he does.

Admin_2 is blind to many opportunities for critical discussion. That wouldn't be a big deal if this was a free speech zone, because then people could point it out. Everyone has flaws. But it becomes a big deal when Admin_2 is an admin with blindspots that lead to ban threats and deleting comments.

A free speech zone – like Open Oxford aspires to be – needs admins that understand the principles of free speech. It needs leadership that defends the expression of unpopular views, instead of joining the angry mob.

---

I hope people will find this criticism helpful and use it as an opportunity to improve.

[Disclosure: I wrote the "spam" comments and I was the dox victim. Also worth noting: I reported the dox to Facebook which found that it was harassment which violated Facebook rules. Facebook (redundantly) removed it.]

[Note: The 3 admins discussed were anonymized as a personal favor to a friend. Normally I would have included their names.]

[Note: The Open Oxford rule (that contradicts open discussion) not to repost text anywhere else did not exist at the time I had these discussions, it was created later and doesn't apply.]

Update: Open Oxford removed me from the group, no reason given.