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Self-Censorship
Sep. 28th, 2014 09:25 amSaying "I don't censor myself. I just say what I think" is popular. I used to say it a lot myself, and I probably still sometimes say something that amounts to that.
My preferred way of saying it now looks more like "no fucks given" -- which is, I think, a little bit more accurate in that it's a statement about my assessment of the risks and benefits of saying something in a particular situation. Which is to do with how much power I have in that situation.
So somebody who says "I never censor myself" is either extremely powerful (and if that person is Donald Trump, he might just be making a completely straightforward statement of truth); is foolish (somewhat more common than the Donald Trump scenario); or isn't being totally honest. (Ironically.)
It's the last case -- the "not totally honest" case -- that I want to look at more carefully. I think a lot of people take pride in their putative lack of self-censorship because they like TV shows like "South Park" or admire some particular comedian. But they're not as funny as the comedians they admire, or even as funny as "South Park" can occasionally be.
More to the point, I think "I don't censor myself" often comes with an implied moral judgment: that there's something dishonest about not saying what you really think, in every possible situation. Tell your friend that his haircut looks nice, when you think he looks like someone put a bowl on his head and cut around it? YOU ARE A TERRIBLE PERSON, because somehow honesty (about something unimportant) gets weighted much higher than the value of maintaining a relationship and making someone else feel nice. Why is that? We know there's no single moral principle that trumps everything -- most decisions are some form of balancing test or another.
What does the expression x + y mean in a program? Pick whatever programming language you like (except Lisp, I guess -- sorry) for the purpose of answering; at least, any one where x and y denote variable references (so, not Erlang or Prolog either).
You don't know, right? It depends on what x and y refer to in the lexically (or dynamically, depending what language you picked) enclosing environment when this expression gets evaluated at runtime. If you are a programmer, you understand that context doesn't only affect meaning. It is meaning. Or at least, you understand that when you're reasoning about programs.
So why would I choose to not say exactly what I think in a given situation? If the same person with the haircut was a total stranger, and my job was to do quality assurance for a haircutting place, then probably I would say that his haircut looked bad. So that suggests that context matters.
Not only does context affect the meaning of what you say, context is meaning in and of itself. For example, if I was at a bar with a very close friend and we were 3 drinks in, I might tell a fantastically filthy joke. (I mention "3 drinks in" because shared intoxication is a legible indicator of intimacy in my culture, rather than because drinking makes people behave badly.) I wouldn't tell the same joke at 10:00 AM on a Monday in a meeting at work. Why is this? Am I a hypocrite because I'd tell the joke in one situation but not the other? If the joke is somehow bad if I tell it at work, isn't it also bad if I tell it to my friend?
( 25 more paragraphs; some discussion of sexualized presentations, trigger/content warning debates, and racism )
My preferred way of saying it now looks more like "no fucks given" -- which is, I think, a little bit more accurate in that it's a statement about my assessment of the risks and benefits of saying something in a particular situation. Which is to do with how much power I have in that situation.
So somebody who says "I never censor myself" is either extremely powerful (and if that person is Donald Trump, he might just be making a completely straightforward statement of truth); is foolish (somewhat more common than the Donald Trump scenario); or isn't being totally honest. (Ironically.)
It's the last case -- the "not totally honest" case -- that I want to look at more carefully. I think a lot of people take pride in their putative lack of self-censorship because they like TV shows like "South Park" or admire some particular comedian. But they're not as funny as the comedians they admire, or even as funny as "South Park" can occasionally be.
More to the point, I think "I don't censor myself" often comes with an implied moral judgment: that there's something dishonest about not saying what you really think, in every possible situation. Tell your friend that his haircut looks nice, when you think he looks like someone put a bowl on his head and cut around it? YOU ARE A TERRIBLE PERSON, because somehow honesty (about something unimportant) gets weighted much higher than the value of maintaining a relationship and making someone else feel nice. Why is that? We know there's no single moral principle that trumps everything -- most decisions are some form of balancing test or another.
Interlude
What does the expression x + y mean in a program? Pick whatever programming language you like (except Lisp, I guess -- sorry) for the purpose of answering; at least, any one where x and y denote variable references (so, not Erlang or Prolog either).
You don't know, right? It depends on what x and y refer to in the lexically (or dynamically, depending what language you picked) enclosing environment when this expression gets evaluated at runtime. If you are a programmer, you understand that context doesn't only affect meaning. It is meaning. Or at least, you understand that when you're reasoning about programs.
Context
So why would I choose to not say exactly what I think in a given situation? If the same person with the haircut was a total stranger, and my job was to do quality assurance for a haircutting place, then probably I would say that his haircut looked bad. So that suggests that context matters.
Not only does context affect the meaning of what you say, context is meaning in and of itself. For example, if I was at a bar with a very close friend and we were 3 drinks in, I might tell a fantastically filthy joke. (I mention "3 drinks in" because shared intoxication is a legible indicator of intimacy in my culture, rather than because drinking makes people behave badly.) I wouldn't tell the same joke at 10:00 AM on a Monday in a meeting at work. Why is this? Am I a hypocrite because I'd tell the joke in one situation but not the other? If the joke is somehow bad if I tell it at work, isn't it also bad if I tell it to my friend?
( 25 more paragraphs; some discussion of sexualized presentations, trigger/content warning debates, and racism )