Toward a non-constant cancellation function
It now seems the switch of Cancel Culture has only two settings:
- everything is cancellable—including giving intellectual arguments against specific DEI policies, or teaching students about a Chinese filler word (“ne-ge”) that sounds a little like the N-word, or else
- nothing is cancellable—not even tweeting “normalize Indian hate” and “I was racist before it was cool,” shortly before getting empowered to remake the US federal government.
How could we possibly draw any line between these two extremes? Wouldn’t that require … judgment? Common sense? Consideration of the facts of individual cases?
I, of course, survived attempted cancellation by a large online mob a decade ago, led by well-known figures such as Amanda Marcotte and Arthur Chu. Though it was terrifying at the time—it felt like my career and even my life were over—I daresay that, here in 2025, not many people would still condemn me for trying to have the heartfelt conversation I did about nerds, feminism, and dating, deep in the comments section of this blog. My side has now conclusively “won” that battle. The once-terrifying commissars of the People’s Republic of Woke, who delighted in trying to ruin me, are now bound and chained, as whooping soldiers of the MAGA Empire drag them by their hair to the torture dungeons.
And this is … not at all the outcome I wanted? It’s a possible outcome that I foresaw in 2014, and was desperately trying to help prevent, through fostering open dialogue between shy male nerds and feminists? I’m now, if anything, more terrified for my little tribe of pro-Enlightenment, science-loving nerds than I was under the woke regime? Speaking of switches with only two settings.
Anyway, with whatever moral authority this experience vests in me, I’d like to suggest that, in future cancellation controversies, the central questions ought to include the following:
- What did the accused person actually say or do? Disregarding all confident online discourse about what that “type” of person normally does, or wants to do.
- Is there a wider context that often gets cut from social media posts, but that, as soon as you know it, makes the incident seem either better or worse?
- How long ago was the offense: more like thirty years or like last week?
- Was the person in a radically different condition than they are now—e.g., were they very young, or undergoing a mental health episode, or reacting to a fresh traumatic incident, or drunk or high?
- Were the relevant cultural norms different when the offense happened? Did countless others say or do the same thing, and if so, are they also at risk of cancellation?
- What’s reasonable to infer about what the person actually believes? What do they want to have happen to whichever group they offended? What would they do to the group given unlimited power? Have they explicitly stated answers to these questions, either before or after the incident? Have they taken real-world actions by which we could judge their answers as either sincere or insincere?
- If we don’t cancel this person, what are we being asked to tolerate? Just that they get to keep teaching and publishing views that many people find objectionable? Or that they get to impose their objectionable views on an entire academic department, university, company, organization, or government?
- If we agree that the person said something genuinely bad, did they apologize or express regret? Or, if what they said got confused with something bad, did they rush to clarify and disclaim the bad interpretation?
- Did they not only refuse to clarify or apologize, but do the opposite? That is, did they express glee about what they were able to get away with, or make light of the suffering or “tears” of their target group?
People can debate how to weigh these considerations, though I personally put enormous weight on 8 and 9, what you could call the “clarification vs. glee axis.” I have nearly unlimited charity for people willing to have a good-faith moral conversation with the world, and nearly unlimited contempt for people who mock the request for such a conversation.
The sad part is that, in practice, the criteria for cancellation have tended instead to be things like:
- Is the target giving off signals of shame, distress, and embarrassment—thereby putting blood in the water and encouraging us to take bigger bites?
- Do we, the mob, have the power to cancel this person? Does the person’s reputation and livelihood depend on organizations that care what we think, that would respond to pressure from us?
The trouble with these questions is that, not only are their answers not positively correlated with which people deserve to be cancelled, they’re negatively correlated. This is precisely how you get the phenomenon of the left-wing circular firing squad, which destroys the poor schmucks capable of shame even while the shameless, the proud racists and pussy-grabbers, go completely unpunished. Surely we can do better than that.
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Comment #1 February 11th, 2025 at 4:45 pm
I don’t know if I agree with premise, that there are two settings of the “Cancel Culture switch”. Most actual people I talk to about it are fairly anti-Cancel-Culture; not to the extent where they think it’s fine to be a bigot, but where they simultaneously value being accountable for one’s behavior and also realize that cancelling/excommunicating/whatever is not conducive to a just society where people are treated with the dignity and respect they deserve. Maybe I’m just not on the internet enough.
Comment #2 February 11th, 2025 at 5:08 pm
Beautifully said. Some additional Scott Alexander posts on this topic:
First, this one, about the temptation to seek retribution when your side gains power:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/some-practical-considerations-before
And this one about one of the people who tried, viciously, to hurt you:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
Comment #3 February 11th, 2025 at 7:22 pm
This is a good handy list, but I feel it is still incomplete. Some elements I would see as helping to counteract “cancel culture” urges (whether progressive or conservative) are:
1. Is this a case that deserves an application of the principle of charity? If it does, are we applying it? If it doesn’t, on what basis do we think so?
I have the impression that a lot of people have either forgotten about or seem to discount the principle of charity.
2. Are we being honest with ourselves? If we think we are, how do we know? If we aren’t, what are we failing to do that we should do?
Cognitive bias and motivated reasoning are notoriously hard to discover within oneself but very easy to discern in others. For example, the reason that misandrists have thrived within the feminist movement is precisely that the movement as a whole has failed to make an effort to confront its own biases while it has been hyperaware of the biases of men against women.
3. Is someone trying to manipulate us?
This is, in my view, the biggie. It seems to me that almost every social conflict comes down to some people being able to “sway the masses” in order to gain some advantage, whether it be money, power, admiration or whatever. Without these bad actors, I believe, there would not really be anything like “cancel culture” because there would be no engine driving it.
Comment #4 February 11th, 2025 at 7:54 pm
Hi Scott: you know I’m sorry for you that some people were genuinely mean to you, on your blog and on Twitter or wherever. I’m not being sarcastic when I say I can see how that would be intensely anxiety-inducing.
But the current situation we’re in is one where actual government officials are attempting to use the enormous power of government to control speech, potentially threaten certain groups, and bring supposedly independent commercial platforms to heel. We all want to join your circle of pro-Enlightenment science-loving nerds — but to the extent that you’re unable to see the difference between these two situations, I’m not sure there’s anything to join. I do hope we can have a more serious conversation about what’s going on than one that invokes terms like “cancel culture,” because time is short.
Comment #5 February 11th, 2025 at 8:01 pm
Matthew Green #4: Uhhhh, the entire point of this post was that there are differences between the situations, and what exactly the differences consist of. Did you read it before commenting?
Comment #6 February 11th, 2025 at 8:53 pm
To Scott #5: I re-read the post just now, and then read it again hoping there were some additional paragraphs I missed because they were under a “show more” popup and I don’t see them. This would have been a fascinating post about cancel culture five years ago when the worst problem we had in the world was stuff like cancel culture (and “too many burned Rice Krispies in the box”) but at this point it just feels like the wrong discussion to be having. Like arguing over the appropriate level of politeness in literary debates in 1933 Berlin.
Comment #7 February 11th, 2025 at 8:56 pm
Meh, if you saw the recent stuff about the Zizians committing rationalist murders in the name of veganism, it should be obvious that facts are irrelevant compared to the overpowering desire some people have to dominate others. DOGE of course works about the same way. That’s why on only Elon Musk could lead it. Billionaires who see themselves as big cheeses can’t possibly defer to anyone who isn’t a lot richer than they are. Similarly, people in sufficient positions of power don’t get cancelled whatever they do. Here’s a devastating (spoiler: fake) Hillary Clinton campaign ad from the 2016 election season, illustrating the point:
Comment #8 February 11th, 2025 at 9:38 pm
Matthew Green #6: Do you spend any time reading the people who’ve taken over the US? In their minds, in their reality, they are heroically liberating America from a tyrannical regime of woke cancel culture — like Vaclav Havel or something — and everything they’re doing is justified by that imperative.
In multiple posts across the past few weeks, I’ve tried to explain why even if I agree with them on a few issues, I fundamentally reject their narrative, and indeed am much more terrified of their tyranny than I am of the woke tyranny they claim to have overthrown, despite what the wokesters did to me personally.
You can say that, for you, this is so obvious that it doesn’t need to be spelled out. But I’d hope that at least you could “take yes for an answer,” and get out of the way while I make a case that you presumably agree with to the people who do need to hear it!
Comment #9 February 12th, 2025 at 12:20 am
May I suggest a simple rule? If someone is willing to listen and to apologize when having giving offense, for whatever reason, then they should never be cancellable.
The ability to say “I am sorry!” should be considered a superpower.
Comment #10 February 12th, 2025 at 2:11 am
Do you know what the context behind those tweets was? I haven’t been able to find the tweet chain anywhere.
He went to Rutgers. I know at least 30% of the student body(in cs) there is Indian, and probably 80% of the elite students and faculty he would have been friends with. It might have been a really distasteful joke and they think it’s better to deflect than explain.
Comment #11 February 12th, 2025 at 2:32 am
Most bad things in the world are a consequence of binary thinking. Many remaining bad things are because some people have some bad tendencies unrelated to a specific ‘other’. They e.g. ‘just like’ torturing animals.
You have to constantly watch yourself. I could e.g. easily have written “the remaining bad things are because some people are just bad”. That kind of reductionism, reducing a complex issue to one specific dimension, is exactly the problem. The animal torturer could very well be a good neighbor to you.
If you find yourself absolutizing *anything*, you are probably making a mistake. Which doesn’t mean things aren’t sometimes in practice near-absolutes. Almost no amount of nice behavior excuses the animal torturer, to such an extent that it is reasonable to write that “No amount of nice behavior excuses them”. But that’s because we already stipulated they do it because they like it. What if they regretted doing it, but thought it necessary for their life-saving research? Do you actually *know* they enjoy it?
Only when you’re capable of reasoning about things in such ways, trying to see the good in, or excuses for, things you truthfully just *dislike*, then you are acting in good faith.
Comment #12 February 12th, 2025 at 3:05 am
So: Scott purports to delineate a binary “switch” in cancel culture—a spectrum where one extreme permits any form of intellectual critique, while the other allows even flagrantly bigoted utterances to pass unpunished. This framing is deeply problematic when viewed through a Foucauldian lens. Foucault’s analysis of power/knowledge reminds us that the mechanisms of discourse control have never been novel; they are historical continuities that privilege established power structures. Scott’s lamentation over what he sees as an emergent tyranny of “wokeism” conveniently obscures the fact that the normative frameworks he defends—often rooted in white, heteronormative, and patriarchal traditions—have long been at the helm of academic and cultural discourse. In effect, his narrative reifies the very power dynamics that intersectional theorists and new-left scholars have critiqued for decades.
Moreover, Scott’s insistence on the need for “nuance” in cancel culture controversies—his checklist of mitigating circumstances and contextual evaluations—reflects a liberal humanist impulse that neglects the embedded hierarchies within which such discourse operates. His appeal to “open dialogue” and “good-faith moral conversation” sounds pat only on the surface, as it fails to interrogate how the epistemic privileges he enjoys have historically silenced marginalized voices. Intersectionality teaches us that oppressions are multi-layered, and the kind of supposedly neutral criteria Scott proposes are themselves infused with the biases of an entrenched elite. In this light, his call for a reformed adjudication process is less a principled stand for fairness than a strategic move to preserve his own social capital. Far from heralding a genuine democratization of discourse, Scott’s narrative seeks to legitimize the preexisting power structures that have always determined who speaks, who is heard, and who is ultimately silenced.
Comment #13 February 12th, 2025 at 3:33 am
Matthew Green #6: Since you mention “five years ago”, https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=4892 might be an interesting read.
Since the matter hasn’t been settled since then (only postponed because suddenly the bullies of those days are at risk of a larger bully today, along with everybody else – not that the bullies would care about that latter part…), I don’t see anything wrong with continuing to call out that there’s _still_ a problem, in preparation for the after-times: Yes, Trump II will end someday, too (and the sooner the better).
It would be a shame if we just reverted to the old-fashioned bullying, instead of finally moving past that.
Comment #14 February 12th, 2025 at 3:37 am
I remember seeing:
– Fox News’ total destruction of the Bud Light brand because they made an advertisement with a (shock!) transgender influencer
– Fox News’ coverage of ‘cancel culture is the ultimate evil’ in the exact-same period
Complete and utter nonsense. Cannot make this up.
And the schizophrenia is not limited to that. I’ve seen people who in the same comment laugh about “go woke go broke” AND say they oppose “cancel culture”.
I vote to rid of the terms ‘cancel culture’ and ‘cancellation’ completely. They are abused to just make people angry and give a framing so you don’t have to think anymore.
I 100% support your 9 points. They align with the three ways to judge ethically:
– what are the persons values
– what are their actions
– what are the consequences of their actions
The problem is, the Powers That Be think it’s just fine to judge by one rule only: “is this person supporting me or ‘them'”?
Comment #15 February 12th, 2025 at 4:08 am
I’ve slowly become more and more certain over the years that the correct boundary to draw here is between private views and one’s private life on the one hand, and one’s publicly expressed views and official duties on the other. The problem is that we have slowly eroded that boundary; the norms shifted under the pressure of various kinds of moral haranguing from diverse quarters.
Suppose it becomes known that I harbor a private mistrust or fear of group X. Does it follow that I cannot be trusted to work with people belonging to that group, or to make decisions that involve such people as part of my work? Of course not. I know this about myself, as a fact. I know that there are principles and requirements about how I must treat people fairly at work that are more important than my private biases, and I genuinely try not to let my biases about people influence how I treat them publicly. If I do this very badly or don’t even try, if I gleefully discriminate against X-people, openly or discreetly, I should be reprimanded or fired, by all means. But it’s madness to presume from the get-go that I must be doing that, if I have a private negative opinion or a bias. Yet this madness has become universal. And it’s very bad, because *everyone* has private stereotypes; if you tell me you don’t, you are either lying to me or to yourself, possibly both.
For some values of X this is still understood – like if X is about ideology. If someone is a staunch Republican and posts on “I hate democrats.com” in the evening, it is not presumed automatically mean that they will discriminate Democrats at work and should be fired and cancelled. But if X is race- or sex-based (sometimes religion-based, too), the wall between private opinion and public behavior is presumed to not exist. And that’s both factually wrong, as it does exist for almost everyone (and almost everyone is frantically hiding their private dislikes and self-policing not to say anything that can be construed as bigoted, even in a private context, about some X’s); and pragmatically bad, because it leads to waves of cancellations based on private opinions. People with cooler heads instinctively feel that these cancellations are wrong, but can’t quite put their finger on it (“he did say those horrible things in that private conversation that was secretly taped! How can X people possibly work with him after that?”).
We should try to restore that boundary.
What’s the application of the above to the young member of DOGE who wanted to normalize Indian hate? As I understand, he was, not to mince words, shitposting on an anon account on X, and a journalist connected the anon account to his public identity. I really don’t like trolling, even more so anon trolling, even more so racist anon shitposting. But the anonymous nature of it means there’s no automatic connection between that and what he does at work. Unless there are real reasons to suspect him of discrimination against Indians or whoever else at work – and that’s for his employer to decide – he should not be hounded out of his job and cancelled.
Comment #16 February 12th, 2025 at 7:43 am
Student of truth #12: That’s a decent parody of that style of writing—was it generated by an LLM?
Comment #17 February 12th, 2025 at 7:49 am
Henning #9:
May I suggest a simple rule? If someone is willing to listen and to apologize when having giving offense, for whatever reason, then they should never be cancellable.
The ability to say “I am sorry!” should be considered a superpower.
No, I don’t think that’s sufficient … both because some offenses are so bad that “I’m sorry” doesn’t cut it (we’d need, at minimum, forgiveness from those who were actually harmed), and also because I don’t want people to feel pressured to apologize if they genuinely didn’t do anything wrong. Even in those cases, however, they certainly ought to be willing to listen, and to clarify what they said or meant.
Comment #18 February 12th, 2025 at 8:03 am
Aperson #10: And Hitler apparently met lots of Jews in post-WWI Vienna. Exposure to a group is, sadly, not the slightest alibi against the charge of obsessive hatred for them.
Comment #19 February 12th, 2025 at 9:16 am
Scott#18 since we go back to Nazi, here is an interesting post about the Nazi salute and related topic. I know, should post it there rather than here, but that is now buried too low in the website to be worth posting there
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brainking_i-have-known-elon-musk-at-a-deep-level-for-activity-7288439915485315072-5mpf?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
Comment #20 February 12th, 2025 at 9:33 am
I agree with Scott’s list, but I’m not sure what’s the ultimate point of this post.
Like, who is this addressed to?
Reasonable people who want to be fairer when canceling people?
E.g. Scott struggling as to whether to cancel Musk and his Sieg Heils, Nazi jokes, and support of German Neo-Nazi party, contrasted to his open-and-shut case of the pro-Palestine students involved in the campus protests?
And if cancel culture only has now two settings, it seems pointless to come up with a more reasonable set of standards instead of trying to understand/address first WHY culture currently only has two settings… ultimately, most problems we currently see in the culture are about society being deeply divided, and MAGA making sure the two sides drift further and further apart, with no will to heal/bring us together. Trump is in permanent campaign mode…
Until we fix that, the more nuanced ideas are just going to drown in the noise and chaos.
Comment #21 February 12th, 2025 at 10:10 am
A glimmer of good news is that cancel culture will be the least of anyone’s worries when the effects of gutting all the federal agencies start to take effect.
Comment #22 February 12th, 2025 at 10:48 am
I think the attacks on you were mistaken. I do not endorse them.
AND, I wish you would decline to use the word “Woke” in this way. That’s food for the right-wing efforts against having an integrated and equal society. You’re scoring points for them. Has anybody ever called themselves “woke”? Not that I can see. No, it’s a name the Right uses to demean people efforts toward having a more integrated, more fair society and government. Which is something you want.
Comment #23 February 12th, 2025 at 10:55 am
Aren’t you putting people between a rock and a hard place by placing so much emphasis on 8 and 9?
As you yourself mentioned at the end, the left wing cancel mobs seem to come down hardest on those who apologize or try to explain themselves in the wake of their cancelling. I couldn’t be a long-time reader of this blog without knowing that there are people who have managed to explain themselves and avoid cancellation 🙂 … but, for the most part, I see cancellation leave people untouched primarily when they refuse to acknowledge it at all, or indeed when they respond with a taunting rejection of their judges’ moral authority.
So now, it seems people are faced with a dilemma: be cancelled by you and people who agree with you, or be cancelled by the mob.
Before this post, I might have said that one can have it both ways by acting unconcerned with the accusations, while also contemptuously dismissing them. But to me, the most obvious way to do that would be with humor. Now that you’ve called out “glee” as explicitly a no-go for you, I can’t see any way out of the dilemma.
Comment #24 February 12th, 2025 at 11:42 am
With everything going on right now I’m taking some solace in how people on the left whose whole shtick is cancelling people for supposedly being insufficiently pure are themselves getting cancelled. It’s a small consolation given how much they’re taking down with them but at least it’s something. Bizarrely when these people have gone after me personally it hasn’t been for any of the usual purity reasons, it’s been for being almost technically wrong about some minor point in something completely apolitical I said. Apparently I’m just the sort of person they think/thought they can/could cancel, even without a reason.
Comment #25 February 12th, 2025 at 11:42 am
Anonymous Ocelot #23: To me, the “choice between a rock and a hard place” that you talk about seems like precisely the choice between
(1) capitulating to the cancel-mob’s morality, out of terror more than agreement (as countless cancelled schmucks have done), or else
(2) sneering at the entire concept of any morality beyond yourself that could possibly constrain your actions (as Trump and Elon do, unfortunately for the world).
As soon you as put it that way, though, the third option becomes obvious: namely, recognizing a morality beyond yourself that is different from the cancel-mob’s morality. For me, this is basically just liberal Enlightenment morality; for others it might be a religiously-inspired morality or something else.
I can strongly commend this third option, as someone who tried it, succeeded with it, and is here to tell the tale.
Comment #26 February 12th, 2025 at 11:50 am
Jay L Gischer #22: “Woke” actually is a word that the woke once used to describe themselves, before the right repurposed it as an insult maybe 5 years ago — just like “politically correct” was unironically used by Communists in the mid-20th-century, before it became a term of abuse.
The issue is that, if not “woke,” I need some other short term for “the brand of militant social justice leftism that reached the zenith of its power between roughly 2011 and 2021, especially in Anglophone universities, schools, nonprofits, media outlets, etc.” Do you have any suggestions?
Comment #27 February 12th, 2025 at 12:31 pm
Scott #17 My simple rule is indeed simplistic, but you got to start somewhere. Right now many people are radicalized and this trend needs to be broken or our societies will no longer retain any ability for the kind of dialog that a healthy democracy requires. For the likes of Curtis Yarvin, and really all foreign and domestic enemies of the US, this state of discord is of course highly desirable. Regaining the ability for a constructive dialog across the political debate is paramount IMHO. Being able to apologize and accepting apologies can be a starting point. It won’t cut it where someone has been severely harmed but it may pave the way to deeper reconciliation. Of course there will always be hardened ideologists who can’t be reached. But those I believe are in the minority.
Comment #28 February 12th, 2025 at 1:52 pm
What does “normalize Indian hate” mean? Is it racist towards Asian Indians or American Indians? Any form of racism is to be condemned.
Comment #29 February 12th, 2025 at 2:55 pm
I do not think it is even remotely possible to conduct future cancellations according to rules like Scott’s proposed 9-point test. Cancellation is fundamentally a mob action, emergent collective behavior without leadership or control, which means Scott’s last two points will absolutely dominate. The mob will target the weak, and it will grow into its full fury when it smells blood in the water. We here may be careful to exactly and only call for cancellations that meet the nine-point test, but there will always be voices calling for cancellation of whoever has offended them. And if cancellation is on the table at all, for anyone, the targets will be decided by mob rule and not by the voice of reason.
If that’s not what you want, then you need a different tool. The nine-point test works fine for each of us to individually decide who we don’t want to associate with, and for e.g. Scott as the proprietor of this forum to decide who he doesn’t want posting here. Broadly implemented, that should be enough. But if the idea is that once Bob has said something too far beyond the pale, we must ensure that Bob can never speak his allegedly intolerable views to anyone, not even those who agree with him and want to hear him, then no, that trick never works. It just drives them to speak elsewhere, in places we have little insight and no control, where they will develop alternate plans. Like having Elon Musk buy Twitter and give it to them as a platform, or electing Donald Trump as President.
When the current fury subsides, the mob du jour is at least partially sated, it may be possible to take “cancellation” entirely off the table by establishing new social norms and perhaps legal protections. That would IMO be best. If you try to keep cancellation available as a weapon to use against those who fail your nine points, then you *will* find yourself and those you care about on the wrong side of the Cancellation Wars, more often than not.
Comment #30 February 12th, 2025 at 3:01 pm
I think you are misdiagnosing the situation. There is no such thing as a “good cancellation”.
Before 2010 or so we used to have norms built up by the society to prevent people from abusing their power. And afterwards some people on the left have realized that they can weaponize those norms as “cancellations” to exercise power over the society. It worked for a while, but the problem is that in the process they have shattered those norms leaving the society defenseless against the real powerful people.
If we have any hope to go back to the “good old times” then we should forget about enforcing the “centralized” cancellations independently of whatever the rules you can come up. We should instead reinforce the shared norms and have people decide for themselves
Comment #31 February 12th, 2025 at 3:18 pm
It seems like a sensible nuanced approach is akin balancing an upside down pendulum. Any deviation from the unstable equilibrium has positive feedback (and lower potential energy) until the pendulum fully flips to one side (and blocks a relief valve or something similar, until the pressure build up enough to push it back up).
In that model, a question to ask would be “what kind of a setup would generate negative, not positive feedback?”.
This is, of course, much too simplistic, but maybe a start.
Comment #32 February 12th, 2025 at 3:39 pm
IndianCitizen #28: I believe this Marko Elez meant that he hates people from India (not that hatred of American Indians would be any better).
Comment #33 February 12th, 2025 at 8:01 pm
Shmi #31, regarding negative feedback, that’s what the DEI movement was supposed to be: pushback against a Nash equilibrium that makes discrimination (about absolutely anything) into a stable attractor. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination#Game_theory
That demystified discrimination for me. DEI and woke-ism are perhaps given to excesses at times, and they may not be aware of this abstraction, but it is what (on good days) they are (in my view) really trying to fix. Similarly the Trumpies want to do the opposite, i.e. they want to entrench incumbent advantages that they currently have for themselves.
Comment #34 February 12th, 2025 at 8:53 pm
Every opinion I have on the matter points to a total rejection of cancel culture; I don’t like mobs, I don’t like the commercial mass media, I don’t like over-socialized behavior, I think that no one has ever been fully cancelled in the US since freedom of speech for political ideas is constitutionally protected, I think that cancellation is at most about financial pressure and doesn’t stop important ideas from being accessible, I think the Biden administration behaved unconstitutionally in demanding censorship from social media platforms like Facebook and Pre-Musk Twitter, I think that the truth fears no investigation, I am unbothered by any ideas, information, or viewpoints so long as the constitution remains in effect, and finally I think “censorship for safety” is counterproductive to the goal of safety (it makes the opposition more angry and draws attention to the “banned” ideas). You can’t fight against ideas you dislike by attempting to contain them, you have to either tolerate them or confront them, everything else is just a delay.
“There is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics”, says Hardy, and so it is with principles as well: they must be clear and distilled, not watered down with caveats, rationalizations, and exceptions. That is the reason why the switch is “all or nothing”, or as close to that as possible, and in the USA the authors of the constitution already chose for there to be essentially no final cancellation of any political ideology. The most common form of ethics that most people have had across cultures and times could be expressed in this honest and self-aware form: “XYZ is good when I do it, and bad when my enemies do it.” It would improve public discourse a lot if more people could accept that that is all their ethical system amounts to.
Comment #35 February 12th, 2025 at 9:19 pm
In response to Dr. Scott #25, I have already suggested “jerk” as more descriptive, whereas when I first saw the term “woke” (which I think was at this site) and asked Google what it meant, I was told something like “aware of the discrimination and oppression of certain groups”, which didn’t seem to match how it was being used. Whereas “jerk” is immediately understandable in a way consistent with its online or dictionary definition.
Comment #36 February 12th, 2025 at 9:23 pm
I think “cancelled” is a deeply unhelpful word here, because it’s binary, and tends to force people into one or the other side of the dichotomy you’re – rightly – objecting too.
I think there is a continuum of sanctions one can apply to people who say things one disapproves of, from “express polite disagreement” to “execution”, via “express rude disagreement”, “cancel their speaking engagements”, “fire them”, “boycott them”, “encourage others to do some or all of the above”, “imprison them”, etc – in rough but not precise order.
And I think that “how far down this sliding scale does this conduct justify going?” is a much more helpful question than “should this person be cancelled (yes/no)?”
Comment #37 February 13th, 2025 at 8:13 am
Even bringing kids to see an eclipse is enough to be called out as “woke” and probably deserving cancellation.
It’s game over, society as we knew it is gone ;(
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/13/nx-s1-5295043/sen-ted-cruzs-list-of-woke-science-includes-self-driving-cars-solar-eclipses
Comment #38 February 13th, 2025 at 9:21 am
Nothing is cancellable, because “cancellable” has a specific connotation of mob justice, and mob justice should never be tolerated. Losing a job because you demonstrated explicit bias where it’s important to engender faith in neutrality is fine, that’s literally a job requirement, but even this is getting close to skirting a fine line. It reminds me of all those stories in the early days of social media, where teachers got fired because they appeared in pictures drinking alcohol during their free time.
Comment #39 February 14th, 2025 at 8:38 am
cancellation is a concept created by people who thought they had and ought to have job security… I.e. academia, social media “creators”, celebrities.
For 99.9999% of people, “cancellation” has always existed through arbitrary firing/layoffs, with absolutely no cause whatsoever, obviously nobody cares about your free speech rights in the private sector.
Comment #40 February 14th, 2025 at 9:20 am
An interesting analysis on JD Vance’s stance (way before the elections)
https://www.vondriskalab.org/blog/when-universities-are-the-enemy
Comment #41 February 14th, 2025 at 2:10 pm
fred #39: It might be more accurate to say that “cancellation” is a concept created by the modern world, where a large fraction of all people are “social media creators,” and everything they say lasts forever. Before that, if you worked in the private sector, there was usually no particular reason for your employer to know your political views or what you did as a teenager.
Comment #42 February 14th, 2025 at 3:36 pm
Scott #41
True, there’s a generational gap.
People in my generation would more likely distrust social media and post content anonymously (I do), unless being public is part of their profession (academia, writer, journalist, etc).
Whereas for gen-z it seems that “being out there” is the default state, or at least something natural, which is why cancellation is always a possibility.
Comment #43 February 14th, 2025 at 3:48 pm
In hindsight, it’s now clear that the facebook idea of connecting people by having everyone put their opinions out there, permanently on a wall that’s never erased, is flawed and would lead to deeper and deeper splintering of society and give the tools for each sides to cancel the others as the pendulum of power switches side.
It’s now trivial for a bad actor to use AI to get the profile of anyone who’s been semi-public. E.g. with all the access Musk has, he could trivially compile targeted lists of citizens…. i.e. automated cancellation (social benefits getting withheld, etc).
Comment #44 February 14th, 2025 at 4:08 pm
Scott #41
I suspect what fred #39 was talking about is the longstanding and honoured tradition of firing employees for criticising their company, arguing with their boss or (gasp!) joining a labor union.
Moreover, it seems clear to me that the advocacy for free speech of Trump, Vance (which today apparently lectured us Europeans on the subject) and our tech overlords lasts only as long as they are not on the receiving end of it.
Comment #45 February 14th, 2025 at 11:13 pm
If you never offend anyone, you are not an interesting person.
What harm do these cancellations are supposed to protect from? That is the real question.
Is the person’s bias leading to bad and discriminatory decisions?
Is the normalization of the offending in the society the concern?
Is it leading or likely to lead to physical harm?
Or is it simply some people feeling offended or their beliefs challenged?
If it is the last one, then the offended folks should grow up. It is not a kindergarten.
We have offended people who believe in God for very long time in this country by what we say, and that is protected as freedom of religion and creed and freedom of conscious and freedom of thought and freedom of expression. And pretty sure it is much more offensive to those religious fanatics than it is to these MAGA guys or Woke gals.
Protection from your feelings being hurt is not a right.
Comment #46 February 14th, 2025 at 11:24 pm
The way I see it, we swang from authoritarian radical left to authoritarian radical right.
The counter to these is democratic liberalism which neither of these two groups get.
The outright majority of Americans are neither of those extreme, yet we end up being polarized into those two.
Most of us just want a government that does basic stuff and doesn’t get into things has no business to meddling in. If we had a third moderate centrist party they would win most of the elections easily.
Comment #47 February 15th, 2025 at 8:18 am
Your second point is wrong. In the new paradigm **many** things are extremely cancellable.
For instance:
1. You can be fired from your job for putting pronouns at the end of your email signature
2. You can be fired for attending a new mother’s meetup group at a national lab
3. You can be fired for investigating Jan 6th assailants
Stop perpetuating to the idea that cancellation is a left-wing issue, and that Musk is a “free speech absolutist.” It is all about power and enforcing ideology. What you get cancelled for changes, but cancellation is here to stay.
Comment #48 February 15th, 2025 at 1:37 pm
While I understand that this thread focuses on cancel culture and that this culture war debate clearly animates and motivates political decisions, I cannot help but feel that it is still mostly a smoke screen to cut back government services across the board. I.e. the real issue is, as it has always been, the money. And so now we have the richest man in world making decisions that kill the world’s poorest.
If this was a movie plot you wouldn’t believe that anyone could be this cartoonishly evil.
Comment #49 February 16th, 2025 at 10:55 pm
I watched 2 great movies this weekend. A Real Pain and JoJo Rabbit
Beautiful movies. Brilliant story, dialog, acting and direction too.
In Jo Jo Rabbit, the last scene, when American flags are flying on the streets in Germany after the Nazis are defeated…
Now in Trump’s America, highly educated young people like the 25 year old in your example, speak of racism being cool. If America becomes a place where the far right goes from strength to strength, who will come to its rescue? It looks like the whole world used to look to America for guidance. Who will come to ITS rescue?
Comment #50 February 17th, 2025 at 11:05 am
Correction :
The movie was set in Poland, not Germany.
Comment #51 February 17th, 2025 at 11:13 am
I think I’ve witnessed at least 2 dozen cancellation attempts in various communities at this point, including an ongoing one right now in the Civilization VI community. I think whatever criteria people think *ought* to be the case, your list included, the reality *is* that the real success/failure criteria are far simpler, and not very subject to change.
1. How well liked is this person by individuals who control the levers of power that effect them?
2. Did they admit to even the slightest of faults or give an inch of ground that can be paraded against them endlessly?
3. Is the case against them simple, obvious, and highly memetic, or complex and hard to understand to all but the most invested/informed?
4. Do they have a proven history of otherwise doing the bad thing?
In general, any sort of apology/acknowledgement is a tool of last resort for someone who has already lost. For better or worse it seems that most people, especially younger people are now aware of these rules, and conduct themselves accordingly. Many attempted cancellations would’ve gone infinitely better if the target had just shut up and ignored them, rather than trying to proffer a defense while being just the slightest bit reconciliatory to their accusers.
Comment #52 February 18th, 2025 at 9:39 am
For more detailed explanations about the cuts and their consequences (esp for people outside academia), a nice monologue from Sean Carroll
https://youtu.be/ZbyG9nfs4us
Comment #53 February 18th, 2025 at 6:04 pm
Trevor #51, what I fail to see is how this is any different to clique building which has been part of human nature since forever? It just now plays out in online spaces which facilitates snowballing rather than keeping it within a tribal sized epsilon-environ of an individual.
Comment #54 February 19th, 2025 at 12:47 am
The idea of education for all came when factories needed educated workers. I can think of a sci-fi scenario where Musk conjugates that AI would make researchers (and most humans) redundant in a decade or two. In that case, there’s no need to invest in academia or the education system.
Comment #55 February 19th, 2025 at 11:46 am
Dear Scott,
have you seen the announcement from Microsoft Quantum? https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/ai/microsofts-majorana-1-chip-carves-new-path-for-quantum-computing/ It would be great if you dedicated a blog post to it. Do you think it is as relevant as the announcement says?
Comment #56 February 19th, 2025 at 11:56 am
Fred #52: Thanks for the detailed explanation – I’m in the pre-grant-writing phase of my academic career and learned some things from that.
Does anyone know if/where Elon’s explained his motivation for cutting science funding? Usually he’s pretty transparent on X about his motivations, but not for this particular issue as far as I can tell.
Comment #57 February 19th, 2025 at 9:15 pm
In many cases, cancellation is a method of gaining power and advantage (unearned) over someone.
Comment #58 February 20th, 2025 at 1:48 am
fred #40 very interesting link.
Given the content of (now Vice-President) Vance’s 2021 speech – and particularly his Nixon quote that “the professors are the enemy” – I think the public discussion has moved far beyond the “properties of the cancellation function”. In the here and now, it’s more about the properties of the truth function, which is now whatever your President says it is.
Based on the present US administration’s behaviour, it’s quite possible that there’ll be a large scale purge of academic staff across the country. Anyone who has shown any sign of “wokeness” (= disagreeing with current administration) should be either looking for work outside the universities, or planning to emigrate.
Comment #59 February 20th, 2025 at 3:50 am
I suspect the goal of cancellation is something like “an armed society is a polite society” with fewer bullets, which seems like an improvement. Unfortunately making provocative comments publicly provokes others! Some people might find journaling in a personal diary—or talking about their distressing feelings in a support group with enforced norms of anonymity/confidentiality—preferable. It is not surprising that high status positions are energetically fought over and jealously guarded. Bright young people can generally land on their feet and should be encouraged to develop resilience and prudence.
Comment #60 February 22nd, 2025 at 4:59 pm
Great piece! I think a lot of liberal people need to get this kind of message of compassion and temperance out there. I consider myself very liberal and relate with the articles published in the Atlantic and elsewhere by the author, discussing their own awkwardness in their formative years. The human experience can be so difficult. So much mental anguish is self-inflicted, it’s just unbelievable that others jump into these cancel mobs in these cases that are “mild” at best.
However, I’m a PhD student so I don’t see this in my day to day existence… Who I see around me are vindictive liberals, who scream, shout, and try to enact retribution against people in their ranks despite 75-90% alignment in ideology. It’s so silly; instead of trying to find a real way to convey ideas to the middle-grounder, the leftist tries to finds ways to shame people for being less ideologically pure. The easiest and most unfortunate target is the liberal man, which is the stupidest outcome. I have no doubt that this nonsense has directly led to elected plutocrats/ opportunists that are now plundering the government coffers to transparently enrich themselves.
Comment #61 February 27th, 2025 at 3:02 am
Hi everyone (not only Scott), I am curious to hear if you have any advice on what Sabine Hosenfender’s recent video about science fundings:
She seems to defend an opposite point of view
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shFUDPqVmTg
It’s recent and relatively short (9m + 1m of sponsorship)
She has quite a lot of influence on the average science enjoyer (maybe less in the research community)
Have a nice day !
Comment #62 February 28th, 2025 at 1:02 am
Alex N #60.
I think the real underlying problem with public debate in the US at the moment is that facts have been completely replaced by feelings and beliefs.
You say Who I see around me are vindictive liberals, who scream, shout, and try to enact retribution against people in their ranks despite 75-90% alignment in ideology. In other words, in 2025 it’s not about the truth of what people say, it’s the manner in which it’s said, and whether the listener feels bad as a result.
The current administration understands this very well. So many initiatives launched that provoke deafening squeals of outrage. You need to realise this is deliberate policy. After all, you can’t take effective action to oppose these things if you’re nursing your hurt feelings.
Comment #63 February 28th, 2025 at 12:54 pm
Martin #61:
I don’t think it’s a good idea to speculate about the motives of others. It is very difficult to disprove such a claim. Particularly if the claim is, that you are doing something for the money.
A string theorist, e.g., has usually a steep learning curve behind him and even most physicists with a degree will have a lot of difficulty understanding what this theory is about. And these people are very smart because everybody else will give up on the topic before they reach the current level of understanding. Making money with abilities like that is much easier in other occupations.
I’m myself an example of this. I finished a PhD in basic physics, the driving force being an intense interest in finding out what makes the world tick. I later than left academia to found a startup and made a lot more money than the usual tenured prof. So my motives inside academia weren’t financial, but ouside they were, quite in contrast to what Hossenfelder takes for granted.
I have no sympathy for Hossenfelders disrespect for basic science. All of current technology is based on foundational work. Science is basically a searching endeavour with an endless series of mistakes and dead ends which never get published. The major scientific breakthroughs are published by the geniuses of their time but they rest on the shoulders of countless contributors, which paved the ways for them. Somebody has to do the paving but Hossenfelder thinks that this is a waste of taxpayers money, since the fruit of their work isn’t immediately apparent.
That video is full of anger and it should be viewed as precisely that: a statement of anger, not of insight.
Comment #64 March 3rd, 2025 at 4:13 am
Uspring#63:
Thank you for your answer and testimony, I often watch her science news videos and I was surprised to see her position on the subject. I was also very surprised at the people in the comments who were strongly agreeing with her.