zlacker

>>tosh+(OP)
I find it weird that so many people seem to think that "attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity" (I guess this is a fancy way of saying cancel culture?) is a big problem, because frankly I have no idea how big a problem it is. Where are the statistics on this? How many are actually impacted by it? There are many articles citing examples and saying how dangerous it is (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/25/online-shaming-d...), and yes there are certainly such examples, but are these just outliers? Is this like air travel, where really for the most part it's ok for people to speak their minds and people get overly freaked out because of rare events?

Actually curious to hear what people on here think about this.

>>andrey+AN
I think this framing of the issue is pretty interesting. There are a decent number of articles that talk about how cancel culture affects celebrities, but I do think it would be pretty hard to quantify the effects of cancel culture. It seems hard to define.

Personally, I'm not totally sold by the letter from Harper's. But I don't have data one way or another to support my bias. I don't believe at face value that cancel culture is the root cause (or even a root cause) of the problems folks see with American public discourse. I wonder how to quantify something like this.

>>bork1+rP
Why do you need data when you can experience the chilling effect cancel culture has on open discussion for yourself?

>>HeroOf+MP
Well, when people argue against BLM/M4BL I often hear calls to statistics. That's a potential bias of my own, but I don't think it's unreasonable to think about what metrics we might be able to use as indicators of whether cancel culture is created by an unsubstantiated bias that some folks have or if it might actually be a phenomenon that has a real impact on the way that the average person communicates.

Basically what I'm saying is that I personally don't feel or notice a lot of "cancel culture" within my own life, and I'm trying to better understand where people feel like it comes from. Data might not be necessary, but it might also make the impacts more clear. I'm just wondering about how to frame the issue in a way that makes sense to me.