I think future societies will be surprised by how much human suffering we permit in the name of being "tolerant". Religions are not all created equal, and no intellectually honest person will claim that Islam and Jainism are equally valid moral frameworks (this is why few people fret about Jainophobia). We know that Islam and its adherents are generous contributors to the surplus of misery in the world. People concerned about the quality of human life will recognize that we were right to be extremely suspicious of Islam.

(Note that I'm defining Islamophobia as "deep suspicion of Islam / thoughts informed by Islamic beliefs", especially when it comes to questions of morality and ethics.)

Speaking as an Arab person who is very critical of Islam, I think we should be careful to distinguish the two.

NOPE! You've been made to think that by the media. Time to bring out this vid again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQnxnYEVp4U

The relevant part:

The meaning of “Islamophobia” is not at all like the meanings of those other terms. It is simply not easy to differentiate prejudice against Muslims from ordinary racism and xenophobia directed at Arabs, Pakistanis, Somalis, and other people who happen to be Muslim. Of course, there is no question that such bigotry exists, and it is as odious as Greenwald believes. But inventing a new term does not give us license to say that there is a new form of hatred in the world. How does the term “anti-Semitism” differ? Well, we have a 2000-year-old tradition of religiously inspired hatred against Jews, conceived as a distinct race of people, both by those who hate them and by Jews themselves. Anti-Semitism is, therefore, a specific form of racism that, as everyone knows, has taken many terrible turns over the years (and is now especially prevalent among Muslims, for reasons that can be explicitly traced not merely to recent conflicts over land in the Middle East, but to the doctrine of Islam). “Sexism,” generally speaking, is a bias against women, not because of any doctrines they might espouse, but because they were born without a Y chromosome. The meanings of these terms are clear, and each names a form of hatred and exclusion directed at people, as people, not because of their behavior or beliefs, but because of the mere circumstances of their birth.

Islamophobia is something else entirely. It is, Greenwald tells us in his three points, an “irrational” and “disproportionate” and “unjustified” focus on Muslims. But the only way that Muslims can reasonably be said to exist as a group is in terms of their adherence to the doctrine of Islam. There is no race of Muslims. They are not united by any physical traits or a diaspora. Unlike Judaism, Islam is a vast, missionary faith. The only thing that defines the class of All Muslims—and the only thing that could make this group the possible target of anyone’s “irrational” fear, “disproportionate” focus, or “unjustified” criticism—is their adherence to a set of beliefs and the behaviors that these beliefs inspire.

And, unlike a person’s racial characteristics or gender, beliefs can be argued for, tested, criticized, and changed. In fact, wherever the norms of rational conversation are allowed to do their work, beliefs must earn respect. More important, beliefs are claims about reality and about how human beings should live within it—so they necessarily lead to behavior, and to values, laws, and public institutions that affect the lives of all people, whether they share these beliefs or not. Beliefs end marriages and start wars.

So “Islamophobia” must be—it really can only be—an irrational, disproportionate, and unjustified fear of certain people, regardless of their ethnicity or any other accidental trait, because of what they believe and to the degree to which they believe it. Thus the relevant question to ask is whether a special concern about people who are deeply committed to the actual doctrines of Islam, in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, is irrational, disproportionate, and unjustified.

His arguments for arming himself smack of complete ignorance of the concept of the monopoly of physical violence[1], and without accounting for those theories (and their practical application in modern states), the whole argument is just vapid.

[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gewaltmonopol_des_Staates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

Are you proposing that they should read minds? As far as I know that's not possible so this statement is preposterous, of course they are going to target by the headgear/skin-color, is the only way they can determine who is Islamic and who is not; being bad at it is a different matter.

How do you decide who owns the "right" beliefs? By that logic, who can we consider to be a Christian?

It's not NtS to point out that James "Scotty" Doohan wasn't Scottish (he was a Canadian of Irish descent.) Nor is it NtS to point out that certain people don't hold various relevant defining characteristics and therefore to claim that they don't count as being in a particular category. Of course, that exclusion is contextual -- it can apply to a particular use of a label without applying to all uses of it.

Note that I disagree with Sam Harris overall. His claim is that the only way Muslims can be reasonably said to exist is his definition; I would argue that one way Muslims can be said to exist is his definition. I would further argue that some people who use other definitions of Islam have irrational/unjustified/disproportionate fear, and can therefore be said to be Islamophobic.

on IQ - I'm not sure that's necessarily true, or at least, the differences are complex (one group has a slightly higher average, the other a higher standard deviation, which has implications at the right-end of the bell curve). but for day-to-day social impact, that's not nearly as important as wondering what society should with people in the bottom 50% of the IQ distribution, which is another topic we don't discuss.

I often wonder whether the political correctness furies directed at pg were a factor in him putting sam altman in charge.

for example - it was considered wildly controversial to say that not being able so speak english without a heavy accent might put you at a disadvantage in starting a company in an english speaking country. really?

also - yc is the most forward thinking vc on women's issues in the country, and yet they were still accused of gender bias etc. wildly unfair, you might say.

kind of hard for a thoughtful person to deal with all that chatter. you have to adopt a PR perspective, make general statements - no longer operating from a place of logic, just a desire not to offend.

my sense is that there are many foolish things progressive americans believe which future generations will laugh at. we already laugh publicly at conservatives, but we're supposed to take everything progressives say seriously.

here's a controversial closer - even if we equalized educational access to EECS, funding - women would be less likely to start companies than men, because men are hard-wired to take risks (hormonal profiles, probably other brain circuitry). tens of thousands of years of evolution can't easily be overcome, in even 100 years.

doesn't mean we shouldn't encourage women, or that they can't do it (they obviously can) but bemoaning the out-of-whack ratios constantly, and expecting parity to be around the corner, seems foolish IMHO.

I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Under every interpretation I can think of, it is incorrect. In the first place, people vary in their CD4 and CCR5 (&c.) receptors, so they also vary in their susceptibility to HIV infection given exposure. My understanding is that some alleles confer such resistance to infection that carriers are considered naturally immune. As ever in immunology, that's not the entire story, but it certainly enough to falsify the view that "everyone is equally likely to get HIV" _even given exposure_.

More importantly, people have different rates of exposure. Those rates depend on what sort of potential transmission events one faces, and the prevalence of infection among partners for potential transmission events. Both of those differ between groups of people.

Hence, not everyone is equally likely to get HIV. That implies nothing, of course, about what we ought to _do_ about that.

Are blood donations accepted from gay men now?

Women _on average_ may very well be better or worse than men in all sorts of ways, but that doesn't mean some of them won't be extraordinary.

We have to be careful about our biases so we don't miss out on the extraordinary ones.

It takes extra work to do this.

For example orchestras (traditionally very male dominated) tried to remove bias from their auditions by having the musicians play behind a curtain. The curtain increased the probability that a woman would advance from preliminary rounds by 50 percent(!).

Bemoaning may be tiresome, but it can also lead to changes that really do make a difference.

I wonder if YC applications are gender neutral (names removed)?

Very often times ideas which stir controversy do so because of a real or perceived agenda behind them. If I say, for example (as I have on HN and gotten flack for) that women tend to be more likely to think in ways which are socially more complex than men, I get flack because there is a fear that anything essentialist about gender (outside of, say, the abortion debate) is essentially a way of trying to imprison women in limiting gender roles. That isn't my intention naturally but I have to accept that this is the framework behind the controversy that saying something like that arises.

Similarly if I argue that the natural order is for people to retire with their children, this has huge impacts for modern ideas of sexuality and the choice of childlessness.

There are tons of attitudes that I think that I would be cautious (though perhaps I am too foolish to be reluctant) about discussing. But the key issue is the concern about the perceived agendas, and the perceived power structures that come with those.

Ideas themselves must exist in a context, and that context is defined in part by how they are used, not only by the person discussing them but also by others.

That could eliminate unconscious bias during the application screening process, but it would be hard to run face-to-face interviews without revealing the sex of the person doing the interviewing.

To give an example in the present day: imagine you believed a gender or race was literally subhuman, in the sense that you had every right to do whatever you wanted to the Thing. That is something that was a widespread belief in the past but is now simply unspeakable. Note that we're not talking about race and IQ, which is still "allowed" to be spoken of, in the sense that people can and do talk about it, even if other people vociferously disagree with the person. But also note the framing the race-and-IQ folk themselves use when talking about it: they bend over backwards to claim that they think race has no bearing on whether a person has rights or equal moral status. It's always framed as a purely scientific statement which, although perhaps having policy implications, says nothing about the moral status of the person designated as more likely to have a low IQ. Someone arguing otherwise wouldn't be denounced but altogether written out of rational discourse.

When PG talks about the unspeakable assumptions and fashions of an age, that's what I read him as talking about. In general, I mean, not about race in particular. It also goes to show that just because something is a widely shared assumption of an age doesn't mean it's wrong.[1]

[1] But isn't it interestingly meta that I can reference universally shared moral assumptions and use the fact that they are universally shared as rhetorical evidence that they're good and useful?

The reason why people often choose to condemn those who speak an unpopular truth is because the truth is a powerful and dangerous weapon, often used to fight progress. This is what is known as the naturalistic fallacy, or the is-ought fallacy: the fact that something is true does not mean that it is good, or that it cannot change if we try hard enough. A "lie" might be more valuable than the "truth", because a lie might be a bright hope for the future, while the truth is simply the status quo.

For some reason, even people that are usually curious and generally skeptical, sometimes stop questioning society when they find data demonstrating that some notion is "true". They don't take the extra step to ask why is it true, and can we change it? Or, should we change it?

That is why the "truth" in the social sciences might be a dangerous thing, because if people come to assign the same meaning to a true finding in physics or in anthropology, we have a problem. While we cannot change the laws of physics, we can certainly change the social order. And we have.

I don't think, then, that "truth" is all that important when it comes to ideology. What's important is picking values that you feel comfortable believing, and staying true to them.

related: http://nytimes.com/2014/03/15/health/in-rare-case-woman-with...

PG suggested this as well with his references to "racial insensitivity," etc. And he may be right that future generations may not worry too much about racial insensitivity. But that does not mean that trying to speak and write about race in a way that is sensitive to the problems that race presents is irrational or merely fashionable.

We live in a time of ongoing racial strife in America and around the world, and we come from times of even worse strife. Attempting to be racially sensitive is a rational response to the fact that, for centuries, we white western men have been extraordinarily racially insensitive.

Let's look at an example of statements about race that would fall on different sides of that line. If I were to say that black men earn, on average, less money than white men, most people would say I was speaking factually. If I were to say that black men are, on average, less intelligent than white men, most people would say I was being racially insensitive -- or worse. In fact, one striking thing about many taboo or insensitive things that one could say today, is that they are frequently used as moral apologies for other, factual statements. Anyone arguing that black people are usually less intelligent than white people is probably also going to argue that black people deserve to make less money than white people. If it is taboo to say that urban gay men are more likely to contract HIV (in a moment I'll argue that that is not the case), it would be because there could also be a whiff of a suggestion that therefore a gay man with HIV deserves to be sick.

Another striking thing about this variety of taboo statements today, as opposed to taboos of previous generations, is how frequently such taboo statements are factually inaccurate. In fact, calling "black men are less intelligent than white men" racially insensitive is possibly the most charitable thing one could say about that statement. When you see "racially insensitive" in print, that is usually because someone (a politician or celebrity) said something false and/or blatantly racist, but the publication felt it was too inflammatory to call it what it was -- false and racist.

Finally, as a rebuttal to your statement about HIV, if it's taboo, why does a doctor ask me if I have sex with men the first time I meet her? Why are gay men still not allowed to donate blood? Context is what matters here. As a matter of fact, HIV is more prevalent in the gay community than the straight one (or at least it was -- feel free to offer newer data that refutes this). It is also more prevalent among African Americans. Stating these facts is not taboo, but suggesting that these fact hold any moral weight, that any of these groups that has faced ancient discrimination actually deserves it, is rightfully subject to distaste and rebuke given our cultural history.