[narag]

Paul Graham's essay What You Can't Say contains a great piece of advice:

One way to do this is to ratchet the debate up one level of abstraction. If you argue against censorship in general, you can avoid being accused of whatever heresy is contained in the book or film that someone is trying to censor. You can attack labels with meta-labels: labels that refer to the use of labels to prevent discussion.

The downside is sometimes people doesn't understand what you meant.

http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

[dragonwriter]

> Downside is sometimes people doesn't understand what you meant.

But the explicit purpose is to conceal what you actually mean to avoid criticism. So, you need to be more specific about “people”: one downside is that the intended audience sometimes doesn't understand what you mean (another is that the audience you are trying to bypass sometimes does.)

PG is referring to the long-recognized practice of political dog-whistles here.

[ifyoubuildit]

That's one interpretation, but I don't think a particularly charitable one.

My own read on that would be this: the explicit purpose is to discuss something that has emotional/tribal baggage associated with it (which makes it hard for people to think rationally) by distilling out the actual meat of the issue without the baggage.

I think its important to be critical of things, but I see a tendency for people to constantly be looking for the enemy in conversations online. Everyone has their weapons raised. Everything has to be labeled and sorted into it's own little box (the terms "disingenuous" and "bad faith" seem to have exploded in use for example). That's what I see in your reference to dog whistles. Do you think pg is advocating dog whistling?

[tanseydavid]

>> PG is referring to the long-recognized practice of political dog-whistles here.

Serious question: what exactly do you mean by "political dog-whistle"?

No similar term is contained in the Paul Graham piece that was linked and I am genuinely curious what it is you are implying by this.

I have heard this term "political dog-whistle" thrown around over the past few years and for me it has somewhat poor metaphorical quality -- but that's just me.

Can you help me understand this term in the way you seem to understand it?

[wrycoder]

Only the dog can hear the dog whistle.

The act of using coded words, phrases or even emoji to say specific things to a specific group while seeming innocuous to the general public. It can be used for members of a group to acknowledge who each other are, or to rename issues so that they seem different to the general public, or to bring up events to push an agenda. [0]

[0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dog-whistle

[tanseydavid]

I have a very difficult time finding this to be applicable to the PG piece.

[jimbokun]

It is the idea that certain beliefs are outside the Overton Window [1] of acceptable political discourse, but you want to signal your endorsement of that belief to your supporters without saying it outright, to preserve plausible deniability.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

[throwaway0a5e]

At some point a dog whistle is just a whistle though. Every free speech advocate that defends some odious speech is not endorsing that speech.

[narag]

But the explicit purpose is to conceal what you actually mean to avoid criticism.

Criticism is OK, lynching is not. Attacking the censorship makes obvious that there is a problem with free speech. If you just defend the specific topic, you get sucked into the mess.

Saying that righteousness is an addiction is actually more efficient than attacking one of the addicts' many self-righteous causes. Have you tried to reason with an addict about their use?