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It’s our first submission to the Intellectual Turing Test! (Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is? Click here!) Please read, then vote at the end of the post. Feel free to speculate in the comment section about this person’s identity!
1. What discourse norms do you tend to follow? Why? Do you think everyone else should follow them, and why?
I tend to mostly shut up and let others speak. This is because I am privileged in several ways, but also because I am a shy person and I don’t feel a lot of need to make myself heard all the time.
Of course everyone should use the same meta-norms of discourse. People are, in the abstract, equal: in the original position, everyone should have the same ability to affect the conversation. To suggest otherwise would be to create privilege. But meta-norms are not norms, and our (actual, real-world) norms should take account of existing privilege to achieve the meta-norm. People with privilege are inherently “louder” and should be working towards equalizing the conversation, which is to say, they need to step back, listen more, and let others lead.
2. What is the true reason, deep down, that you believe what you believe? What piece of evidence, test, or line of reasoning would convince you that you’re wrong about your ideology?
I am a liberal. I believe in human rights, which are the same for everyone because we are all equal. Everyone has the right to have a decent life. I also believe that every person can and must define what a decent life is for themself; nobody else can do that. And everyone else needs to create the space necessary for that, pay attention, and respect our choices.
What would convince me that people don’t have rights? Nothing, because that is a normative statement. People should have rights because we’re equally people.
3. Explain Gamergate.
Gamergate is a conflict about the content of games and the culture surrounding games. Should games contain so much graphic violence and misogyny as they do? How does such content affect our thinking? Questions like these are totally valid questions, which are being studied by a number of social scientists and others. A small but increasing set of game developers are trying to use such criticism to improve their games and make them more inclusive.
The conflict is also about women in gaming, and the gaming identity. Gaming is a very cismale dominated culture. Why aren’t there more women and LGBT gamers and game designers? What are games, gamers and/or game companies doing that causes this problem? Shouldn’t games allow the player the freedom to choose her identity, including race, sex, and sexual preference?
Some conservative gamers feel threatened by such inquiry, and they have banded together to try to prevent game magazines and game companies from paying attention to it. In addition, because of the controversy many other internet trolls have jumped in. They use many tactics, primarily anonymous threats but also consumer pressure, in the attempt to silence criticism. Their behavior has been particularly egregious towards women on the anti-Gamergate side.
Thing of Things 
Man, I am too used to “ITT:” meaning “In this thread:”…
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I’m going to make the prediction that the SJ writers are better at pretending to be anti-SJ than the antis are at pretending to be pro-SJ. This is *mostly* because learning the correct patterns of speech are among the primary ways to show status in the social justice community; it will be hard to fake for the same reason that it was hard for a working-class laborer in Victorian England to replicate the mannerisms of the aristocracy.
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There are certainly low status SJers and high status SJers, though, and there are certainly anti-SJers who either study SJ’s language closely (they have defined themselves by their enemy, after all) or used to be SJers.
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I’m anti-SJ, and this post is anti-SJ-failing-the-ITT as fuck. Opening with an admission that your discourse norms tell you to shut up, but conceding that you’re also pushed that way by your introversion? Okay, that’s a red flag but not a killer. Constantly explaining in an overtly sophist way how liberal values naturally lead to SJ’s illiberal values? My mind is already pretty made up that this is fake. The GamerGate explanation never actually mentioning the Zoe Quinn incident and not seeming aware that Zoe Quinn even exists? I’m sure that there are anti-Gamergaters who actually are unaware of such things (or would willfully choose not to mention them out of stubbornness), but it’s a pretty weak man, and not one you’re likely to find around here.
I feel like it might be better to publish the ITTs in random order, rather than sequentially. That’d avoid the problem of us immediately already having an answer to each anti-SJ ITT by just taking the inverse of the pro-SJ ITT paired with it.
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Forgot to mention this: this post is pretty much how I would write an ITT submission if I had never seriously attempted to consider things from a SJer’s point of view before making the attempt.
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Both SJ and anti-SJ are going to be separately randomized.
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Good to hear. 🙂
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What makes me think this is an anti-SJ is the word “equal”. Doesn’t come up much from real SJs, I think.
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“I believe in human rights, which are the same for everyone because we are all equal.”
This line makes me think that this is an impostor. People don’t use this kind of phrasing for their own beliefs.
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Likewise.
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It kinda sounds like the giant brain that is the bad guy at the end of A Wrinkle In Time.
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I agree that this is clumsy wording. However it could be explained by the author not being a native English speaker, or by it being generally hard to put in words things that you don’t question/discuss on a daily basis since they’re at the core of your belief system. I remember some time ago having a conversation with a friend about axiomatic beliefs and I know I ended up using some pretty awkward phrasing even though I was describing my own beliefs.
Furthermore, if what you say is true and the author makes the rather obvious mistake of expressing a belief they don’t have in a way that sounds super fake, you would probably expect other mistakes such as self-defeating arguments, and references to things the other side cares about more (e.g. Zoe Quinn, although she is very much part of the events of Gamergate, it would take someone pro-Gamergate to think that the emergence of the movement is due to her actions).
Note that I’m not falling into the trap of http://lesswrong.com/lw/ii/conservation_of_expected_evidence/. I’m saying that, in the context of this exercise, this awkward phrasing combined with the apparent lack of other errors makes it more likely to be genuine than something that could more easily have been lifted (or paraphrased) from a blog post.
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>calling oneself a liberal
>no space between cis and male
This seems a tad too easy, to the degree I’m almost starting to think this is an SJ pretending to be an anti-SJ pretending to be an SJ.
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I voted anti-SJ, but I have a suspicion that this may be an SJ trying to imitate an anti-SJ. Either way, it’s not sincere SJ.
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I also would be surprised if this was written by a genuine SJ supporter.
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I voted pro-SJ for the reason you cite. It seems off from being sincerely pro-SJ, but also doesn’t track how I’d expect anti-SJ people to flub an ITT.
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I voted before looking at the comments.
My main reason for voting pro-SJ is because the explanation for SJ discourse norms was more nuanced than what I am used to, and I don’t think I could have made it.
Now that I’ve looked at the comments, I believe I have been fooled.
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I feel like the sample for people who are readers of this blog is skewed. Pro-SJ people who read this blog are much more likely to have a more nuance view of SJ. The submission indeed comes close to imitating that sort of “meta-contrarian pro-SJ” view, but fails to convince as an example of how SJ is usually expressed by non-rat-adj pro-SJ.
The format of the test itself also lends to this, in that a lot of SJ posts online are written as arguments or prose (editorials or testimonials), and therefore are streamlined. Conservation of detail, discarding nuance that breaks tone or decreases persuasiveness, etc. Agreeing comments are usually about carrying that tone forward, a la call-and-response in gospel styles, and therefore are prone to more exaggeration for effect. (again, flattening out nuance and complexities)
But the ITT’s format is about personal beliefs, rather than setting up an opponent (direct or indirect) to address, so the answers from a genuine pro-SJ would yet be different from the majority of SJ posts out there.
Primarily, in that GG posts written by someone unprompted will more than likely include the phrase “of course,” while it would be less likely to appear in the response to this question, imo. And the inclusion of that “of course” can make a world of difference in tone, and therefore how people who feel they might be implicated receive the account.
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I voted anti-SJ, because of the reasons other people have given. It’s pretty bad, and it over-relies on shibboleths like “privilege” and “equal”. (The answer to gamergate seemed the best at capturing the relevant logic actually.)
But I should say I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually an SJ who’s just… very bad at capturing their side’s points. It’s really hard! Ozy does a good job of it and I suspect they and lots of other blogs we read make it look easy, but it’s not.
The lesson I guess is “sometimes even humans have trouble passing turing tests.”
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I voted for anti-SJ writer because the piece seemed like it was viewing SJ from the outside and trying to make best arguments. It didn’t have SJ-style urgency;.
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I’m SJ, and this definitely doesn’t quite pass the sniff test to me. It’s either an anti or an SJ who is significantly disconnected from SJ discourse.
It’s not common for SJs to take “shut up and listen” too seriously, or to call themselves liberal, or to use equal in the way this writer does. In addition, it calls GG “conservative” when that’s clearly not really true, and in general gives an account that doesn’t even mention the original scandal that caused it.
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To be fair the GG part could just mean this person does not know GG in particular very well.
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>or to call themselves liberal
A lot of SJs are genuine liberals though, in the sense of knowing about socialism vs. liberalism and consciously rejecting socialism. In fact, they’re use of “I’m a liberal” would dovetail nicely with their next sentence that references “human rights”.
>it calls GG “conservative” when that’s clearly not true
Out of curiosity, why do you think it’s not true?
As far as actual language used by SJs is concerned, /r/gamerghazi is very fond of referring to GG as “reactionary” and “right-wing”. I don’t know exactly how often they’ve thrown the word “conservative” in there, but I’m sure it’s been used at least a few times.
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Several surveys have measured the political identities of GG supporters, with results as summarized here and here. Excerpt:
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@tardinoc: It’s possibly a case of using “conservative” as “socially conservative” rather than “politically leaning towards the self-described conservative party”, which is more specific. I would be very surprised if there wasn’t a very significant fraction of Gamergate supporters with a conservative view of gender roles. Like, even if I were to concede that it wasn’t only about hostility to women, it is an undeniable fact that it attracted a bunch of people hostile to women, who tend to believe in traditional 19th century gender roles.
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@Subbak, check out the plot of political compass results at the second link above. The bulk of responses are in the left-libertarian quadrant.
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GGers may have alt-right sympathies but in general their ideology doesn’t fit neatly on the conventional political compass. Its closest relative is 4chan – esque cryptoanarchism, and of course it’s also closely related to standard geek misogyny, but obviously neither of those are particularly closely related to any mainstream political position.
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#1 and #3 are both reasonable, but the answer for #2 seems pretty incomplete.
On the one hand, this makes me think this person is not pro-SJ because they didn’t mention key SJ ideas and seem to not really be clear on what exactly they’re defending in #2.
On the other hand, this makes me think this person is not anti-SJ because they don’t seem aware of anti-SJ counterarguments.
…On the third hand, maybe this is an anti-SJ person who doesn’t think SJ people are aware of counterarguments. (But on Ozy’s blog I would expect everyone to be aware of counterarguments!)
……On the fourth hand, maybe this is an SJ person who is so unaware of what anti-SJ people actually object to that they in fact are not really clear on what exactly they need to defend.
……..I don’t know, this is hard!
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What left me most unconvinced here was the “true reason, deep down” section. Most people’s terminal values are more emotionally loaded, and a true believer would talk about care for humanity as a whole or anger at injustice.
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Most people (including myself) seem to be making the judgment based on language, but what about the other angle? Purely from a philosophical perspective, does this person pass the ITT?
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On my first read of it, I was pretty sure that it was anti-SJ based on language, but as I reread it I grew less sure (perhaps just me overthinking it, though). What finally made me decide to vote it anti-SJ was answer 2, actually: I thought the justification provided for never changing one’s mind was really hard to take seriously.
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I don’t know if it’s *unrealistic* for an SJ person to say this, but
“What would convince me that people don’t have rights? Nothing, because that is a normative statement.”
is a profoundly silly statement.
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I’m concerned I might be biased by a desire not to be fooled. I.e., better to guess they’re anti-SJ and be wrong than guess they are SJ and be tricked. That said, I genuinely believe this person is anti-SJ. It all comes across as a bit…Too much, if that makes sense? Like, it doesn’t feel like a Social Justice person wrote this and tempered it for a non-SJ or SJ-ambivalent audience.
Author, if you’re reading this and you really are pro-Social Justice, I’m sorry I thought you were insincere (though you have to admit that this situation is funny).
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Nope. #1 sounded dodgy, but #3 was a clear giveaway. Nobody who wasn’t pro-Gamergate would describe it without mentioning Zoe Quinn.
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Huh? I agree with you that #3 was a giveaway, but my impression was that anti-Gamergaters were more likely to describe it without mentioning Zoe Quinn, and that we were seeing a weak man argument.
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GG likes to refer to Zoe as “Literally Who” and pretend Gamergate is about wider issues of ethics in gaming. People who aren’t in GG see it as a harassment campaign aimed at Zoe Quinn by a vengeful ex, which spiraled out into a larger antifeminist movement that’s still mostly about harassing women in the industry and complaining that “walking simulators,” artsy indie games, and games with political/social justicey themes are propaganda.
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Huh, I’d thought it was anti-GG that tried to make GG about wider issues to distract from everything terrible Zoe Quinn and her supporters have done.
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I think it’s overgeneralizing to say that either pro-GG or anti-GG all care/don’t care about Zoe Quinn. I’ve seen descriptions from both sides that focus heavily on her, mention her but paint her as part of a broader issue, or don’t mention her at all.
I think both sides usually mention her when giving extended descriptions of the movement & it’s history.
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I mean, I suppose it’s possible someone who wasn’t pro-GG might describe it without mentioning Zoe Quinn by name, but they would absolutely foreground the issue of harassment aimed at women in gaming.
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I’m going to end up believing every post in the whole series is exactly what it claims to be, aren’t I?
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I voted anti-SJ.
(1) It leans too heavily on some shibboleths while overlooking others. “Privilege” comes up three times, but nothing about “marginalization” or “oppression”. Not much focus on victims at all, actually. “People with privilege” is awkward and vague; I’d expect more specifics about male privilege, white privilege, etc.
(2) “I am a liberal”, and the focus on rights and individuality, reminds me of the left of the 90s. Rush Limbaugh hadn’t yet made “liberal” a dirty word. The left was in a weaker position, fighting power instead of wielding it, and appealing to fairness instead of settling scores. I grew up in that era, mocking the last iteration of political correctness, and I still call myself a liberal to distance myself from the current iteration; this submission seems to be defending SJ by appealing to values that aren’t associated with its supporters.
(3) In the GG answer, the harassment and such is blamed on “other internet trolls”, not on the “conservative gamers [who] feel threatened”. That’s a dead giveaway. In my experience, anti-GG people invariably attribute all of that to disgruntled gamers, not opportunistic agitators.
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Ugh, your (3) is a very good point and I can’t believe I missed that. I guess I was fooled by an anti-SJ, then.
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I voted fake, but I wouldn’t be hugely surprised to learn that this was written by exactly who the author claims to be – a guy who doesn’t write very much on blogs and who sees himself as more SJ than not. However, I agree that #2 and #3 lack detail that you would expect to see from our hypothetical shy SJ fellow, so probably fake.
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Definitely Anti-SJ, none of the answers read as sincere and the Gamergate answer is particularly “off”.
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Voted fake too. It just feels stilted. it could just be a SJ person who’s not great at articulating their position but I’d still say 95% imposter.
I’d feel better if I had a confidence slider instead of yes/no
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95% seems pretty high. I’d give this maybe 70% chance of being anti-SJ.
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Anti.
The first answer focuses way too much on “privilege”, which is a relatively minor element of SJ discourse, but which is an element of discourse anti-SJ individuals encounter at a disproportionate rate (because it is one of the first verbal weapons pro-SJ people tend to pull out in an argument).
The second answer is too… motte-y. It’s what an anti-SJ person would think a pro-SJ person would want to claim their cause is about. A pro-SJ person would mention injustice.
The third answer comes off as insincere and sarcastic; at that point I don’t think the author was even trying. “Questions like these are totally valid questions” isn’t something somebody who thinks they are valid questions would feel the need to say. That was clearly the most painful question for the author to attempt to answer for their opposing view.
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I’ve been convinced by another comment (re: the blame for Gamergate being shifted to unrelated trolls) that this is more probably an anti-SJ, but I don’t agree with your arguments re: answers 2 and 3.
re:2, It’s possible (likely, from other clues) you’re right and this person did not mention injustice because that’s not a thing they think about. Or maybe they didn’t mention injustice because they understood the question on a different level, and assumed they would still believe the same things in a world without injustice (but act differently). The answer 1 being very meta would tend to corroborate that.
re:3, As I’ve said about something else, awkward wording in and of itself only indicates awkwardness with expressing a position, which I expect would be more likely on a sincere position (on an insincere position, you would twist it to make it less awkward to express).
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Social justice is approximately the belief that social injustice needs to be righted; without that, it’s a null referent. Believing there is injustice is a prerequisite for belonging to an ideological group seeking to right that injustice.
As for 3, I know tone doesn’t convey well over the Internet, but that is pretty much stock-standard phrasing for expressing a sarcastic sentiment; even if it were merely awkward phrasing, it would be attempting to assert the validity of questions that somebody who actually believed in the questions wouldn’t think to question, and furthermore, the assertion is empty. Somebody actually seeking to establish said validity would attempt to do so, rather than merely asserting it.
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The consensus so far is “anti” (since no conceivable SJ person would say such things), with an undercurrent of “pro” (since this blog tends to attract smart/rationaly people who would realize that no real SJ person would submit such an entry). It’s also been suggested that this is pro-SJ masquerading as anti-SJ masquerading as pro-SJ.
A third (fourth?) alternative: in the announcement thread, quite a few commenters identified themselves as SJ-orthogonal. Maybe one of them submitted this entry to test us: how do we treat something that’s so far off base it’s not conceivably someone true beliefs that is, for the same reason, not conceivably an impersonation thereof?
I allocate this possibility around 6% of my probability mass.
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Ugh, I meant to enter this but forgot about it.
Ah, well, I’m probably centrist enough that it would risk interfering with my pro-SJ entry anyway.
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Yeah, I didn’t enter because I was thinking there was no way I could credibly do the pro-SJ side; then I came up with an idea for how to do that, like, a few days after the deadline…
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I’m one of the orthogonal people, and I’m pretty sure I could do neither side very convincingly, considering how much emphasis you people place on “the right emotions” (I might even fail an actual Turing Test with my entries).
Also, I had no idea what to write about Gamergate from either side because I chose not to touch that thing even with a standard-issue ten-foot-pole. Mainly because I don’t find being mind-killed very enjoyable…
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This reads to me like someone anti-SJ trying to write a pro-SJ thing, trying admirably not just to string a whole bunch of buzzwords and shibboleths together in the way that people often do when caricaturing their opponent, but they don’t have the same underlying worldview that most (all?) SJ people do. Of course, it could be someone who is pro-SJ but highly atypical.
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This one doesn’t seem too much like SJ; more like a rationalist who may at best have vague leanings that way, but couched in too many hedges to really represent a firm stance on anything. So it could be a badly-done fake, or a sincere writing by somebody just barely considering themselves pro-SJ, but it’s not a typical SJ piece by any means.
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Pro
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