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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?
Frankly, I think a lot of good discourse is just not being an asshole. Most people, if told they’re doing something that’s making other people uncomfortable, will knock it off—most of the time.
But some people fail to apply that rule if the thing that’s making other people uncomfortable involves their own privilege. Then, they’ll talk over the complaint, insist it was “no big deal”, or nitpick the complaint until the other person gives up from exhaustion. Much of the time, the counter arguments (if they go beyond “it’s no big deal because I said so”) amount to hearing about a friend’s house getting robbed and telling your friend, “Are you sure your house was robbed? Or do you mean to say it was burgled? Because there’s a difference you know. Legally speaking, the difference is that…”
Of course, the reason people act this way is because so much oppression is due to unconscious biases, so most people don’t realize it when they’re being racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or ableist. So part of good discourse is working to become aware of your own unconscious biases and correcting for them. This is something that privileged people can’t expect members of oppressed classes to do for them, it’s something the privileged need to do for themselves by spending lots of time listening to other people’s experiences of oppression—and I mean actually listening, not just waiting for the first excuse to dismiss everything they’re being told.
Sometimes people balk at this because they misunderstand that’s being asked. An analogy I like to use—and I wish I could remember who came up with it—is for privileged people to imagine they’re on a job internship. If you’re an intern, obviously you’re going to spend lots of time listening and asking questions, and you’re not going to presume you have the expertise to tell the company’s full-time employees everything they’re doing wrong. In discussions of oppression, it’s people who’ve experienced oppression their whole lives who are the experts on their own oppression. So shut up and listen to what they have to say.
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?
Uh, because the evidence of society’s oppressive power structures is literally everywhere? I don’t want to invoke Donald Trump lightly here, because whether or not he wins, the mere fact that his presidential campaign has gotten this far has already had direct consequences, particularly for women and people of color, in terms of normalizing bigotry. So I don’t want to say that his campaign has been a good thing, or that it will have been a good thing even if he loses. But I do think there’s a silver lining here in that given nearly half the country is willing to vote for this guy, it’s now impossible to deny that bigotry and oppression are still major problems that need to be combated. Not to mention the fact that main reason I can say “nearly half” is because of rich old white dudes who are fine with racism and misogyny, as long as it’s polite racism and misogyny, but faint at the thought of anyone being crass about it.
Speaking of the current election, there’s also no shortage of examples to prove that oppressive attitudes are rampant among “progressives” as well, but 2016 also conveniently gave us an especially easy-to-use example of this in the Bernie Bro phenomenon. So really 2016 is the year in which everybody stopped having any excuses.
As for what would change my mind—I don’t know, waking up from the Matrix and Morpheus telling me, “oh, by the way, for some reason the machines decided to create an alternate 21st century where racism and sexism continued existing after 1970, which is when they were completely eradicated in real-world history.” I’m not being sarcastic, I think that may actually be more plausible than imagining we discover an elaborate conspiracy to manufacture evidence of ongoing oppression. I mean, it’s easy to make fun of MRAs for ranting about the secret feminist conspiracy that’s supposed to be controlling the world—but how else do you explain away all the evidence of sexism in the modern world (not to mention all the other *-isms that still exist).
3. Explain Gamergate.
Gamergate is an internet harassment campaign that started out targeting women in the video game industry and appears to have expanded to anyone who the Gamergaters perceive as a threat to their fragile male egos (including some men, but the Gamergaters seem to find women especially threatening). Actually, I’m not sure I can explain all of it, like I can recite the “it’s about ethics in game journalism” narrative almost by heart by now, and in a sense it’s a coherent narrative, it just bears no relationship to any of the documented facts. Like, we have screenshots from the chatroom where the harassment campaign was originally organized! There are links to them on Wikipedia! So I know what happened but I’m totally confused about who the Gamergaters think they’re fooling. Not that I’m surprised by the misogyny—but you’d think eventually they’d come up with a new hashtag and agree to pretend it has nothing to do with the old one?
John said:
Better than the last entry, but some notable tells, I think. The internship analogy is bad enough that I’d be seriously surprised to find anyone around here still using it to describe their ideology. Framing SJWism as a reaction to Trumpism seems more like something someone faking the position would invent (IE, an argument someone would make for it if they were starting the intellectual basis from scratch now rather than describing what they already believe). Once again no Zoe in the Gamergate description; I think this is weakmanning on the anti-SJers’ part (they see antiGGers ignoring her existence and assume that they must always do so because her actions are inherently indefensible).
Still, my confidence is lower that it’s a fake than it was for the last one.
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anosognosic said:
I think you’re misreading the Trump thing entirely. The Trump phenomenon is brought up as incontrovertible evidence of racism, sexism etc, and not in any way as the cause of the spread of SJ.
The internship analogy seems fine to me, in that it adequately explains the very basic mechanics of the SJ position with regards to personal experience of privilege and oppression. It doesn’t have to hold up to strict scrutiny to be a helpful analogy (cf. spoons).
I am aggressively resisting knowing more than I already do about this circus and these monkeys that are very much not mine, but on GG, as I understand it: Zoe Quinn’s personal virtue and her alleged involvement in instigating the whole thing is very much more of a thing on the pro-GG side. The anti-GGer side is that she was a victim of a harassment campaign, along with Anita Sarkeesian, full stop, and that the ugliness of that harassment campaign completely eclipses any possible cause that GGers might have had to oppose them in the first place. Given this context, the absence of a specific mention of Zoe Quinn does not mean much.
In conclusion, this is either an actual pro-SJ person or an imitator that fully deserves to win.
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John said:
I agree with you that an anti-GGer is much more likely than a pro-GGer to not mention Zoe Quinn, but I think that among readers of this blog, a pro-GGer imitating an anti-GGer is more likely not to mention her than an actual anti-GGer.
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anosognosic said:
I dunno. I’m not super feminist, but I’m also not terribly sympathetic to GG, and I don’t want to get into the whole thing, but I myself would’ve omitted Zoe Quinn from a paragraph-long take on gamergate.
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Susebron said:
My experience has been the opposite – people who are pro-GG are much more likely to push it as “ethics in video games journalism”/a general reaction against SJ, whereas people who are anti-GG are more likely to focus on the harassment, of which Zoe Quinn was a target.
Anyway, I think this is probably someone anti-SJ, but if I saw it posted somewhere else outside of this specific context I would assume it was pro-SJ.
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San said:
Yeah, this is what I was trying to articulate on the last one: the prevailing anti-GG opinion is neither “Zoe Quinn is a hero!” nor “Zoe Quinn is a terrible person of whom we are ashamed,” it’s “Zoe Quinn was victimized by a misogynistic harassment campaign that spiraled out to threaten many other women, and that’s terrible, and whether she’s a bad person who deserved it or not is totally beside the point.”
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San said:
(I do think the GG answer here is much more credible than the last one despite not actually mentioning Zoe, because they DO mention that GG is fundamentally a harassment campaign aimed at female gamers & game devs rather than some kind of wider debate about social issues in gaming, which is the important part.)
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ameliaquining said:
The internship analogy is an established thing that real SJ advocates use.
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John said:
Yes, but it’s a really weak argument. I’d expect an anti-SJer around here to glom onto it a lot more than I’d expect an SJer to.
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ADifferentAnonymous said:
Wait, what’s so weak about the internship thing? As a privileged person, I find that pretty useful as a trick to foster humility.
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taradinoc said:
@ADifferentAnonymous
For one thing, it assumes a seniority hierarchy, but the real-world situations don’t have one. If I make a remark and someone tells me it’s racist, they may be “experts on their own oppression” (i.e. past experiences of racism), but I’m an expert on my own words and meaning, and we may both be equally informed on the definition of racism. It’s not clear that their expertise on part of the issue should override my expertise on another, nor why we should even care about expertise instead of just applying the definition.
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hrurahaalm said:
I’ve never seen that before today. Googling ‘internship analogy oppression’ shows me this page, plus what look like false hits.
However, while the analogy seems somewhat poor and is definitely not a standard idea, it also doesn’t seem like a smoking gun. I have more doubts about you now.
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Anon. said:
Definitely leaning real SJ on this one, most of it feels authentic. The appeal to “all the evidence” as answer to “what would convince you..” is suspect, and the GG feels a bit “off”, not sure why. Overall I’d say 85% certain it’s Pro-SJ.
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Anon. said:
To those saying it’s anti: is it failing because of the wording, or because it’s not accurately modeling the “real” SJ positions?
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John said:
Both – but the problem with the wording isn’t so much that it’s failing to imitate SJ’s wording as that it’s oversignaling SJ’s wording, the same way that someone impersonating Hillary Clinton might find too many excuses to say “stronger together”.
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Royal Night Guard said:
Both. The wording has shibboleths that make it seem suspect (“racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or ableist”), and together with the arguments this seems too much like the sort of extreme pro-SJW person that anti-SJWs make takedown videos about on YouTube.
I’m having some second thoughts, but that was my initial impression and how I voted.
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Placid Platypus said:
To me the strongest evidence it’s anti-SJ is that it does such a bad job explaining the anti-SJ side of things. I feel like especially in the context of an ITT someone who really held the position would have a more robust model. I.E. what a pro-SJ person thinks an anti-SJ person believes is probably closer to what an anti-SJ person actually believes than what an anti-SJ person thinks a pro-SJ person thinks an anti-SJ person believes is.
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Dan said:
I think this one is anti-SJ, but much better than the last entry. Would pass if posted in the comments section on a left-leaning blog.
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Walter said:
Sounds genuine to me. I buy this arguer as actually believing what they said.
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Balioc said:
Putting my wager down on “anti-SJ who’s pretty good at this game.” The phrase “fragile male egos” is a tell, I think; that’s something plenty of SJers would say in various contexts, but not SJers who know this particular discursive space and who are trying to put their best foot forward.
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Autolykos said:
Yup, that’s exactly what ticked me off, too. I heard that phrase only from straw feminists, or in very heated debates. Not when someone has a lot of time to carefully present their opinion.
(But so far, I’ve always been on the minority side in the vote, so you might do better if you disregard my hunches).
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Fisher said:
Completely, totally, absolutely, anti-SJ.
And a rather mean-spirited one at that. Much more interested in making SJ look bad than in actually expounding from their POV.
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callmebrotherg said:
There are some comments that make me think “anti-SJ,” like the “fragile male egos” line and the Matrix bit, but if I had to pick, and I do, then I’d go with “authentically pro-SJ.”
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Idomeneus said:
The answer to #2 is *fascinating.*
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Maxim Kovalev said:
Nice try – really nice, but still anti-SJ. This could be authentic SJ if randomly picked from the less pleasant corners of tumblr, but the comments on this blog tend to be much more sophisticated. I don’t buy the idea that readers of this blog would use wordings like this.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
Note though that apparently there are lots of readers who don’t comment – yesterday’s poll had >200 votes, and there are never this many comments here. It could be a pro-SJ lurker.
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Split16 said:
It was you, wasn’t it?
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tcheasdfjkl said:
This confuses me. Obviously I’m not a lurker. Also I try to be nice.
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pillsy said:
I guessed anti-SJ, on the grounds that it seemed to be assembled by plausible-sounding if not-great pro-SJ arguments, but not necessarily in a way that makes them seem part of an organic whole devised by someone who thinks enough about these sorts of things to even attempt an ITT.
(Also, I gotta say I keep reading ITT as “Intention To Treat”.)
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Katelyn Ailuros said:
I, meanwhile, keep reading ITT as “In This Topic”.
Which is technically true, I suppose :V
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Mr. Eldritch said:
Same, but also Integrated Tinformation Theory.
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Ampersand said:
It’s really close, and I’ve gone back and forth, but I’m now leaning towards this being anti-SJ. But, as Maxim said, if I just saw this on Tumblr I’d totally buy it.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
This is reasonably similar to load of SJ that exists in the world and really dissimilar to the kind of SJ that exists around this blog. Either this is an SJ person who doesn’t normally comment here or its an anti-SJ person who forgot to take into account that they should be trying to imitate Ozy-type SJ, not generic SJ.
Once again I’m too uncertain to actually vote in the poll.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
*lots of SJ, I mean
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anosognosic said:
I’m pretty surprised at all the skeptics here. I’m sympathetic to SJ, and all this reads as perfectly plausibly written by someone on the SJ side.
“Fragile male egos” seems entirely in line with the tone in general, and the Matrix point is pretty consonant with what a worldview feels like from the inside–you actually do see the evidence literally everywhere, to the point where you’d have to be living in a completely different reality to believe anything else.
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Katelyn Ailuros said:
The votes are mostly pro, unlike yesterday’s, so I’m thinking this is going to be a case of “the skeptics are way more likely to comment”.
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Mr. Eldritch said:
I think that while the tone is consistent, the reason I’m skeptical is mainly that the tone seems wrong for the sort of person who’d try to make an authentic pro-SJ argument on this blog. I suspect it’s somebody anti-SJ who’s intimately familiar with a certain flavor of SJ rhetoric used by the people who most loudly argue against them, and is imitating that.
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Autolykos said:
> the Matrix point is pretty consonant with what a worldview feels like from the inside
True, but anyone living near the intersection between SJ and Rationalists should be well aware that this kind of thinking is a giant red flag, and not wave it around so proudly (SCNR the metaphor-massacre).
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rlms said:
I think anti-SJ. Aspects of it (e.g. the internship analogy) in this context read to me like thing an anti-SJ person has seen, sneered at, and decided to use in their impersonation. It’s relatively convincing though, I wouldn’t be too surprised if it was written by an SJW.
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Thad said:
Something about the style in section 1 makes me lean towards anti-sj, but I am not very confident.
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Treblato said:
I said pro, getting my doubts after reading the comments section. What mostly tips the scale towards true SJ is that in my mental model an anti would probably overshoot and attack Hillary for not being progressive enough instead of going for Berniebros.
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Subbak said:
So this one felt more polished, which makes it harder. The only thing I’m pretty certain of is that whoever wrote this is anti-GG, but one could be anti-harrasent campaigns while disagreeing with most of SJWs (see: Scott Alexander). Actually, apart from the lack of terrible puns (and more seriously, the different style), Scott Alexander could definitely have written this.
So my judgement is “ambivalent about social justice”, and therefore I didn’t vote.
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Mr. Eldritch said:
WAY better than the last one, but suspect this may still be anti-SJ. Mostly because I don’t think anyone actually takes “Bernie Bros” seriously as a thing that exists, and “fragile male egos” likewise sounds pretty off. Generally the level of … spite, I guess, just strikes me as off, more likely to come from someone who has negative feelings about SJ and views Tumblr fuckery as a typical example of the ideology.
Mind you, it’s a pretty good imitation of a particular sort of Tumblr personality, and if you’d shown me this completely out of context, I definitely would believe it was pro-SJ. But in the context that this is an ITT, and written by the sort of people who would be at least nominally familiar with this blog, I think I’m going with anti-.
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jossedley said:
Based on my friends’ facebook feeds, I think people believed in Bernie Bros when they thought Bernie was a threat to Hillary. I assume they still believe there were real Bernie Bros, but they’ve definitely stopped talking about them.
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Inty said:
This one has a few imperfections, which I mostly count in *support* of it being the real deal. I think a fake-SJ persona is more likely to be perfectly crafted than a real human being. I think the weakest part is the end of the second paragraph. I don’t know much about this blog’s reader base, but I’d like to think most of them would demand a lower burden of proof than that (even after filtering away the middle). That to me reads like somebody going by their idea of Social Justice people rather than a Social Justice person (specifically one who reads Ozy’s blog).
That said, it’s written in a very genuine sounding way. The Trump part in particular seems like it was written to be sympathetic rather than antagonistic.
As somebody said on the last one, I’d prefer a slider, but I’d bet 5-1 on this being real.
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greenergrassgrowing said:
I would’ve said pro-SJ, except for this line:
“Uh, because the evidence of society’s oppressive power structures is literally everywhere?”
I don’t know why, but it strikes me as overcompensating. I think the author couldn’t think of an answer, so they went all the way in the opposite direction and just went like “evidence? There’s lots of evidence. No-one can deny how much evidence there is”. Note the ratio of jargon (rich old white dudes, Bernie Bros) and vague assertions to actual examples. Maybe I’m reading way too far into the one line, but I think anti-SJ.
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Royal Night Guard said:
I think it would be interesting to split the poll options in two to include the position of the voter.
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argleblarglebarglebah said:
I’m honestly kind of confused why that’s not already the case.
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greenergrassgrowing said:
I hope that would include an option for people who smugly refuse to participate in the Pro-SJ vs. Anti-SJ debacle.
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taradinoc said:
I voted anti-SJ.
This is more convincing than the previous one, but I think it’s still just a very good impression — and it really strikes me as an impression. The sneering tone, the digressions toward Donald Trump and Bernie Bros and “why doesn’t GG come up with a new hashtag?”… each answer feels more like a condensation of every combative SJ blog post on the topic than something one person would write while filling out a survey.
Also, I’ll go @Subbak one step further: I suspect the author is Scott Alexander. Something about the style reminds me of his more emotive writing.
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Royal Night Guard said:
Might be cheating :P, but if it is Scott, he’s making an effort to use punctuation differently than he normally does. A quick jump over to SSC shows that Scott puts spaces on either side of his parenthetical/sentence break dashes, while this writer does not.
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argleblarglebarglebah said:
Whoever wrote this is either pro-SJ and significantly more strident than the average reader of this blog or anti-SJ and significantly more tied into SJ discourse than the average reader of this blog.
I think on balance it’s more likely to be the former than the latter, because the author says a lot of things that strike me as hard for an anti to mimic. For example: the previous answer, in response to the first question about discourse norms, used the word “norms” a lot, and generally sounded like it was written by someone that likes LW jargon. This one doesn’t use the word norms, and answers the first question in a pretty conventionally SJ-way, to the point where it’s very slightly talking past the question.
OTOH it really does come off as the sort of person who would be unlikely to participate in an ITT in the first place. So I’m not completely sure, but if I had to give an answer I’d come down on the side of pro.
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Kuyan Judith said:
I feel like this is full so full of SJ jargon and slogans that it has to be an anti-SJ overdoing it.
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Murphy said:
Voted pro though only about 75% certain. There’s a couple of sentences that jar but there always are.
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Tapio Peltonen said:
Definitely anti-SJ, more obviously than the previous one. I’m leaning towards thinking that the previous one was pro-SJ.
Obvious red flags: Uses things that real pro-SJ folks might say in another context (e.g. talking to other pro-SJ people), but not in a “explain your beliefs to an unknown observer” context. “Of course, the reason people act this way is because so much oppression is due to unconscious biases, – -” okay, this is literally what (many) pro-SJ people think, but pro-SJ people tend to be aware that most people do not view the issue this way and would rather elaborate on why and how people keep on contributing to systematic oppression, rather than just state that this is a thing that happens.
I think this thing reads a lot like someone just paraphrasing various things they’ve heard pro-SJ people say, without really believing in them.
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Ann Onora Mynuz said:
It felt very SJ, but far more vindictive than the average commenter here, another thing is that, being so confident that the previous one was anti, I give a bigger prior to this one being Pro.
The “Uh” is a really nice touch, by the way. In any different context I’d say it’s an excellent predictor. But because it’s such a clear tribal marker, I’m inclined to think it’s an anti person trying to get easy points.
Finally, the weirdest thing is that, despite this feeling more “Pro-SJ” than the first one, I’m more sympathetic to the arguments in that one. I guess, assuming they’re both anti, it feels like the first one is trying to imitate SJ ideas, while the latter is far more concerned in imitating their style.
One thing that seems like a strike against both, is that neither even attempts to consider the possiblity they’re wrong. People at least try to appear humble when talking about their actual beliefs.
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Orphan said:
And in contradiction to everyone else, I’m thinking this person is pro-SJ. In particular the complaint about “picking to exhaustion” in the first answer strikes me as genuine; this isn’t an argument an anti-SJ person would ever make.
The second answer is leaping to places anti-SJ people would generally be unfamiliar; a typical anti-SJ person might think to point as Trump as an -example- of a heavily biased person proving our society still as issues, but not -proof- of broader bias in society. You have to be looking for proof to find it there.
And the third answer does something it would take quite a sophisticated emulation to perform; stating that the GG people have a coherent argument that bears no relationship to reality. Given that you’ve already made an effort to humanize your emulation, an anti-SJ person would make a point of calling out the women on the… I have no idea what the GG sides are called, but the anti-SJ side of that. Anti-SJ people are generally quite cognizant of the way “gender traitors” are treated, and if the goal was really to paint an ugly picture of SJ, they wouldn’t have missed that.
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Fisher said:
pro GG are called “gators,” or some derogatory, infantile miswording of “gamergaters” (e.g. “gibbergoobers, gobbergrapes, etc)
anti-GG are called “ghazelles,” “antis,” “aggros,” or “decent human beings.”
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Orphan said:
That… fails entirely to tell me which side is which. “Pro” and “Anti” don’t actually convey anything to me, because “Gamergate” isn’t a position, it’s a mess of despicable and broken people in equal measure on both sides, with the despicable people largely happy to have a conflict to engage in, and the broken people all thinking, because of the abuse heaped on them by the other side’s despicables, that they have some sort of moral upper hand imparted by their victimhood and the victimhood of their team’s saints, as if the validity of a position were determined, not by your own position, but by the horribleness of the other team. Which of course promotes a certain kind of conflict in which everybody is trying to make everybody on the other team be horrible while fanatically defending the horribleness of their own teams whenever their people do anything. Not that the goading is even necessary, because, again, the whole mess is full of despicable people who don’t care about the issues at hand and just like any opportunity to behave like assholes.
Which is to say, I’m not impressed by your implication that whatever side you are on happens to be the one of decent human beings, because I’ve seen the shit both sides have gotten up to, and the way they both desperately attempt to assert that the other is full of evil people, and their own is full of martyrs for the cause.
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imperfectlycompetitive said:
I read the “decent human beings” bit not as an injection of Fisher’s own opinion, but as an example of the terms that the anti-GG (=SJ?) side use for their own side. It’s not hard for me to believe that some unpleasant people on the internet claim that human decency is synonymous with taking their side in a dispute; and it’s entirely consistent with unpleasant people being found on both sides of the fight, as they usually are.
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ADifferentAnonymous said:
“Pro-GG” is the anti-SJ side. I too think this terminology is dumb.
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Jimmy said:
The very first paragraph is just so perfectly SJ. As an anti, “don’t be an asshole” is something I would never think to include in my own discourse norms in a million years, and if I were trying to describe SJ norms, I would talk about fairness, equality, awareness of privilege, sensitivity to others’ backgrounds, etc. But this paragraph nails the view so perfectly, because from the SJ perspective, they really are just enforcing the minimum standards that are required to not be an asshole. Privilege is just something that you have to know about in order to not be an asshole to women and minorities.
I don’t feel that there were any obvious tells, except for a general feeling of over-compensating, as others have pointed out.
I will be absolutely fascinated to see what the real pro-SJ posts are like, and to see how many skeptical comments they get. 😉
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Fisher said:
@Orphan
It’s not my implication. Literally every single respectable media outlet agrees that one side of the kerfuffle is absolutely 100% in the right and the other is just a gibbering horde of awful, horrible, icky icky bad people. You can confirm this by looking up the wikipedia article of any of the principals involved. Going to the talk pages of those articles is even more enlightening wrt the human grotesqueries populating one of the sides.
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Ann Onora Mynuz said:
Well isn’t this more evidence that this piece could be a sincere Pro-SJ person.
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Anon. said:
Does this comment pass the ITT?
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Orphan said:
Your claim that all respectable media outlets agree with you, given that it’s likely you wouldn’t find any media outlet that would disagree with you on this matter respectable, isn’t a very convincing argument, I’m afraid.
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Jimmy said:
I’m going to have to guess anti-SJ on this one.
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dtsund said:
Might you consider numbering these titles (e.g., “ITT: Social Justice #2”), to make it easier to see when a new one’s been posted, and also make it easier to refer to specific entries?
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ozymandias said:
Good idea!
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arbitrary_greay said:
It’s….too on the nose. Voted anti. Again, it comes back to the format. This post was written as if the person if in an argument with another, but SJ 101 posts that are written “on neutral ground,” (uncharitably, preaching to the choir style) don’t read like this. As someone on the previous post said, the anti-SJ writers are emphasizing arguments that are disproportionately employed against them, which is not the same thing as the arguments for SJ used to preach to the choir or to educate newbies.
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dantobias (@dantobias) said:
This seems either a real SJ person or a very well-done fake. It’s not quite the Tumblr-style rabid sort who calls everybody opposed to them an edgelord or shitlord (or some sort of lord, anyway), but in these rationalist-adjacent circles you probably won’t get too many of them. It does use much more of the expected jargon than the previous submission did (which could mean a true SJ or a better-done fake).
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Autolykos said:
It’s definitely within the range of plausible pro-SJ opinions found on the nets, even if you don’t include the more unpleasant areas of tumblr. But it is pretty subpar for the level of discourse on this blog. Nobody in the comment section here is that aggressive and radical, and the term “radical lurker” is kind of an oxymoron.
In short: It’s a good imitation of people I don’t expect to have submitted an entry here.
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dantobias (@dantobias) said:
I’m not so sure; after all, this blog’s owner is one of the few in rationalist circles who actually uses words like “intersectional” and “ableist” unironically, so this perhaps attracts at least a few who believe in that direction, though they likely keep their views somewhat more muted than they would on Tumblr.
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Anon. said:
I feel this is moving the goal posts a bit. Is the aim of the test to imitate the super specific kind of SJ/anti-SJ person that reads this blog, or someone from the “general population”?
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tcheasdfjkl said:
I totally agree with Autolykos (except I think radical lurkers may well exist).
@dantobias: I’m confused that you think the concepts of “intersectional” and “ableist” are relevant here? Like the things that make this response read as aggressive (and thus out of character for visitors of this blog) are “fragile male egos” (which you could argue is itself ableist and ignores intersectionality) and the sense of “I don’t need to actually present my evidence because I’m obviously right and you could only convince me I’m wrong by substituting an entirely different world”. You can totally talk about intersectionality and ableism without being mean and intellectually arrogant (in fact, Ozy generally does)!
Your response comes across sort of as “well this person uses some SJ terms so they probably also do these SJ things” while ignoring at the actual substance of the terms and behaviors in question, which makes me think you would not do very well on this ITT.
@Anon.: well, the goal is to convince readers of Ozy’s blog that the response was probably submitted by a pro-SJ person. Since we know that the submitters are all readers of Ozy’s blog, that does put some limits on what kind of views submitters are likely to have.
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dantobias (@dantobias) said:
@tcheasdfjkl The relevance of the blogger being comfortable with SJ terminoligy is that it’s likely, in turn, to make SJ-oriented people comfortable with it (even if they’re not highly active in the comment sections), including the more strident, aggressive sorts of SJ people, so some might see this challenge and respond to it. Scott Alexander, on the other hand, seems to have a style that is better at attracting alt-right types, even if he personally dislikes them. Libertarianish rationalists might show up at both places, but might not feel strongly enough on one side or the other of the SJ culture war to join the challenge.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
@dantobias
I see, thanks for clarifying! Sorry I misinterpreted.
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SilasLock said:
I voted anti-SJ; it’s so good that it’s too good.
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Dank said:
Anti
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