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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?
I believe that discourse can only be productive when the parties share a certain baseline knowledge and certain terminal values. If the parties disagree on basic points of fact or on basic points of right and wrong, further discussion is pointless until they get on the same page. Often, someone looking for a debate will treat a rant as an invitation to have one. This is a mistake, and in arguments that get heated, it’s the responsibility of the less emotionally-invested party to shrug and leave – they are sacrificing less by giving up the last word than the more emotionally-invested party would. It is unreasonable to start a debate with someone who doesn’t want to have one, and it is on the same tack unreasonable to start a debate with someone you have no reason to believe wants to have one. I think everyone would benefit from these discourse norms, but nobody is obligated to have them. Disagreements over discourse norms simply bring about suffering.
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 do not like to see the strong taking advantage of the weak. I do not like to be taken advantage of by those stronger than me. And frankly? I do like to take advantage of those weaker than me, at least in my id. But I don’t like to take advantage nearly as much as I hate being taken advantage of, and I don’t think anyone does. Oppression is, in my experience, a negative-sum enterprise. Everyone is strong in some ways and weak in others. Some people may effectively be more strong or more weak overall, but at least the vast majority of people fall somewhere in the middle. No one is physically safe from being hurt by others, and no one is morally safe from hurting others. I have been hurt many times, and have some idea of how awful it is, and I have hurt others, and deeply regret doing so and making the world a worse place. I’m fairly certain that everyone else has had the same experience as me, and if they come out of it without apparently sharing my basic moral framework, I can’t help but assume on some level that they’ve faced a moral choice analogous to the one I’ve made and made a worse choice. I only think I would change my object-level ideology if I became convinced that I was wrong about which side represented the strong and which side represented the weak. I only think I would change my meta-level ideology if I discovered a positive-sum oppression, where a strong group takes advantage of a weak group and gains more than the weak group loses – but I find that very unlikely, as surely the strong group could return some portion of the good they gain to the people they took advantage of to gain it; such a scenario would be moral perpetual motion.
3. Explain Gamergate.
I’m not particularly familiar with Gamergate, so take this with a grain of salt, but my impression is that it was a dying gasp of an antisocial demographic that was increasingly finding that they were not tolerated. Women were increasingly accepted in gaming circles, and male gamers who considered masculinity an important part of their identity took this as a threat to their local importance. They attempted to establish their continued relevance and power by opportunistically seizing on the manifesto of feminist indie dev Zoe Quinn’s jilted ex-boyfriend, which alleged that Zoe Quinn had had sex with multiple men (even if the allegations are true, the obsession with a woman’s sexual purity speaks volumes about the regressive ideology of those involved, and it is disgusting that Zoe Quinn’s ex-boyfriend would share things he was told in confidence). Zoe Quinn, it should be noted, is disabled (indeed, her most noted game, Depression Quest, is entirely inspired by her disability) in a way that made harassment even more awful for her than it would be for a neurotypical person; indeed, though the harassment aimed at feminist game analyst Anita Sarkeesian is certainly unacceptable, it is probably much harder for Zoe Quinn to bear her harassment. Very quickly, though, it was blatantly obvious to any reasonable onlookers that Zoe was the victim and that the Gamergate movement had nothing to offer but misogyny. Unfortunately, the media backlash against Gamergate was coordinated in such a way that the movement gained the opportunity to reframe it as being about corruption within the media. Anyone who examines the issue in the slightest, however, will see that this framing is false. Coordination between media figures is only an issue of professional honesty if they are colluding to hide something true or proclaim something false, and that’s inapplicable. The anti-Gamergate columnists and writers only stated the very true and obvious thing that Gamergate was fundamentally about punishing a woman for fabricated accounts of what she might have done in her private sex life, and that it was most likely motivated by a desire to keep women out of gaming communities in general. They didn’t “collude” to generate a false narrative to spread, and it would take an insane amount of conspiracy theory mentality to suppose that they did. They merely collaborated to ensure that they all were aware of the issue and understood how serious it was. Now, Gamergate is mostly forgotten by the public, and is mostly associated with particularly disgusting figures like Milo Yiannopoulos, the token gay alt-right troll who was finally kicked off of Twitter when he helped to spread leaked nude photographs of a moderately successful black actress who had become the latest victim of the reactionary online lynch mob. That’s because we basically won – and we won because we were right and it was clear that we were right.
Anon. said:
>I’m not particularly familiar with Gamergate
hehehe
Almost as blatant as #5.
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dndnrsn said:
This caused me to think it was an anti-SJ doing the ITT, and not particularly well. If this is the question this person is the least familiar with the subject matter of, why is it the longest?
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Treblato said:
I voted pro, because especially the answer to the first question is the logical underpinning of SJW behaviour in discussions. It more than dispels the doubt I get from the writer agreeing that there was co-ordination for the “gamers are dead” articles in the first place.
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pansnarrans said:
I voted anti (with low confidence) for the opening sentence of that response: “I believe that discourse can only be productive when the parties share a certain baseline knowledge and certain terminal values.” This sounds to me as if the writer is annoyed at SJ because they perceive it as promoting the belief that only “right-on” people deserve a voice, and has tried to rephrase this as a positive.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
The strangest thing about this response is ‘I’m not particularly familiar with Gamergate” followed by a long response (the longest of the three, even!) ending with “we won because we were right and it was clear that we were right”. This seems inconsistent and I’m voting anti for this reason.
The first response doesn’t seem particularly SJ-aligned, and I’m not sure if that’s evidence that this is a bad fake or that this is someone with a slightly unorthodox SJ view. The second response is mostly reasonable except it doesn’t explain how they determine the current state of the hierarchy.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
On rereading, this part of answer 2 is not reasonable at all:
“I’m fairly certain that everyone else has had the same experience as me, and if they come out of it without apparently sharing my basic moral framework, I can’t help but assume on some level that they’ve faced a moral choice analogous to the one I’ve made and made a worse choice.”
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John said:
That was strange. The opening of the answer seems to be an epistemic modesty signal, but that doesn’t really square with the ending. I wouldn’t say that convinced me to vote anti, though; ultimately, there weren’t any really critical tells, as far as I found, that the writer was coming at it from an anti perspective.
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AJD said:
“The media backlash against Gamergate was coordinated” seemed like a critical tell to me.
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callmebrotherg said:
Yeah.
//That’s because we basically won – and we won because we were right and it was clear that we were right.//
That’s… Wow. That’s not even *trying* to pass the test.
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Linch said:
My answers so far:
#1: Anti
#2: Anti
#3: Pro (v. uncertain)
#4: Pro
#5: Anti (slightly uncertain)
#6: Anti
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dantobias (@dantobias) said:
The first part seems to be a philosophy of discourse that doesn’t specifically tie one to either SJ or anti-SJ; it just says that it’s pointless to debate with people with different basic values, especially when they’re emotionally invested, which is something many may hold all across the political spectrum.
The second part seems to say that they’d exert power over others to grab their things if this actually produced a net gain in total utility, an odd thing for pro-SJ people to say, when they usually regard things in this area as morally sacred values rather than utilitarian tradeoffs.
The third is rather long-winded, ironically starting by saying they know little about the issue. It does seem to finally get around to a pro-SJ-style position.
It’s either a fake, or a very unusual SJ type.
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liskantope said:
I voted “pro”, but it’s not obvious.
That is the place where it sounds sort of like I imagine an anti-SJ person trying to put themself into the mind of a pro-SJ person. But I’m not sure I can put my finger on why, and I could feel differently tomorrow.
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liskantope said:
I meant, I voted “anti” but it’s not obvious. I don’t know why I’m so prone to typing the wrong thing lately…
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argleblarglebarglebah said:
Because social justice is, as the name implies, about justice. To say you’re against oppression because it’s net bad is not an SJ opinion, really. It’s just utilitarianism.
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Gazeboist said:
This looks like an anti-SJ person to me. The first two responses are very ambiguous – they could be the reasoning of a thoughtful pro-SJ or a critique of the excesses of SJ. I think the person was trying to frame their real beliefs in a way that wouldn’t seem anti-SJ by avoiding any concrete examples. The third answer, though, is where they get tripped up, because they have to be concrete there, and they can’t do it convincingly.
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Susebron said:
The first two were pretty good, but “I’m not familiar with Gamergate but [long rant about Gamergate that sounds like a summary of the views of the sort of SJ person who is unlikely to be reading this blog]” convinced me that this was an anti. If it weren’t for the disclaimer, I would be more likely to believe it, but the disclaimer contradicts the specifics, and I have a hard time believing that even a strongly anti-Gamergate pro-SJ person would put in that level of detail. Especially when it seems to get the details wrong about the whole Milo affair – he didn’t leak nudes, he just stirred up a harassment mob, and anyone who cares enough to put in that level of detail on Gamergate would probably not make that mistake.
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rlms said:
It sounds pretty anti, and I think interestingly is the only one so far that fails the test due to an inability to represent common SJ arguments rather than due to misuse of shibboleths.
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Nick said:
Man, I have _still_ voted with the majority (without knowing it was the majority yet) on every single one so far. I don’t know how to interpret that.
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itaibn said:
Congratulations! You passed the “SJ Intellectual Turing Test Judge” Intellectual Turing Test!
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liskantope said:
I think the same is true for me.
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San said:
Anti, and again the Gamergate answer is the giveaway. The Zoe Quinn stuff – particularly the part about her being disabled – sounds entirely like an anti-SJ person trying to ape SJ attitudes. Most anti-GG types put little weight on Zoe’s disability or the idea that Gjoni revealed info that should have been kept in confidence – the idea instead is that nobody ever deserves to be targeted by the kind of misogynistic harassment that she’s received, full stop. The stuff about journalists colluding on anti-GG opinion pieces is another clue; most anti-GGers consider the charges of collusion so silly that it’s unlikely they’d even bother trying to refute them, which makes it really unlikely that an anti-GG person who claims to be largely unfamiliar with GG would even know about them.
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Susebron said:
They might refute charges of collusion or bring up ZQ’s disability or say that Gjoni revealed private info – but in the context of an ongoing argument, not in an essay portraying their position. It’s essentially an infodump of the anti-GG position in all the arguments the author has been involved in.
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Protagoras said:
I’m surprised at how confident many people are in their judgments on these. Only one has seemed obviously fake to me. Probably I’m too gullible, but I’m inclined to think that part of it is that I’m pretty deep in the social justice community, and I see people with lots of different idiosyncratic beliefs and attitudes around me, so it’s hard for me to see anything (especially in such short pieces of writing) as definite proof someone isn’t one of us. I wonder if many of the people who think they can easily identify many of these as fakes are from outside the SJ scene, and so applying outgroup homogeneity bias. Which is of course encouraged by the tendency of groups to discuss their disagreements among themselves and try to present a united front to outsiders (certainly I see a lot of that in the SJ scene).
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AJD said:
#5 and #6 are the only ones so far I’ve felt confident enough on to vote.
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Autolykos said:
There is also a lot more motivation to post “This is fake because of X, Y and Z.” than to post “There may be slight inconsistencies, but nothing sufficiently odd to identify it as fake.”
If you really take the posts apart line by line, you’re prone to get plenty of false positives. I just read over them and vote by gut feeling, before jumping into the discussion. And while I don’t know how much I got right, at least my calibration seems to be in the plausible range. That is, assuming the entries are either balanced or have a slight over-representation of pro, which is consistent with how I expect the demographics of the readership be.
“If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.”
– Richelieu
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jossedley said:
I think many of us are working from the prior that there are probably about as many SJ and ASJ people participating. (I’m pretty confident that the field is at least 33%/67% if not more even).
I agree that especially given the length, there aren’t many of these where I would be confident they were fake if I just ran across them on Tumblr.
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philosoraptorjeff said:
Anti, with fairly low confidence. The middle answer felt like a non-SJer’s attempt to steelman SJ to me, and the trotting out of so many party-line anti-Gamergate arguments, rampant factual errors and all, while it might be typical of the wider universe of SJ people, would not be what I expected from a sincere SJ person who reads this blog.
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argleblarglebarglebah said:
Voted anti, mainly for the reasons other people have already mentioned about the contradiction in the GG answer and the vagueness of the first answer.
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argleblarglebarglebah said:
That said, I’m a lot less confident about this one than the previous ones.
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Erin said:
My reaction to the ITTs overall has been that when I don’t like the tone being used or the arguments, I strongly feel that it is the “other side.” It’ll be interesting to see if what this is really testing is my assumption that people who agree with me will sound reasonable and fun, while angry and irritating people must be my enemies.
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Walter said:
Oof, probably the closest that I’ve come to total paralysis.
Arguments for ASJ:
1: Question 3 answer more incoherent than I’d think for someone who actually believes it.
2: Never heard a believe in Social Justice admit that they enjoy oppressing folks before, seems like the sort of thing that we believe about them, which makes me doubt that they believe it about themselves.
Argumenst for SJ:
1: The *smell*, is right, if you will? I dunno, my subconscious is saying that this is probably someone with a more than passing interest in social justice.
The story that makes sense to me is that this this was a fervent enemy of the Sj movement. I think #3 is decent evidence of this being a fake, and the ‘aura’ is being given off by the fact that this person is basically just an SJ with the polarity reversed, which makes their response ‘feel’ right, if that makes any sense.
1: ASJ, certain
2: SJ, certain
3: SJ, unsure
4: SJ, unsure
5: ASJ, unsure
6: ASJ certain
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
Another one that’s so repulsive that it has to be fake. At least I really hope it’s fake.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
Out of curiosity (if you want to share), what makes this one particularly repulsive to you?
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
Talking about the other side like they are a horde of hideous orcs and not human beings with beliefs and motivations that are even slightly plausible.
Everyone has a story for why their side is for truth and justice and humanity. Nobody thinks their own alignment is chaotic evil. Even ISIS has a story they believe that makes them the good guys. To explain the existence of one’s ideological enemies as “they are just evil people” is the worst kind of foolishness. Any mass movement is mostly composed of psychologically normal people. If they do evil, it’s because of an idea that has convinced them it was good.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
I agree with your comment but I guess I’m not sure how this response has that problem more than other responses.
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Rowan said:
I voted pro-SJ, but only because it came off as anti-SJ enough that I felt it must be a double-bluff. On reflection, that was probably overthinking it, I should have voted “anti”.
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rash92 said:
I don’t know how many are left, but is it too late to start having the polls also ask what position the answerer has? (i.e. i’m pro-SJ and i think this is pro-SJ, i’m neutral and i think it’s anti-SJ etc.). You can still just add all of the ‘i think it’s pro-SJ’ and ‘i think it’s anti-SJ’ together to compare with the ones that have already passed.
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Fisher said:
Fake. Way too much “Rah! Rah! Go Team!”
Actually, considering I’ve only voted one being sincere so far makes me wonder if:
1. I’m generating too many type I errors
2. Mostly anti-SJ people contributed
3. Ozy put all the anti-SJ ones fits, and the pro-SJ ones after.
Having said all that, could someone enlighten me on a couple of things?
1. Why is generic or vague seen as a sign of insincerity? The questions themselves are general to begin with, and I couldn’t answer the second one with both specificity and confidence. From my (typical-minding and limited) POV, the only people who could answer truthfully and specifically “why do you believe what you believe” are either possessed of a specific psychic atypicality, or are Freudians, or are teenagers.
2. Is the second question supposed to be particularly illuminating? Is there a specific SJ epistemology? Or has it been postulated that pro- and anti-SJ attitudes come from certain backgrounds?
Also: Yay for weekend content!
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tcheasdfjkl said:
I think social justice is a worldview people are often”converted” into, so I’d expect in those cases people would have an account of what convinced them. Even when that’s not the case, Idunno, I think it’s pretty reasonable to expect that people be able to explain where their beliefs come from – probably not at a moment’s notice, but when given a prompt like this and weeks to think about it, sure. At least I’d expect people to have some examples of things they’ve learned or observed that match this worldview, even if they don’t have like, studies to support them or something. (So, not different epistemologies for SJ and anti-SJ, just different specific evidence and/or different reasoning based on evidence.)
I do think there’s a huge range of possible opinions within SJ, so no answer is truly disqualifying, they’re just more or less likely for this community. I haven’t been certain in any of my answers, but I don’t think certainty is required to vote here – a hunch is good enough for this purpose, I think.
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ozymandias said:
I wanted to give a prompt that was vague enough that there could be a lot of different answers, in order to minimize the boredom of reading people making the same argument for weeks on end. Unfortunately, a lot of people are giving me vague answers, which I probably should have predicted! Writing questions is hard. 🙂
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Autolykos said:
I actually interpret it as (very weak) evidence in favor of sincerity. A fabricated position should be easier to explain in a simple and short way, since it is built from a limited amount of information, mostly using System 2 reasoning. The true position is usually the sum of a lifetime of experiences, taped together by a jumbled mess of emotions. Any short and clear explanation you’ll try to give to that will probably even look fake to yourself (unless you’re a very recent convert, possibly).
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tcheasdfjkl said:
Who says it has to be short? 🙂
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J. Goard said:
The reasonable earlier answers left me uncertain, and the unchained rant of the last gave me some pause. At the end of the day, I focused on one point: describing depression as a “disability” in sociological terms, with the implication that criticizing a depressed person’s actions, works or ideas is especially heinous, is a sufficiently absurd view that it would never have occurred to me to fake.
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jossedley said:
So far:, I’m
1: Anti
2: Pro
3: Pro
4: Pro
5: Anti
6: Anti
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jdbreck said:
I voted pro on this one, based mostly on a gut feel. Figuring these out is harder than I expected.
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Dank said:
Anti. Not contributing much here, but want to record my initial impression before reading others’ opinions.
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Nita said:
Definitely an anti-SJ person, IMO.
But these answers seem to be based on an attempt to construct a pro-SJ position the author could personally believe in, instead of merely retelling arguments they’ve heard from the other side — so, props for taking on such an advanced challenge.
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