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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 am extremely accepting to other viewpoints. I try to ignore my own emotional responses for the comfort of the other person and for the sake of open, but I accept that I often fail. I respond respectfully, though perhaps condescendingly; the condescension is not on purpose. If I am upset, I will tend to simply not respond to the other person’s arguments or statements.
This is because I have had painful experiences with angry people and find that such discourse styles limit free thought and don’t allow for changing one’s mind.
I believe that everyone should attempt to obey this discourse norm so that others feel safe, though if they cannot I am willing to forgive them. I want to be able to change my mind or not change my mind without emotional pressure or social stakes, so I consequently would appreciate if others were unaggressive and polite. I accept that some people might have emotional responses due to personal connections of lived experiences, but that is no excuse for treating others disrespectfully, although ignoring or shunning others is of course acceptable on an individual level.
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?
Well:
Women’s Rights, Intra-societal Racial Issues
It’s wrong that people are treated unfairly, and it’s wrong that people’s autonomy is violated. I would be sad if I were a woman or a person of color or a female person of color who had been treated unfairly or abused due to my gender and/or race, so I must oppose patriarchy and white supremacy and support women’s rights and the rights of racial minorities. It is easy to imagine a likeable person of color and/or a likeable woman, and their needs are no less important than mine on a logical consequentialist level, so clearly it is important that they are treated well.
If women and people of color were shown to not be people with feelings (e.g. they were conclusively shown to be p-zombies), then I would change my opinion to place less priority on their “rights”. If women were shown to make suboptimal decisions that they later regretted, and paternal support altered their outcomes significantly in a way that made women happier, I would stop supporting women’s rights. If people of color were shown to a net bad effect – e.g., immigrants destroyed the economy, black people were all criminals – even without white supremacy in place, then I would alter my opinion thus.
Queer Rights
Almost all of my friends are sexuality-queer. I am bisexual. I would be upset if their love, and I suppose mine, were opposed or shamed or delegitimized due to gender.
I am bi-gender. I care deeply for my trans friends and I would defend them to the last drop of blood. I am saddened to see that they (and I suppose I’m included in this) would be disbelieved, hurt or discriminated against due to their genders. Cissexism and cisnormativity are both illogical and make no sense.
If there was clear evidence that the acceptance of non-straight sexuality resulted in unhappiness, inevitable painful dysfunction in life in general and in relationships even without homophobia and biphobia, or some kind of bizarre existential risk, like the invasion of aliens, and there was no plausible way to mitigate these results, then I would accept that my views were wrong.
If there were some evidence that transgenderism caused unhappiness, inevitable painful dysfunction in life in general and in relationships even without transphobia, or some kind of bizarre existential risk, and there were no plausible way to mitigate these risks, then I would accept that my views were wrong.
Imperialism and Colonialism
Imperialism is clearly wrong. It’s just plain mean, and it involves violating people’s autonomy and telling them what to do. Colonialism means stealing people’s land and destroying their culture. That’s not a good thing. I’m not really sure how else to articulate this, but it just seems like a mean thing to do and I would be emotionally upset if I saw something like this happening. In the present day, it’s important to make sure that imperial and colonial structures aren’t replicated or utilized because of the disastrous results in history.
If imperialism was shown to actually have better results, measured in happiness and unbiased opinion polls, than a lack of imperialism, then I would change my historical opinion. If taking people’s land arbitrarily was shown to have good effects in the long run, or was shown necessary to prevent atrocities such as the Holocaust, I would alter my historical opinion. If taking people’s land and exploiting them was shown to not only have a net positive result, but also to be better than all other options, then I would change my opinion of the present day.
Otherkin
We should be nice to people who aren’t hurting anyone and who seem to be doing what works for them.
If it were shown that being otherkin had deletorious effects, even with, say, a universal basic income or a solid community, then I would change my opinion.
Ableism
Disabled people are people, and if I were disabled I would want accommodations and validation and autonomy.
If it were shown that disabled people weren’t able to make good decisions and in fact did not benefit from accommodations on average, then I would change my opinion on this.
3. Explain Gamergate.
Anita Sarkeesian wanted to open up shop to criticize video games for sexism through Internet donations. She appeared to be criticizing video games from an outsider’s perspective, and so some noxious portions of the gamer community attacked her in a frankly misogynist fashion. She eventually went into hiding due to this sexism.
Thing of Things 
Sincere, with some atypical positions.
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This is so rationalist that it’s making me think I must not be as rationalist adjacent as a I thought I was, because I am having trouble reading subtext.
I could definitely see someone honestly believing these things, and that person would see themselves as roundable to SJ.
It’s not super conclusive, but #2 definitely begs the question – when asked what evidence would cause the author to change their mind, the author writes “if it were shown that my beliefs led to bad results I would change my mind,” and articulates some of the potential bad results, but not what kind of evidence would be sufficient to establish the proposition. I guess we can charitably assume that someone as rationalist as this author purports to be would at least attempt to evaluate the evidence neutrally.
That makes me a little suspicious, because it would be an easy way to dodge if the author is faking. “I would change my mind on SJ if it were shown that SJ reforms would cause an alien invasion or the Holocaust” is a weird idea to volunteer unless it’s tongue in cheek, which this article doesn’t seem to be in other places.
I’m on the fence, mostly because I don’t have enough points of reference.
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This is good, but I’m going to vote anti, mainly because of the ‘would like discourse to be conducted politely’ part (as well as a few other alarm bells). The vast majority of pro-SJ I’ve encountered (and I know that’s not definitive) tend to very strongly hold that requirements of politeness or courtesy are oppressive tactics used to silence the legitimate anger, passion and hurt as expressed by the minority/oppressed person attempting to communicate their lived experience.
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For me “would like discourse to be conducted politely” is precisely the thing that makes me vote pro. Most (not all!) SJ does either reject or at least deemphasize this point, and my impression is that this is notorious among anti-SJs, so I would be very surprised if any anti-SJ didn’t know that. Much more likely that this is a slightly unusual SJ person.
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“Much more likely that this is a slightly unusual SJ person.”
This is anecdotal as hell, but I’d go further and say the article is normal for “SJ person one meets in real life”, and unusual for “SJ person who spends a lot of time shouting on the internet”.
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The answer to 2 seems extremely confused…fairness, autonomy, some parts are based on Rawlsian veil of ignorance arguments, somehow assuming that consequentialism implies egalitarianism, then moving onto some sort of quasi-utilitarianism with the talk of happiness, but imperialism is wrong because it’s mean? If it was real, they would have a more consistent view of the world.
Then bit on transgenderism is particularly weird… “If there were some evidence that transgenderism caused unhappiness,” then trans people don’t get any rights? What good would that do? Or is the implication that transgenderism is a choice and if it caused unhappiness we should discourage it?
And then the otherkin, one of the sillier bits of tumblr-SJ that antis like to mock.
Fake.
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Also I’d like to point out that we’re 9 responses in and nobody has even attempted to provide a justification for moral realism as a basis for their answer to #2.
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That seems patently unnecessary. It would be like expecting all the responses that cite some sort of scientific research to provide a justification of the scientific method and induction. Or expecting all the responses that cite statistics about oppression to provide a justification for using statistics or basic math for decision making. Or expecting anyone who cites the importance of listening to other people’s lived experience to provide a detailed refutation of solipsism.
Basic stuff doesn’t need to be justified every time, we can just take it as a given and move on.
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The whole otherkin thing is actually pretty characteristic of rationalist SJ – people being harmlessly weird isn’t bad, even if they’re really weird by most people’s standards. That’s one of the parts that made it ring true for me.
As for moral realism: most rationalists tend to accept “these are my values and I care about them, even though there’s no such things as “””correct””” values”.
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>most rationalists tend to accept “these are my values and I care about them
Indeed, and it’s one of the worst aspects of the “rationalist community”. There’s nothing particularly rational about letting a melange of cultural influences stew in your subconscious and then living your life by whatever memes manage to pop up first.
Keynes’s quote about being “slaves to some defunct economist” comes to mind. Some old prophet or philosopher wrote down that “if X, then Y, therefore Z”. Then the “rationalist” comes along and picks up Z, thinking she is entitled to it without the supporting arguments. But in fact Z’s nature is fundamentally conditional. Or worse, sometimes Z becomes so prevalent and culturally ingrained that it is simply considered “obvious” and people don’t even think of it as a position they hold.
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But there’s no way to evaluate whether a given set of terminal values are “better” than another, because they’re terminal values. There’s no criterion for determining “better”. You don’t have to produce a justification for your values because it’s not actually possible to do so.
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There’s a chasm between “all values are equally worthless” and “I’m gonna pick one and live my life by it.”
Perhaps a rotational system would be more appropriate. Mondays utilitarianism, Tuesdays egoism, Wednesdays virtue ethics…
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Overall seems real, but in particular the section on imperialism seems too bizarre to be fake. 😛
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I feel like this is probably pro-SJ (from a weird rationalist perspective). But it could equally be weak anti-SJ (from a weird rationalist perspective). If it turns out to be an anti imitating those, I will be impressed.
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Hmm… this actually feels hard to rate. Like, there’s a childishness to the writing (“accepting TO other viewpoints”, “for the sake of open *missing something here*, but” , “This is because I have had painful experiences with angry people AND find that such discourse styles limit free thought AND don’t allow for changing one’s mind.”)
It feels like it would be insulting SJ culture to accept it as genuine (What, Walter, you think we are dumb?), but if I bite I’m going to regret it when the ASJ author is like “To sound SJ I just made a bunch of mistakes”.
In an earlier post a commenter typed “that kind of passion is hard to fake”, and I was thinking, “not really, you just type words.” This is kind of similar. Like, if this line:
“Queer Rights
Almost all of my friends are sexuality-queer. I am bisexual. I would be upset if their love, and I suppose mine, were opposed or shamed or delegitimized due to gender.”
is true then this author is basically certain to believe in SJ. I guess there might be a knot of LBGT folks out there who jointly disbelieve in SJ, but that’s not what I’ve ever seen.
But, concurrent to what I said before, this line is easy to throw in. Is “sexuality-queer” even a thing that people say? If I bite due to this, am I going to have to own this later?
Ultimately, the typos and the line about the author’s circumstances both give me circumstantial evidence for this being a person inclined to support SJ. Nothing in the attitudes described in the paragraphs seems like a gotcha, so I’ll say that this is genuine.
1: ASJ, certain
2: SJ, certain
3: SJ, unsure
4: SJ, unsure
5: ASJ, unsure
6: ASJ certain
7: SJ, certain
8: SJ, unsure
9: SJ, certain
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Almost certainly real. The writing patterns + the idiosyncrasies of the beliefs make me pretty sure that this is a rationalist who isn’t necessarily aligned with mainstream SJ but is in favor of enough of SJ to identify as pro-SJ. It seems unlikely that this is someone imitating pro-SJ, simply because this isn’t what someone thinks of when they think of SJ. If this is fake, it’s a very good fake aimed specifically at fooling the audience of this blog.
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I’d have to say “pro”, since it doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing somebody would write if trying to fake it, but it’s a very atypical SJ position, which would be criticized by most SJ types for being too open to opposing views, as well as for some rather weird rationalist-style hypotheticals such as minorities being “p-zombies”.
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The GamerGate description isn’t really historically accurate, though, since it started out being about Zoe Quinn and her ex-boyfriend’s tell-all account, then eventually got to supposedly being about “ethics in game journalism”, but never had Anita Sarkeesian as its primary focus (though criticisms of her video series about games did end up figuring in it).
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I went anti because the person seems to value a lot of things that SJers often don’t (e.g. personal autonomy). It came across to me as someone who thinks in terms wildly at odds with most online SJ trying to come up with what they considered a palatable version of it.
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I think there’s some support for this in that the pro-SJ people mostly don’t think this person is one of them, while the antis are split 50-50 (immediately after my vote). The person is defending SJ positions in terms more typical of anti-SJ people.
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Forgot about it until Argle brought it up below, but I also thought it was unusual for SJ for their self-justification to be so utilitarian. Granted, SJs are all over the place in why they believe what they believe and quite a few don’t really *have* a coherent underlying moral philosophy (I hasten to add that neither do most people generally; I don’t necessarily think SJs are unusually bad in this regard). But insofar as it has an underlying moral philosophy it usually seems to be a weird sort of deontology, where (what they regard as) oppression would still be inherently bad even if it had good consequences. The worst of it, I’ve heard described as a degenerate form of virtue ethics that doesn’t actually have a concept of virtue, only lesser and greater degrees of vice. Either way, a clearly-utilitarian answer to #2 strikes me as a significant, though not decisive, point in favour of the person being an anti.
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I said anti on this one but I’m on the fence. If there were an option for “this person is neither pro-SJ nor anti-SJ but has staked out a position sort of off to the side diagonal from both” I would want to pick that.
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Anti – this person focuses far more than any of the others on ‘what it would take to change their mind’. I can just imagine them saying these things and then busting out some poll series and shouting “GUESS WHAT! Subjugated women really were happier!”
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I’m so on the fence here! But I’m leaning a little towards “anti” – the gamergate answer in particular, which seems to be centered on “Anita seemed like an outsider” and consider the misogyny a knock-on effect, rings false to me for an SJer.
But it might just be an unusual SJer.
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The long, winding and often incoherent answer to #2 makes me want to vote anti. Also I feel that the author is either trying too much or not enough. Either you go like #1 (was it #2?) and say you don’t imagine anything making you change your beliefs, or you actually think about it and come up with something plausible. “Showing women are P-zombies” is a very weird standard of proof to start with.
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On the fence but leaning anti, someone who is so considerate and conflict-averse wouldn’t fudge up the GG section like that, they would at least do some basic reading into it.
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That doesn’t seem necessarily true? Maybe they’re just not interested in GG discourse, which in my experience alternates between unimaginably boring and outright horrifying. That seems perfectly reasonable, especially given my position above that it’s one of the rat tumb crew who is vaguely pro-SJ but doesn’t tend to get involved in mainstream SJ discourse.
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If I has submitted an entry, I would have considered it cheating to read up on the GG thing before posting (also, I honestly don’t give a f***). OTOH, I also would have written that I only know about it from the few cases where I couldn’t avoid reading someone reference it in a context where it was at least slightly off-topic. So, small, unrepresentative and probably biased sample.
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Pretty mixed, but the otherkin tips it over into fake for me. There are SJers who care about otherkin, but anti-SJers tend to find the topic a lot more fascinating than SJers.
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It’s an anti. Real social justice people (or socialists, for that matter) make a point of mentioning how many opinions are NOT worth respecting.
And a real social justice person would never concede that imperialism or colonialism may have been good on hypothetical utilitarian grounds. Social justice is a variation on virtue ethics in which anything to advance an oppressed person is good. Utilitarianism doesn’t really enter into their worldview.
The author’s work is suffused with scientism. That’s definitely a hallmark of American liberals, but not something I’ve seen among social justice crowds. I think the author is a Sanderista and loves John Oliver, but not a social justice fan.
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I don’t read this as “conceding” that at all, just giving an example of what would change their mind – I think they consider it extremely unlikely that this is true.
This is a remarkably confident and universalizing statement on what social justice “is”. I think you’re right that the moral view you describe is common in social justice, but I would argue that the fundamental core is social justice is much more about specific empirical beliefs about the state of the world & about opinions about how the world should be than about specific underlying moral theories.
(To be honest I’m a little (possibly unfairly) annoyed at the insistence of several commenters here that social justice people aren’t utilitarian.)
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I don’t think the “core” of social justice is virtue ethics or utilitarian or deontological or any other metaethics. Social justice isn’t about metaethics. It employs virtue, utilitarian, and deontological reasoning as is convenient or applicable. It also employs notions of sanctity and defilement.
What SJ really is at it’s core is a new civic religion that has outcompeted liberalism as the dominant ideology of the left. In reaction, nationalism is rising to replace conservatism (which is really a sub-sect of liberalism) as the dominant ideology of the right.
As a liberal, I find this incredibly tragic and infuriating. Social justice and nationalism are dangerous, fanatical, intolerant disasters. They are ideologies of hate and strife. They are a horrible cancer that is eating our civilization and moral community from the inside.
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So basically social justice people are exactly like other human beings in their moral reasoning!
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“So basically social justice people are exactly like other human beings in their moral reasoning!”
yup. They aren’t a special breed of mutants that do moral reasoning in their own crazy way. They do it the same way liberals, or nationalists, or conservative muslims, or communists, or anyone else does.
They have a mutually supporting web of priorities, empirical beliefs, rituals, taboos, and values. Just like everyone else.
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“I don’t think the “core” of social justice is virtue ethics or utilitarian or deontological or any other metaethics. Social justice isn’t about metaethics.”
This might come across as pedantic (it probably *is* pedantic, unless you’re planning on actually doing relevant coursework in philosophy), but:
The debate between those views is not “metaethics”. I kind of see why that might seem like the right term; there is a significant sense in which a judgment like “all else being equal, it’s better if people are happy, even people I don’t like” is one “level” above a judgment like “it’s better if people of different races are as socially equal as possible”. But the former is still just plain “ethics”.
(Or sometimes “normative ethics” if you want to be extra-clear, with statements like the latter one being examples of “applied ethics”. That said, an actual applied ethics course is likely to spend most of its time on medical ethics and very little on “social justice” issues. (There is overlap, of course; Tuskegee, in particular, is the main reason the subfield of research ethics exists.))
Metaethics is when you start talking about the nature of morality and moral judgments themselves. “Moral judgments are disguised statements about the speaker’s emotional state” versus “moral judgments are objectively true or false, and we can tell which if our moral intuition is tuned properly” versus the many other views one could have on this issue, is an example of a debate in metaethics. Except for the person who lamented the lack of defences of moral realism in the answers to #2 so far, I don’t think anyone has really talked about metaethics much in these threads.
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@philosoraptorjeff so what should I call things in the list deontology, utilitarianism, virtue? Can I call them “ethical foundations”?
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I don’t know. Whatever you would call them anyway, only without the word “meta” in front? “Moral theories” or “theories of ethics” works too, I suppose.
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So are you pro-SJ? Because if not then I think your statements about this not being SJ are more a matter of you not passing the ITT rather than this being a fake.
In general, I’m surprised about how many commentors are assuming that they know exactly what SJ is and think that this isn’t SJ. This is a competition about faking other people’s worldviews – why in the world would someone write a fake entry that is so idiosyncratic that people are disputing whether or not its actual positions are pro-SJ?
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“Real social justice people (or socialists, for that matter) make a point of mentioning how many opinions are NOT worth respecting.”
OK. I’ve read a lot of comments like this thus far during the ITT series, and I have to ask: do you guys honestly think that this is what SJ is about? That it’s about oppressing opposing viewpoints?
Maybe I’m missing how “SJ” is being defined, I don’t know. But a lot of responses seem to be along the lines of “Nobody who seems like a decent person could possibly be in favour of social justice!” Are we trying to guess people’s political faction, or trying to decide if they’re an enemy?
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This was the most difficult one for me (and it is interesting to see that as of now the vote is *exactly* 50-50). The author is definitley deeply embedded in the rationalist subculture. Either they are presenting accurately their (idiosyncratic) pro SJ views, or they chose to mimic the hypothetical closest approximation to themselves that holds them, rather than pretending to be a more typical but very different SJ-supporter. I voted Pro, but am very uncertain about it.
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I voted anti on this one, but I am significantly unsure.
The otherkin one was actually the most significant point in favor for me; it sounds a lot like a lot of rationalist SJ positions on otherkin, including me as a definitely-not-rationalist-but-occasionally-adjacent-SJ.
My problems with it were pretty similar to my problems with 3: the author is way too willing to change their mind in the middle answer. I would not expect SJ people to even respect some of those hypotheticals, much less consider them themselves. If an anti seriously told me to consider whether women and people of color were p-zombies, I’d frankly tell them to go fuck themselves, and the apparent lack of that emotional reaction here is the biggest reason why I don’t think this is SJ.
They also don’t seem to have a good grasp of Gamergate, or really even the Anita Sarkeesian thing which eventually became part of Gamergate, not that that’s necessarily determinative. But based on their first answer this person has had some significant experience with being yelled at on the Internet, which makes not knowing what Gamergate is particularly weird.
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Oh, also: some of the answers to question 2 do not seem to understand the conventional SJ position.
Like I said in a comment on a previous one of these, social justice is about justice. What this means is (for example) even if it was shown that women being independent made women less happy, I would still support women being independent. To use utilitarian terms, agency is a terminal good.
This person says several variations on “if greater agency made such-and-such people less happy, I would not support greater agency for them”. The problem with saying that is that it runs into the “slaves in the South were happier” trap: you can certainly find legitimately true stories about masters who treated their slaves well, which means if you take what you’re saying seriously you have to support slavery to at least some extent. But, to run further down the path of this analogy, if you look at the writings of black people at the time (I’m thinking of Frederick Douglass in particular here) you find that ex-slaves didn’t actually buy that argument themselves: for Douglass in particular, and for many other former slaves, the point of freedom was freedom, and how they were treated before being free was irrelevant, since they weren’t free then.
It’s also possible to find studies that show women now are less happy than they were pre-feminism. If you ask any feminist who was around during the second wave, those studies also miss the point: the point of women’s liberation was to liberate women, not to make them happier.
Because the author emphasizes happiness over agency so much, it makes me strongly suspect that this writer is not actually pro-SJ. Being for better outcomes for women and minorities is not the same thing as being for social justice.
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I’m not so sure, I’m gonna side with the people saying “orthogonal”
You get the same arguments about happiness vs agency outside of SJ as well.
For extremes:
if the options were everyone being free to roam and run their own lives in an infinite pit of suffering while in constant agony or having little agency but lots of happiness I’d probably choose the option without everyone in the infinite pit of suffering.
if the options were everyone being blissfully happy but in a tank being wireheadded with zero agency vs having modest to little happiness but being generally free to run their own lives I’d probably shy away from the wireheadding.
I weight agency fairly highly, slightly higher than happiness for the most part as a terminal goal but it’s not the only terminal goal.
I can easily imagine the author having only a modestly different weighting such that happiness wins more often vs agency.
We restrict agency in many cases where most people agree that it’s harmful. Most SJ people support committing people who are in danger of serious self mutilation or suicide when the harm-vs-agency equation gets too heavily weighted towards harm.
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I think people rounded themselves to SJ or ASJ for the exercise – if the author really believes the stuff in this essay, she would probably identify as more SJ than ASJ.
As for the p zombie, I took it as another of the fairly absurd (or maybe just imaginative) conditionals that would change the author’s mind, like being opposed to gay rights if they were shown to threaten human existence by causing alien invasion.
Now that I re-read it thoigh, the idea that otherkin would have to be shown to be net harmful even with a UBI is a little weird.
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Now I want an option to vote the submissions as “orthogonal”.
This position is neither consistent with pro-SJ, nor with an attempt at faking pro-SJ (and not even with anti-SJ).
Voted anti, with pretty much the same reason I call myself anti for the purposes of this test.
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I’m fairly sure that whatever this author believes, it’s sufficiently off the mainstream “pro-SJ”/”anti-SJ” axis that there’s basically no way to figure out which one they rounded their beliefs off to when they signed up as a pro/anti-SJ for test purposes. Might as well ask if i is greater than or less than 1.
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feels real but very atypical.
The person doesn’t seem to be really toeing the SJ line nor parodying it. More like someone who’s picked their positions almost from first principles. The explicit reasoning of “I wouldn’t like it if I was in their shoes” with the implicit assumption that it’s a prisoners dilemma type situation where you choose the actions you want everyone to follow feels sort of high-functioning-autistic. Definitely deep rationalsphere.
Love the almost perfect split on sj/non-sj votes.
Pretty sure it’s the kind of person I’d enjoy sharing a few pints with.
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I am metagaming a lot lately, and it might be unfair of me to go from “3 is too big and detailed!” to “3 is too small and un-detailed!” but I am pretty sure that nobody this rationalist-sounding would know that little about GG.
If it’s real, then it sounds so far from what most people would consider “social justice” language and thinking, while still having similar objectives, that I think it’s another case where the person is so atypical as to make the ITT kind of irrelevant.
It’s like “can a Spanish speaker speak French competently and vice versa” but one of the people doing the test is an Italian.
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This is either a very conscientious SJ supporter, or an anti-SJ doing a ridiculously good job of pretending to be a very conscientious SJ supporter.
The post is on the defensive, and that’s deliberate. All of the comments about “I would change my opinion” say that this is someone who firstly wants to make it clear that they have rational reasons for believing what they believe, and secondly is aware that some SJs are unreasonable and that they’re not like that. I’m an SJ and that is exactly what I would be saying if I were setting out a manifesto.
I vote SJ. Whether or not I’m right about that, I also vote that this person is pretty cool.
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Lots of little problems here. Maybe the single greatest flaw is the way it opposes “paternal support,” whatever that means, to women’s rights. I also note that p-zombies are usually defined by not being detectable through evidence. That’s part of why many rationalists consider the idea incoherent.
Ozy, though this applies more to an earlier entry, I think leaving out crucial words is cheating and you should stop allowing it. Making an informed decision impossible would be easy if the writer never actually said anything.
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I have no idea what you mean by crucial words?
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“and for the sake of open,”
From #3: “and I believe that a society .” They didn’t answer that question. They asked us to imagine an answer.
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I do not intend to correct other people’s writing style.
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That seems like clearly a mistake, not cheating.
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