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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 try to always be polite, and more to the point, to always express myself in a way that implies I respect the person I’m talking to. I don’t always succeed in this, but it’s my goal. Why? Because I think being kind is better. And because I function better when people aren’t treating me with contempt, and so it seems best for me to try to avoid treating others with contempt.
But I don’t think everyone else should follow my norms. Some people would feel that they can’t communicate if they have to do it in a civil fashion. It’s better to have a variety of communities with a variety of norms, so that more people are able to find a community they can function in well.
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 believe in kindness. I believe that the best society is that which provides as many people as possible with a happy and satisfying life.
I can’t think of any evidence that would cause me to change that belief – it’s a prior, really, and thus not subject to evidence. But I can certainly think of things that would cause me to change my policy preferences.
So if – for example – it were shown, with really excellent evidence that is then replicated by equally excellent peer-reviewed published research a dozen times over, that being lesbian or gay or bi makes people sad even in an accepting society, and that conversion therapy has been empirically shown over and over to make LGB people happier and more satisfied, then that would cause me to change my mind about a lot of my policy preferences.
3. Explain Gamergate.
The instigating event was a bitter ex-boyfriend’s public attack on his game designer ex- girlfriend. But the underlying explanation was that there’s a fuck load of misogynistic men in gaming who resent feminism and are furious that “SJWs” keep on critiquing video games and in some cases are having an impact.
Thing of Things 
Wow, looks like real is winning in a landslide. I definitely agree that it’s real, although it vaguely saddens me that it appears that the short responses have worked in its favor, whether it’s real or not. Roughly the equivalent of passing the regular Turing Test with realistic typos – if fake, it’s not a way to win that shows very much skill, and if real, it encourages participating fakes to put less skill into winning.
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EDIT: I guess it’s not as much of a landslide as I thought because there’s simply a lot less votes than I thought.
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This is short enough that I’m not confident enough to make a decision. (I was in the same boat with #9.) Nothing’s particularly alarming. #3 is a lot more aggressive than 1 and 2. That might be consistent with the subject matter, though.
1: Anti 2: Pro 3: Pro 4: Pro 5: Anti 6: Anti 7: Anti 8: Pro 9: ?? 10: Pro 11: Pro 12: Anti 13: Pro 14: Anti 15: ?? Overall: 7-6-2
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I’m on the fence on this one. Answer to #2 seems kinda sincere, but they just mention their values without mentioning what those values imply in practice. Perhaps a tactic from an anti to keep their answer short?
>always express myself in a way that implies I respect the person I’m talking to
>there’s a fuck load of misogynistic men in gaming who resent feminism and are furious that “SJWs” keep on critiquing video games and in some cases are having an impact.
Is this real hypocrisy or simply feigned? I’m leaning toward the latter.
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Overlooked the hypocrisy and now wondering if I was wrong to vote pro, but considering each answer on its own they all come off as very genuine.
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short, but it seems real enough.
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The pluralism of answer 1 isn’t consistent with the triumphant totalizing of answer 3.
Anti
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Am pro, vote anti, motivation the same as this person.
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Sad that this is apparently real.
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The first two parts don’t really get into much in the way of actual social-justice positions, just politeness and niceness and other warm-fuzzies… more ’70s “I’m OK, You’re OK” pop psychology than 2010s social justice. The GamerGate part, as usual, brings out the bigger social-justice guns, but is still rather short and superficial. Not much to go on one way or the other, but I went for “fake”.
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Very tough, not a lot to go on here.
In particular, there is not much talk of Social Justice. Like, I don’t know any ASJ folks who’d disagree with this answer on 1.
Strip the third paragraph from #2, and once again the ASJ world nods in agreement.
The third paragraph of 2 doesn’t really fit right with the first two (instead of explaining how they came to believe in SJ/ASJ ideas and why they’d forsake them), #15 has explained their true value set, kindness, and stipulated that if SJ proved unkind they would renounce it. Which is totally a legit preference, but doesn’t really help us understand if the author is genuine or not.
II’m forced to face the facts that I’m basically coin flipping on this one. Squinting hard at the meta, I’ll say that based on the tiny amount I know of Ozy, from reading their blog, they know more social justice folks than anti, and thus this is more likely to be an SJ entry.
Walter Picks:
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
10: SJ, certain
11: SJ, certain
12: ASJ, unsure
13: ASJ, certain
14: ASJ, certain
15: SJ, unsure
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Voting pro because of the slight nod to competing access needs in their second answer. The really obvious fakes have a ton of 101-level SJ stuff and none of the 102-level stuff like that.
My intuition is that real SJers/anti-SJers will tend to focus more on fringe concerns/arguments within their movement, and find it harder to even describe 101-level stuff because it seems so obvious.
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I voted pro, and I’m fairly certain. Respect and kindness are pretty central concepts in SJ discourse norms, but I don’t necessarily think that someone would see that from the outside.
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So vague it barely even gets around to describing a clearly-SJ position that the author ostensibly holds, much less convincing me it’s sincere. I think a fake is slightly more likely to feel this phoned-in than a real one, especially on a rationalist-adjacent blog, so I voted fake, but only moderately confidently.
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Way too short to be sure, but this smells off to me. I voted anti. Things that make me suspicious in particular:
1. The shortness is a potential tactic of an anti to avoid being identified.
2. Most of the beliefs offered aren’t actually SJ beliefs, they’re pretty neutral beliefs in things like “kindness” and “politeness”. While, indeed, many SJ people believe in SJ because of their beliefs in these things, I’d expect a real SJ to connect their SJ beliefs to their beliefs in these things instead of just leaving us hanging as the author does.
3. There’s very little actual detail about the author’s SJ beliefs. The only one offered is that the author believes that conversion therapy is wrong and harmful, which is a belief shared by many antis, and a pretty stereotypical account of Gamergate.
4. The account of Gamergate is both very stereotypical and very superficial. I believe that it would be very easy for an anti to fake.
5. The author says they believe in kindness and then delivers a rather mean-spirited account of GG. Not that necessarily it’s right to be kind or that it’s not right to be kind, but I’d expect someone who emphasizes so much that they believe in kindness to be a lot kinder.
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I can believe in someone failing to live up to their desired discourse norms.
But not within two paragraphs of stating them. Fake.
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For the most part, this doesn’t even address any SJ positions. Could be anything, including control group. But since being short and off-topic would be an easy way for a fake to weasel out of being discovered, I lean towards Anti.
(For personal record keeping: My last five were -+-+-)
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Based on the polls, most people here are pro-SJ, so with that as a prior a majority of these answers are probably genuinely pro-SJ.
Assuming that’s the case, I’m surprised that the Gamergate definitions are almost uniformly much more partisan-seeming than questions 1 and 2.
I’ve always felt that GG was one of those cluster****s where both sides are as bad as the other and working who was originally “at fault” is just a distraction. Given the widespread disdain for the topic I see in LW-adjacent circles, I always assumed this was the most common position – sure, one side is probably worse if you look really closely, and there are genuinely good people on both sides, but in general paying attention to the whole thing is just begging to get dragged into a million-person game of he-said-she-said with no prize.
So I expected people who were anti-SJ to overestimate how much the other side care about this nonsense, and vice versa.
But if all these steps of reasoning are correct it seems a pretty large chunk of this blog’s readership feel Very Strongly that one side is Right and the other side is Pathetic. Interesting.
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I think the SJ interpretation of GG tends to be along the lines of the essays so far:
Gaming reflects the patriarchal bias of society, and when SJ critics of that bias started raising criticism, gamers resented that criticism, and that resentment ultimately manifested in a wave of harassment that occasionally masqueraded as an ethics dispute, but ultimate was itself a reflection of privilege, patriarchy, etc.
Most of the SJ essays, real and fake, IMHo present some version of that case. I’ll be interested to see if the ASJ essays take some version of the opposite case (SJ’ers were trying to remake gaming like they’re remaking college/it’s a hoax by the SJ victims/harassed GGers were ignored), or tend more towards the pox on both their houses analysis.
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I think it’s fake, because I don’t think someone would enter an ITT with their own opinions and then submit something so content-free. 1 and 2 boil down to “be nice” and 3 sounds like a GG’er doing a 1/4-charitable impression of an anti-GG’er.
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