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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!
What discourse norms do you tend to follow? Why? Do you think everyone else should follow them, and why?
I do not simply believe that those engaging in discourse should assume the best of their opponents – surprisingly often, your opponents are legitimately malicious, and it’s never good to assume something false. I do believe, though, that you should avoid assuming the worst of your opponents – for example, by rounding off their arguments to the nearest cliche. Assuming the worst of your opponents is itself an example of maliciousness, albeit a minor one. Once your opponent has crossed a certain high threshold of maliciousness, it is justifiable to be somewhat malicious, though not as malicious, to them in retaliation. If you do so, though, be careful not to let your maliciousness target any non-malicious bystanders, and remember that maliciousness is epistemologically inferior – it is always better to show someone that they are in error than it is to hurt them, though in extreme cases the latter may be useful in accomplishing the former. Everyone should follow these discourse norms, because they are objectively correct.
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 have always been deeply committed to the pursuit of truth; when I fail to uphold this commitment, I later feel shame, and when I have a very low certainty of a point of truth that I have a very high certainty is important, I feel confusion and anxiety. My ideology formed very early, in school, where I discovered firsthand the existence of authority figures who are more committed to other things, like maintaining their own authority, than they are to the pursuit of truth. It is my belief that commitment to things besides the pursuit of truth deeper than one’s commitment to the pursuit of truth is the root of all evil. Any person acting on these misplaced motivations can do irreparable damage to the world, and they tend to seek positions of authority, where they do even more damage. I selected my political alignment because, in my experience, one side of the political debate is much more hostile to the pursuit of truth than the other side. I could be convinced to realign politically on any given issue given a sufficiently strong argument for the other side of that particular issue, but it would be much harder to convince me to flip all of my political opinions at once; I’m not sure if I can conceive of such a situation. I could be convinced to abandon my current political alignment and go looking for a new third party if my current political alignment was taken over by a different sort of non-truth-seeker – for example, if the Republican party became fascist. On a meta level, my ideology can’t change, because it’s intrinsically linked to my ability to change my mind in the first place.
Explain Gamergate.
Gamergate fundamentally started when Zoe Quinn abused her boyfriend, Eron Gjoni. For what it’s worth, it strikes me that Zoe Quinn probably has Borderline Personality Disorder and should seek counseling rather than just, you know, be made to feel bad, but that is still bluntly how it started. She was an abuser and abused her boyfriend, routinely doing things like threatening suicide as a tool of manipulation, cheating and letting him know about it to induce feelings of inadequacy, and telling him that he didn’t have the right to set boundaries for the relationship. After Quinn ended the relationship, Eron felt hurt, as many abuse victims do, by his abuser’s continued social prosperity among those who have not seen her abusive side. He posted receipts of her abusive behavior in what seemed to him like the most obvious place, 4chan, in an attempt to get something done. Something was indeed done, though 4chan’s immaturity led them to focus almost exclusively on the cheating element, which fit well with the then-natal “cuck” meme – and the angle that they took focused on a somewhat strained interpretation of the evidence indicating that Zoe Quinn had exchanged sex for publicity. This was particularly easy for Zoe Quinn to manipulate her in-group into seeing as misogynistic, because quite a few of the people in the mob were indeed misogynistic, and didn’t really know what they were complaining about. The already hopelessly-corrupt gaming journalism mini-industry came down heavily on Quinn’s side, largely because their internal discourse is so lockstep and intellectually incestuous, and largely because Zoe Quinn, as a politically active social justice proponent, is their innest-in-group, while those identifying with Gamergate, as common and anti-authoritarian people, are their outest-out-group. The Anti-Gamergate movement, as led by Zoe Quinn, basically won, even though Gamergate had truth on their side. They did this with a combination of their massive institutional power in the media, academia, and government, and their social scorched-Earth policy of “you’re disgusting if you’re a Gamergater, and you’re a Gamergater if you would tolerate a Gamergater”. Nowadays, it is uncommon to see a positive Gamergate reference except from the obsessively, extremely political, while it’s somewhat more common to see anti-Gamergaters reminisce about how they destroyed Gamergate.
Thing of Things 
I voted Anti, because the writing style seems so personal and unique that it’s hard to imagine someone creating this style as a charade. (Unless I missed it, there’s also no pro- essay in this style, so either this is an honest essay by someone who wrote in an assumed style for pro-, or vice versa).
Also, the author seems very conversant with a number of the details of Gamergate, and #2 states a plausible reason to identify as ASJ
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I’m reluctant to name names, but this reminds me so strongly of a specific rationalism-adjacent person that I’d lay slightly greater than 50% odds it’s that specific individual. (Who doesn’t know me from Adam, as far as I’m aware, but who I’ve recently started following fairly closely). Since that person is anti-SJ, that’s how I’m voting here.
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I also can’t help but be reminded of a particular anti-SJ person who hangs around this blog, but I also feel reticent about naming them, especially considering that I don’t have such a specific impression of that many other commenters here.
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I agree, this does sound like a particular person. But it also seemed a little off-key sometimes, so it might be someone doing an impression of them, or even — who knows? — another person with a similar pattern of ideas. (The last possibility would be pretty funny, considering the multiple comments here insisting that the existence of even a single person like that is unlikely.)
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Feels quite genuine. Commitment to truth above other values is a big tell that I don’t think the “pro” side understands. Fairly certain anti.
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“that I don’t think the “pro” side understands”
I feel slightly offended!
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I meant “understands as being part of “anti” ideology/worldview”.
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Given how often I see “you might hate it because it’s against your ideology, but it’s the bitter truth, and that’s what’s important” combined with posts about autogynephilia, human biodiversity, PUA evo psych, etc., I don’t think it’s particularly tricky to infer that truth is important for anti-SJ, even if I disagree with their understanding thereof and is-ought jumps.
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@Anon
I agree with Maxim – this comes up all the time.
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I’d say that was one of the more obvious tells for it being fake. Commitment to truth was named, but the emotional motivation for it just doesn’t fit with how Anti-SJ will usually present themselves as being the “objective” side. Also, strong association with a political party seems to be pretty much completely incompatible with that value.
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Hooray! We’re in to part 2!
I voted insincere on this one. Taking for granted a connection between ASJ sensibilities and Republican politics felt like a tell. From what I understand, the average gamergater identifies as center-left, and is a lot more likely to describe themselves as ‘liberal but not progressive’ than they are to embrace the GOP. Sure, a Republican could be ASJ, but I don’t know if they’d assume the two are synonymous, or even that they’d think of being ASJ as ‘politics’ per se.
Another place that feels off is the conditional defense of maliciousness in part 1. Most people that can round themselves off to ASJ are going to be responding to social justice as a very powerful force, which is why they’re ASJ and not just ignoring social justice. This author is arguing that they ought to respond to cruelty in kind; if they thought they could win a symmetric conflict like that, they probably wouldn’t be ASJ.
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I must say, the mention of the GOP was the one bit that seemed off to me.
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Huh, I read that just as “I personally am a Republican and I would change that part of my political affiliation if Republicans became terrible” without implying anything about anti-SJ as a whole.
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Good that I try to read the whole thread before posting – I would have written exactly the same. One of the most prevalent ASJ claims is that SJ is malicious, or at least loud, rude and generally obnoxious (case in point: the existence of the term SJW). Defending such behavior kind of weakens the whole point.
And I have never seen anyone claim that GG revolves even to a large part around the original Zoe Quinn affair, except as a strawman. But, to be fair, I try to avoid certain unsavory parts of the Internet.
Also, from a purely Bayesian standpoint, I don’t expect to see many Republicans on this blog, even among the ASJ part of the readers (maybe a few Libertarians that occasionally vote for them). Our filter bubble is just too strong.
And since we know half of the submissions are fabricated, that claim alone is pretty strong evidence for it being fake.
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Technically, you know that some number of the submissions are fabricated. I never claimed it was exactly 50/50. For all you know, I decided to run only posts by anti-SJs.
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Good point, I did jump to a conclusion there. On the other hand, I feel that I can safely make the assumption that most readers here are more on the Pro side (at least the results of this poll seem to indicate that), which would make it unlikely that the submissions are mostly from the Anti-SJ side. But it could, technically, be possible – and it is rather silly of me to argue about this with you, since you know the numbers and probably won’t (and shouldn’t) tell us before it’s over…
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@Autolykos
In the first half of the contest we had commenters claiming that only SJ people would minimize Quinn’s role in GG. Now you’re saying only an SJ person would focus on her?
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Is this really how SJ people see the ASJ side of things? Is this how ASJ people want to represent themselves in public? I find both options troubling. I almost voted after just reading the first question, but stuck it out to make sure I wasn’t jumping the gun. The first answer just left me viscerally offended, you don’t maintain the moral high ground by being slightly less evil than your opponent , be as virtuous as you can be and let the contrast speak for itself.
In terms of in groups and out groups, I’ve considered SJ an out group and ASJ a far off group not worth investing an opinion in, and if SJ is my out group I guess that puts me in their out group. If all the ASJ responses are this bad, that may well be proof that I did a bad job picking the lesser evil.
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This was very difficult, but I voted pro because:
1) Author says they’re very deeply committed to the pursuit of truth but that there’s nothing that could fundamentally change their mind.
2) Author says “for example, if the Republican party became fascist”; either that’s a snip at Trump or an snip at antis from a pro-SJ author.
3) Most antis don’t actually identify as conservative (though more antis than pros do), which makes me suspicious of an anti who seems to explicitly claim to be conservative.
4) The general writing style is… odd, in a way that seems possibly like uncharitable strawmanning from a pro-SJ author.
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I thought that the path about fundamentally changing their mind is like this. “A fundamental part of my mind is wanting to seek truth. So, that part I refuse to change.;
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It is a lot more fun to read articles from those who purport to align with me politically.
Perhaps there is some primal entertainment in trying to suss out imposers; it’s like a hidden roles game.
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voted anti but close. the gamergate stuff didn’t have enough detail and got a few things slightly off that makes me think they aren’t super into GG and might be what an anti-GG thinks the pro-GG position is. but not by enough to make me switch.
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Pro-SJ, voted Anti-SJ, too dismissive of the harassment in GG. It is a drop in an ocean and some folks see it as the definining moment of their political lives, true, but this skirts too far in the other direction.
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Wrong thread, apologies.
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I voted anti, but I myself am pro so I do not trust my judgment at all. It will be interesting to see how confused and unsure I get trying to vote in this latter half of the contest.
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Ah, crap: voted stupidly that this was anti-SJ because I thought the style was so parodic it could not be serious. This is what you get when you don’t read the instructions.
So if this is meant to be “anti-SJ writer”, then I think it’s definitely a pro-SJ writing their worst version of how they think a rationalist would think – “Everyone should follow these discourse norms, because they are objectively correct”? Would you go away out of that!
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Have you not interacted with young Randians?
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No, thank God!
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People who know/care about Gamergate: How common is it to describe Quinn as having BPD? Given that this was posted to Thing of Things in particular, I’m having a hard time not seeing that mention as intended to draw negative attention to the anti- side.
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I agree that the BPD comment felt really off, and considering the writer was submitting to this blog it felt particularly weird.
But I doubt that a fake ASJ would insert that; it would be too cheaply uncharitable to the other side.
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I agree that somebody dedicated to nonmaliciousness and even truth could never ascribe BPD, not professed by the person in question, as a social justice warrior. I therefore voted anti, assuming such a person would see the description as apolitical.
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I picked it as “pro”, because if this is a real anti-SJ person, it’s a mean, arrogant one to the point of straw-man caricature, including proclaiming themselves to be “objectively correct”.
Looking at the vote totals so far, it seems that each of the two camps prefers to put this person in the other one.
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Went the same way for the same reason (who thinks their discourse norm is “objectively” correct?), but I thought the second and third answers were better (more personal and genuine-y, as another commenter already said) so I think I was wrong, now.
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>Looking at the vote totals so far, it seems that each of the two camps prefers to put this person in the other one.
I’m still unsure of what side OP is, but this, at least, doesn’t surprise me one bit.
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The author endorses malicious discourse and then in the next question says truth is the highest virtue. Blatant hypocrisy. I think this is fake.
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Well they did say malice is not great epistemologically. And I read this as not so much endorsing malice as just like, “if someone is being actively extremely malicious towards you, you don’t have to hold yourself to a much higher standard” which is in practice how people usually operate anyway.
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But in real life treating your outgroup with a modicum of charity and respect always feels like holding yourself to a much higher standard. I think a real anti-SJ would have a better chance of understanding that.
Unless you’re the kind of actual conservative that goes to church, is against gay marriage and first-trimester abortions, it’s pretty hard to wrap yourself in an anti-SJ bubble. It’s pretty hard to just avoid knowing anything about SJ or being friends with any SJ people. I think SJ people are more likely to be operating completely unreflectively inside the ingroup-outgroup dynamic.
They know the words ingroup and outgroup, but I don’t think they really get it. I don’t think they catch themselves in the grips of it on a daily basis and think “shit, did it again”. I think to them ingorup-outgroup thinking is just another reason the outgroup is so awful.
Of course I could be doing it right now. It’s so goddamn hard to tell.
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There is a much more charitable interpretation available, and nothing about malicious discourse is *necessarily* incompatible with truth being the highest virtue.
It is possible, for example, to be *charitably* malicious and have the intent to harm those who intend to harm you while constantly working to give them an out should they not deserve the harm. It looks a bit different than the sort of maliciousness you’re used to, but it exists.
It’s also possible to know the terms “ingroup” and “outgroup” and really get it without thinking “shit, I did it again” on a daily basis. They just have to be successful holding themselves to higher standards. It’s possible. If you’re successful holding yourself to higher standards when not only most do not, but also when doing so is seen as implausible on the face of it (and therefore do not even get credit for doing better), that also goes well with not having respect for those who are *uncharitably* malicious and having no problem putting them back in their place when they ask for it.
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@anon56743
How can you be charitably malicious? Do you mean a form of “virtuous trolling” where you expose the poor moral qualities of your opponent by provoking them into an overreaction? Or what?
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@Lawrence D’Anna
I agree with you that it’s very hard to be fair about these sorts of judgements!
SJs look at the churches and small town America and think that they have a lot of work to do; anti-SJs look at academia and the art world and think that they have a lot of work to do.
In fairness to SJs, a common SJ talking point is how pop culture and casual speech are both saturated with hidden prejudiced attitudes, so many SJs probably feel like they spend a lot of time interacting with the outgroup.
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“How can you be charitably malicious? Do you mean a form of “virtuous trolling” where you expose the poor moral qualities of your opponent by provoking them into an overreaction? Or what?”
That could be one way, so long as you do it while being the paragon of virtue yourself. That kind of thing is often done in an underhanded manner though, or while being kinda a prick themselves, which doesn’t really make it okay.
I’ll draw up a more clear cut hypothetical though. Say you have some disagreements with Bob about how consent works. An uncharitably malicious thing to do would be to conclude without considering his side that he’s just a shitbag rapist, and to spread the word that he’s a shitbag rapist so that he’s socially ostracized, loses his job, etc. This is obviously really bad if you’re wrong, and it’d be nice if you could just have a good faith conversation with him until one of you changes your minds so that in the end you know he’s not a bad guy.
But maybe he *is* a shitbag rapist, you have very good reason to believe this, and maybe nobody is paying you to go above and beyond to teach the guy how not to be a rapist. Maybe having him ostracized and thrown in jail for rape is better than doing nothing, and easier than showing him how he’s wrong. You can still find the people he has had sex with and get their testimony with intent to hurt the bastard by exposing his behaviors without being *uncharitable* if you’ve really made sure that he’s guilty first and even in your intent to hurt the guy it won’t hurt him too much if you were wrong and all the testimonies say “Bob is amazing, and I always felt respected and cared for!”.
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I voted anti, but I’m not at all certain. Actually, reading this gave me a bit of shock as I realized I have no idea how to tell which of the Anti posts are genuine and which are not, while I felt very comfortable about knowing which Pro posts were genuine.
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So much this!
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Side note, how do you blockquote?
I voted anti-SJ. It hit some weird notes, but I also thought that they sounded like authentically weird notes.
The part about being slightly less malicious than one’s opponents sounds, to me, like a legitimate contracturalist belief- if you defect, I defect.
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The comments here support a subset of normal HTML tags, including “blockquote”.
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Ey, thanks! 🙂
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Hooray, we’re on my territory now!
I voted fake for this one.
The first answer was the biggest signal. It reads like an SJ who has a very uncharitable view of what anti-SJs think like. We don’t think of ourselves as evil, we don’t go around measuring out how much “maliciousness” we need to apply to each person. And, “Everyone should follow these discourse norms, because they are objectively correct”? Give me a break.
The second answer was pretty decent. We do value truth and the capacity to challenge authority, and we feel that our particular emphasis on these values is one of the differences between us and SJs.
I have a feeling that I won’t be able to empathize much with the GamerGate answers, even though I’ve been regularly reading GamerGate forums since the beginning, since I just don’t think that Zoe or press corruption would be important enough to bring up in any hypothetical answer I would give. Maybe my views on GamerGate are just idiosyncratic. But I think any GamerGaters who are still “in it” would be willing to admit that it’s not about ethics in journalism anymore and never really was, except for maybe the very very beginning. It’s just a general banner that unites (united?) people who want to combat SJ influence in gaming culture and culture at large.
Mainly I voted fake because of the terrible first answer. I sincerely hope it wasn’t a real anti-SJ who wrote that.
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First time that the pro-SJ and anti-SJ sides have disagreed this much about whether an entry was real. So: is the pro-SJ side overly gullible about how nasty their enemies are, or is the anti-SJ side overly paranoid about infiltration?
For what it’s worth, I’m anti-SJ, and I still voted that this was real. It was abrasive, but not unrealistically so, in my opinion. Wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I was wrong, though.
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I think it’s just that this doesn’t seem like a very nice person, so neither side wants to claim him. 🙂
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I like the writer! They remind me of some of my friends.
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I voted anti, because it’s so weird for somebody’s reason for opposing a political position to not engage that position on the merits at all. They brought no empirical evidence to bear at all, and saying truth is your highest value is just as consistent with favoring reparations for black people and affirmative consent laws as being a republican.
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I meant to say I voted pro, I think the person isn’t really anti-SJ
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This is sketchy because I haven’t read all of the entries, just a sampling, but one of the things that distinguishes both SJ and anti-SJ writing (from the rest of the world, not from each other) is a really high level of anger, and I don’t think I’ve seen any of the entries hit the emotional notes properly. On the other hand, I may have missed something. Any nominees for getting the emotional aspect right?
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I wouldn’t say “getting it right,” but the author of #7 came off as pretty enraged. I think it actually made it less convincing though because a lot of it rang false. People don’t generally “collapse in agony” when someone talks over them in class.
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What causes you to believe this?
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I think a major issue is that these were recruited through this blog, and to some extent in other parts of the rationalist blogosphere and Tumblr (Scott Alexander mentioned it). This resulted in a predominance of writers (whether pro- or anti-SJ) coming from rationalist or rationalist-adjacent circles, and since the readers voting on them are also from these circles (and presumably know and expect the writers to be such), there’s not much incentive to try to fake a less-rationalist viewpoint, even if rationalists could convincingly do so. This produces essays of a decidedly more “rational” rather than “emotional” basis. The intellectual distance between rationalist-flavored versions of SJ and anti-SJ isn’t all that large (just reflecting slight leanings one way or the other, rather than fervent tribal identification), making it very hard to judge them.
If you wanted more strongly emotional stylings, you’d do better to recruit the SJ writers from Tumblr (not the rationalist parts of it) and in person at college campuses; the anti-SJ writers could be recruited from Reddit (again, avoiding the more rationalist parts) and in person at Trump rallies. If you also throw in a few people recruited from the “chans”, you’d get some well-done trollery which should make for more clever fake positions. Then get people from all of those places to vote on the realness/fakeness of the essays.
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Now I really like the idea of trying to orchestrate a general-population ITT like you mention and I really want someone to do that.
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I voted fake.
The “it’s okay to be malicious” bit paired with “objectively correct” just sounds more like a SJ person trying to vent about anti-SJ’s obnoxious elements than an anti-SJ person trying to represent themself.
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Seems fake to me. Things that seem off:
– Admitting willful use of maliciousness.
– Inconsistency between unyielding pursuit of truth and endorsement of maliciousness. A more SJ stance would be “I pursue truth, sometimes truth hurts, I say it to be true, not to be malicious.”
– Republican and seemingly assuming this is the anti-SJ default
– Gamergate entry obsessive about Zoe Quinn but unaware of anything after
– Admitting GamerGate lost
– Knows many details about Zoe Quinn / Elon Gjoni situation, but says “he posted receipts of her abusive behavior in what seemed to him like the most obvious place, 4chan”, which contradicts things Eron has said. His story is that he posted many other places which seemed obvious, they deleted it, but someone else grabbed a copy and posted it to 4chan, after which he set up his own site for thezoepost because 4chan seemed like a terrible place. It’s weird for someone to take a pro-GG perspective, know all those details but not know this.
These are all possible for an anti-SJ person, but together they seem unlikely.
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This is probably the same person as Pro-SJ #7 (https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/10/17/itt-social-justice-7), because they both use double spaces after sentences, which is big idiosyncrasy. Interestingly, most people think that one is from an Anti-SJ writer, and this one is from a Pro-SJ writer. For each, they get called on having a very uncharitable view of the side they’re speaking for. What is this person’s actual stance?
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I use double spaces after sentences, but I didn’t send in any entries. Good to know there are more folks out there who use the One True Way To Do Sentences!
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Your name is noted for the purge.
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Two possible candidates: Pro-SJ #6 (https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/10/16/itt-social-justice-6) uses the same spacing.
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Oops, bad link: https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/10/16/1866/
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Ah, good catch. Since those are consecutive, my search for ” ” turned up both, and I didn’t realize they were spread across two. That one also had most people guessing they were Anti-SJ, though if I recall correctly, I found that one a bit more borderline. Well, we’ll see who it was at the end.
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because they both use double spaces after sentences, which is big idiosyncrasy
So do I, because that’s how I was taught to type when learning keyboarding skills. It seems to be something age-related,as quick Googling showed me a few articles about the dreadful horrible no-good ‘extra’ space in two spaces and how it’s probably because of all the old dinosaurs who learned to type on manual typewriters not like the cool modern kids. Phooey, says I, and I’ll continue to double-space, so there, hip modern persons! 🙂
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I double-space, and I did not write this. Nor #6, nor #7, nor…
It was how I was taught, and in early text parsers, it was used as a way of distinguishing the end of sentences from abbreviations.
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Gah! It is SO MUCH HARDER for me to make up my mind about this issue than the SJ ones. I wonder why that is?
3 possible reasons jump to mind, probably a blend is the real one.
1: SJ is a thing, but ASJ is everyone who disagrees. There are a lot of different ways to disagree, so criticism of social justice is less tonally similar than social justice itself.
2: Since I’m anti social justice myself, I might well be reluctant to agree that anyone else is ASJ unless they are literally me. IE, any difference from me feels like a difference from “my team”.
3: Since I’m ASJ, it might be more embarassing to make a mistake about my own “team” than the other.
Anyway, on to this entry.
First off, #1 is not making any attempt to be likable. “Everyone should follow these discourse norms, because they are objectively correct.” strikes me as a thing that people put in their enemy’s mouths, rather than say for themselves.
Aside from that, the “abuser” tag for Zoe Quinn is something I think I first saw on thingofthings. It feels weird that an ASJ would use that phrasing, but I guess “ASJ’s that read Ozy’s blog” aren’t exactly going to be rare in a contest with ASJ entries on thingofthings.
Despite these factors, I’ll lead off with a “Genuine”. My gut feeling is that was written by one of us.
#1: ASJ, certain
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I’m inclined to say this is real, but the “objectively correct” seems parodic, and I wouldn’t have thought many rationalist-adjacent anti-SJs would support the Republicans. Not sure which SJ attempt this matches with.
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This post understands parts of A-SJW, that we see ourselves as priotizing truth to a higher degree than SJWs, that we consider SJWs to often engage in malicious discourse etc… However I find it very antagonistic.
Aside from that,a couple issues
The biggest one for me is that they say anti-gamergate was *led* by zoe quinn. I don’t see how anyone who is pro-gg could think that (nor do I think someone against GG thinking that, but I could see them thinking that gger’s think that).
The poster seems to think that gamergate is entirely about ZQ, when I think at-least both A-GG and Pro-GG would agree that gamergate is about what games should value (even if each side can’t understand what either side thinks games should value).
The second is that “There are people its okay to be malicious to, but don’t hit bystanders” is… “There are no bad tactics, only bad targets”. An idea which A-SJW (rightly or wrongly) assign to SJWs. I can’t see a true A-SJW being blind this.
That said, I can’t see a SJW honestly attempting to pass the ITT by writing what was written above. Someone who was SJW attempting to pass as A-SJW wouldn’t be so antagonistic.
Honestly, if I had to guess I would say its some one claiming to be A-SJW for the purposes of the survey and attempting to paint A-SJW in a bad light.
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Actually, ZQ has been up to a lot. There’s strong circumstantial evidence for her having led the coordinated harassment of multiple people involved in or against GG, though she was often harassing people as a false flag to make them hate GG. There’s evidence for this in both the leaked “Crash Override Network” logs, and the case of the Social Autopsy Kickstarter (whose creator faced an “outpouring of gamer harassment” that only started after having a conversation with ZQ in which she did not give ZQ what she wanted, did not correspond to any other development or announcement, was in part directed at an E-mail she had given ZQ but not used publicly, ramped up from 0 to “overwhelming” so rapidly it suggests coordination and not a large group of people stumbling upon the Kickstarter, and stopped just as abruptly when the target announced she knew it was ZQ behind it).
And I didn’t think this was that antagonistic at all, and the parts people point to as antagonistic were admissions of imperfection. Don’t do that thing where someone who tries to be nice admits that sometimes when they are overwhelmed by a certain type of condition they can be meaner than they want to be, and you hold it up as proof they are wilfully and maximally cruel and should be shunned, while the people who are actually willfully and maximally cruel never admit to it and get lauded for what good upstanding people they are.
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(Liked to endorse the last part; I don’t know anything about Zoe Quinn.)
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I’m actually kind of disappointed by your last paragraph. If you think I was suggesting that someone be shunned or that OP is being maximally cruel then I absoltuely failed to communicate. If anything what I thought after read this, was “Who ever this person is, SJ or A-SJ, I really want to talk to them”.
That said, I don’t see the OP doing what you suggest. He wasn’t saying “Its good to be nice but sometimes I slip up when I get overwhelmed.” He was wrote that it is okay to be malicious to the right people. That is completely different.
Maybe antagonistic is the wrong word, but while I wouldn’t shun the person, as a an A-SJ person, this isn’t the kind of person I would want associated with A-SJ, and I feel like a SJ attempting to pass the ITT wouldn’t write a post that A-SJ’s would not want to associate with themselves.
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Is anyone interested in discussing hypotheses what different results of this experiment would indicate, before the data is in – so we can avoid fitting the hypothesis to the data?
It’s a bit late for taking bets, since half of the data is already in. But feel free to give your ratios anyway.
Possible results:
Pro-SJ (or Anti-SJ) is more often voted as fake.
Pro-SJ (or Anti-SJ) is more often identified correctly.
People vote their own (or the opposite) camp more often as fake.
People identify their own (or the opposite) camp more often correctly.
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I think it makes more sense as a qualitative study in retrospect.
For each surprising result (a ‘fake’ answer overwhelmingly voted true, a sincere answer overwhelmingly voted fake, your own opinion deviating from reality):
– What were the justifications given?
– What else could have influenced the judgments?
– What was wrong with the reasoning that produced false negatives?
– What made the test-passing answers so effective?
– What can we conclude from this?
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I definitely think the “pro” side will win (i.e. fake antis will be voted real more than fake pros will be voted real). The difference will be >15 percentage points.
Part of the reason is that being “anti” is not a belief on its own, but a feature of whole range of positions from religious conservatives to Scott-style left-libertarians to death eaters, etc. This makes it harder to identify the real ones.
So far, except for this one, I think pros/antis have agreed on every answer, so I don’t expect significant differences in terms of people identifying their own camp correctly.
On the other hand maybe antis will get ideological tunnel-vision and only vote “true” for their own brand of anti-ism and “fake” for all others? That would invalidate both of my predictions. I doubt it though.
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This is actually a good way of expressing it. I think this one is authentic, but it seems a lot less “anti” than the pro ones I think were authentic were “pro”, and even those were fairly weakly pro by the standards of the general online population (but not rationalist/rationalist adjacent spaces).
As always, I base my decisions heavily on the third question, because everything that seems most inauthentic ends up landing there. It appears that mindkilling interferes with ITTs.
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FWIW, here are my predictions:
90%: Crbcyr ner orggre ng vqragvslvat gurve bja fvqr.
75%: Nagv jvyy or ibgrq nf snxr zber serdhragyl.
65%: Guvf vf nyfb gehr sbe gur bccbfvgr pnzc.
65%: Ceb vf zber yvxryl gb or whqtrq pbeerpgyl.
And one hypothesis contingent on results:
The side more often voted as fake is more strongly divided into subcamps and -bubbles.
Corollary:
The same goes for the side that is more often misjudged by their own people. (I expect those to be the same with 70% confidence)
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I was going to vote fake after the first response, but answers #2 and #3 madfe me vote sincere.
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