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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 would describe my discourse norms as “positivistic”. Empirical evidence, predictions w/ probabilities, etc. I think everyone should follow them because it is the best way to reach the truth. At the same time I recognize that my opponents place other values above the truth (which is how you end up with this, this, this, this, everything in Fashionable Nonsense, etc). In those cases no real discourse is possible. Actually it’s even worse. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma: empiricism is cooperation, ideology/angry mobs are defection. If you cooperate every time and the other side defects every time, you’re simply a bad player. I’m not entirely sure what to do about this.
In practice my discourse norms also include pseudonymity/anonymity when it comes to this sort of thing. I have no interest in becoming a social outcast.
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?
Chesterton wrote that “The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.” And he was completely right. SJ is secular Christianity (as Nietzsche wrote, “They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality”) and one can dismiss it on these grounds alone.
The SJ argument is that between-group differences in outcomes are due to historical oppression/current discrimination. This is very easy to refute, if one simply looks beyond black-white differentials, toward differentials between whites and groups that do better, such as Jews and Asians. If downward differences are fully explained by this model, then so must upward differences.
Jews have a millennium of harsh oppression behind them, including the holocaust, and yet they are over-represented at elite universities by more than 1000% (yes, 10x). The difference in household income between Jews and Whites is larger than that between Blacks and Whites.
The conclusion is inescapable: either HBD is true and Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than Whites, or there is an enormous Jewish conspiracy to discriminate against and oppress white people. In both cases the SJ narrative flies out of the window.
Egalitarian values can only pull down the successful, never push up those at the bottom. No matter what, without genetic engineering, Blacks will never be as successful as Jews. Either you accept the differences, or you try to pull down the smartest, the fastest, the strongest. And for what? To satisfy your ressentiment? No good can come of it.
The simple matter is this: I’m on the side of reality. And reality has an anti-SJ bias.
As for tests that would refute my view:
- God comes down from heaven and tells us we all have souls that are metaphysically equal.
- Direct genetic evidence showing a uniformity of IQ-related SNP frequencies across the globe. (But I think we all know what the direct genetic evidence will show, which is why such studies do not get funded.)
Explain Gamergate.
Gaming journalists, like virtually all journalists, are leftists. They mostly see games as yet another medium for agitprop, gamers don’t like this for obvious reasons. Shitstorm ensues. Also, the part of it that really is about “ethics in game journalism” is 100% justified, as e.g. Jeff Gerstmann’s firing, or this article from 20 years before gamergate. Of course even though it’s justified, you’d have to be stupid to actually care about it.
Thing of Things 
Something is weird with the formatting.
And fake.
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Fixed, thank you.
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Such people do exist, even around these parts, but I’m still going to go with fake. Doesn’t feel like a sincere presentation of one’s personal beliefs.
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I think this is probably fake. The first essay had links to feminism in science, the second is entirely focused on IQ/HBD, and the third is entirely about gaming journalism without and discussion of any other aspwct of GG. It feels like somebody did a good job of pulling some brief arguments from three separate Reddittors and then added some links.
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Yeah, this feels like a “greatest hits” compilation instead of a real album, and we all know that true fans don’t buy the greatest hits.
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I think this is a SJ person who tried to research for the ITT by reading some HBD and neoreaction and fashionable nonsense and possibly Joseph Bottum.
fake.
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This is particularly incoherent:
(What would change your view) God comes down from heaven and tells us we all have souls that are metaphysically equal.
Er, yes, we do? People are not equal in looks, strength, intelligence, singing voice, ability to stack bricks, etc. but what gives us all equality is that we are all human beings. It’s possible to believe that group A has a genetic advantage in intelligence over group B, and that both A and B are humans deserving of equal treatment which means A doesn’t get to abuse, kill, enslave or otherwise treat B as lesser. A may all be Nobel laureates in physics and B are coal miners, which means nothing more than if you want a physicist, you look amongst group A first. It does not mean physicists are ‘better’ than coal miners so they get to take things away from coal miners if they want them, or push coal miners over cliffs for fun.
I definitely think this is someone exaggerating their idea of what non-SJ is like; perhaps (because anything is possible) there are some out there who hold up HBD as the one true truth about humanity and that we’re not equal under the law because we’re not equally smart, athletic and beautiful, but that’s the small number of extremists, not the majority version.
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I have no idea of this is real or fake but I don’t like this person.
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ugh, if*
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Agree with the people who said this seems like a mishmosh of different positions that don’t fit together well.
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By the voting results, I guess I’m in the minority, but I went with real.
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This sounds exactly like an SJer who wasn’t sure how to derive the essential parts of an anti-SJ platform from basic principles and so pulled together several disjoint arguments they’ve heard some of the more vocal and extreme anti-SJers say. Although there are some individuals who do believe all of these things, I don’t think they’re all that common in this crowd.
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I voted anti on this one too. It has the genuinely puzzling nature I’ve read on blogs a couple degrees of separation from SSC when I was going through a period of reading widely to challenge my own beliefs.
However, I’m not certain that my vote is correct, as this is 5 for 5 that I’ve voted were real on the Anti side. Again, could be genuine randomness or could be I can’t spot a fake when it’s not my own side.
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This is either a real anti-SJ who is horribly uncharitable to SJ, or a fake anti-SJ whose idea of anti-SJ begins and ends at…
… Wow, typing this sure is giving me deja vu. :V
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Actually —
“No matter what, without genetic engineering, Blacks will never be as successful as Jews.”
this sounds way more like “I, a pro-SJ person who *really hates* anti-SJ, think anti-SJ is just racism in disguise and will portray it as such” than “I, a genuine anti-SJ, genuinely have this opinion about correlation between race and success”.
Most anti-SJs I’ve met claim to be advocating for “real equality”, not making claims that inequality has a natural basis.
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In fact, they’re more likely to make claims that real equality *already exists* than that inequality exists but is caused by nature rather than bigotry.
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I’m anti-SJ and I am convinced that based on evidence, there are racial differences in IQ, and this explains to SOME extent the variable success of different racial groups.
For what it’s worth, I am brown, so I’m not one of the “intelligent” races (East Asians / Ashkenazi Jews / Whites).
So I agree that inequality has a natural basis to some extent. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t treat everyone with respect and dignity. We don’t endow others with spiritual worth based on their physical prowess or lack thereof, why should we do it for intellectual prowess?
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Obviously anti-SJ.
The idea of any racial difference in IQ is so repulsive to a social justice advocate that they wouldn’t advocate it even in jest.
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That’s a strange claim in this context. I would totally “advocate” ideas I find abhorrent if it’s clearly understood that I’m trying to play a role which is not myself.
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If I had to do a Turing Test in which I advocated for Creationism. I couldn’t do it because I find Creationism that abhorrent.
Obviously there’s more evidence for racial difference in IQ than there is for Creationism, but I think SJ finds the topic as horrible as I find Creationism.
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More or less the same. I am physically capable of writing “blacks will always be less intelligent than Jews”, but I wouldn’t be able to write it in something were it was not 100% clear to every potential reader that it has nothing to do with my opinion. So if I was to write it in an ITT, I would have to sabotage the whole point of the Turing test and write endorsements of Hitler and what have you to make it clear that this was not my position.
OTOH, it seems presumptuous to assume everyone is like me, especially since this heuristic leads to me marking “real” extremists and “fake” more moderates essay, when you could expect an ITT for anti-SJ in a mostly sane community to produce opposite results.
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The ‘metaphysically’ equal line was so far beyond the pale of most traditional religious ethics that it’s actually hard for me to use as calibration; whether the author is SJ or ASJ, they’re clearly coming at religion from a, hrm, nontraditional angle.
In the end, I went with insincere for style reasons. It’s the density. Almost every sentence here, taken in isolation, would be clearly ASJ and often straight-up NRx- more than half the volume goes to inherent racial differences, but none is spent on why we should *care* about these differences, or why they are important to the author. It’s certainly a very vivid presentation, and the arguments about HBD don’t seem like strawmen. But it’s still basically constructed in the tradition of villain monologues.
I am a bit surprised a the notion that a pro-SJ person would write such bald racism, so that lowers my confidence significantly.
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I also thought fake. I certainly hope it is (though sadly there are real advocates of all the most problematic points made; as others have said, though, I wouldn’t expect to find someone advocating all of that around here).
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Hell, I think it’s fake and I agree with the most problematic points!
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This line in particularly annoyed me:
“If you cooperate every time and the other side defects every time, you’re simply a bad player. I’m not entirely sure what to do about this.”
Liberalism is the belief that you really can cooperate in the face of defection and win. Liberalism is the norms and ideology that make that possible.
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That’s an interesting interpretation. Are you working within the author’s framework that ‘cooperate == empiricism’ and ‘defection == mob orthodoxy’? Liberalism does have its technocratic wing, but I wouldn’t say that liberalism per se is the proposition that persistent empiricism will triumph over ideology or a structure to enable that. Almost everybody likes to wrap themselves in scientific authority, when they can, but it’s much more rare for anyone (liberals included) to change their ideology in response to scientific findings. Except maybe superficially.
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I accept the author’s framework as a special case. They’re saying that if the good guys listen to evidence and the bad guys stick to their preconceived notions no matter what, then the bad guys have an advantage and will win. Yet somehow science has triumphed and religion has withered. I wonder how that happened.
Liberalism isn’t specifically about empiricism vs orthodoxy. It’s not even specifically about cooperation and defection. It’s a broad, cohesive ideology. It has positions and beliefs on many topics. But it has a theme, and it’s theme is this: You can be nicer than your angry little monkey brain thinks is possibly prudent or acceptable, and still win.
Machiavelli was wrong. It is better to be loved than feared.
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Honestly, the fact that they used this article (http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/03/why-rationalism-is-irrational/) as an example suggests to me an anti-SJ perspective.
I believe a sincere impersonator would make an effort to pick the best arguments for the opposing side (‘best’ obviously from an SJ perspective). Reading the article reveals that the author uses “rationalism” to mean “pragmatism.” I can believe an anti-SJ could read it without seriously engaging enough to get this realization. I can believe that a pro-SJ would do the same. I don’t believe a pro-SJ acting charitably would risk portraying an anti-SJ who didn’t seriously engage with the sources they used.
This and the fact that I don’t believe any of these arguments would be the strongest arguments for fighting social justice from an SJ perspective indicates to me that the author is genuinely anti-SJ. Of course, the point is to successfully impersonate to the standards of the people being impersonated. So I don’t know if my SJ perspective is very useful on these ones.
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I think, and rather hope, that this is fake. It just seems too perfect a collection of the least charitable things that some SJ folks believe about anti-SJs.
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Voted anti, am pro, the woke eugenics thing is actually a stance I’ve seen in certain weirdo transhumanist offshoots.
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I’m starting to agree with the view that the anti-SJ side of this may be too hard. While SJ is itself a meaningful cluster of views, philosophies and identities, there is a huge range of anti-SJ viewpoints which have no single thing in common besides disagreeing with SJ. Looking at this example, the typical anti-SJ is not an HBD/NRX/anti-egalitation type. But those types of people do exist, and are generally against SJ. Nearly every anti-SJ set to answers so far seems to come from a very different viewpoint, but they all seem like they *could* be some real flavor of anti-SJ.
So far, all 5 of the anti-SJ entries have a majority voting real, which implies one of:
– SJs have a better understanding of anti-SJ beliefs than vice versa
– A disproportionate number of entries are actually anti-SJ
– Surprisingly improbable random ordering
– Anti-SJ is not enough of a coherent viewpoint to clearly label anything as not being real anti-SJ
– Tactical voting
(On this one I ended up voting fake on this one because it seems like too much of a perfect weakman, if not quite a strawman. But it was hard to decide.)
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Agree, I’m having a hard time imagining anything that would make me think “This can’t be a real anti-SJ person.”
Maybe if the position were something narrower–“NRX-er” or “Donald Trump supporter” or “center-left university student who thinks some of the far-left people on their campus are getting carried away,” or “casual internet user who dislikes heated arguments and first encountered SJ-type stuff in some sort of online flame war;” or even “someone who used to identify as eg feminist, was kicked out by the community for internal reasons, and is not ‘anti’ their philosophy but dislikes the social dynamics of the group now.”
Or even, “the anti-SJ side in a particular dispute”– not because the same people are likely to be pro-SJ some other time, political disputes are mostly about one’s affiliations, and those who do battle rarely defect– but just because it would select for a narrower subtype than “all people critical of SJ, for any reason.”
But “anti-SJ” is too heterogeneous — it’s like trying to have an ITT for, like, Benedictines and non-Benedictines or something. Or Trotskyites and non-Trotskyites, or Ayn Randians and non-Randians. One of these groups is too heterogeneous to diagnose as “real” vs “fake.”
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I agree that anti-SJ out in the world is very heterogeneous as you say, but is that really the case here in this ITT?
I’ve been going under the assumption that anti-SJ that you would find here are either:
– Committed ideological liberals who find SJ to be incompatible with liberalism. (that’s me!)
– Neoreactionaries. These are people who grew up as liberals, leftists or libertarians, and have decided to reject their native ideology and attempt to resurrect extinct ideologies of the past.
This person doesn’t sound like either of those, and that’s why I think it’s fake.
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I voted for real anti-SJ, in this case an alt-right style. Since I’ve voted “real” for all but the first anti-SJ essay, I’m probably wrong with some of them.
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I voted real in all but the second. I didn’t read the last few SJ ITTs because I got bored, but I seem to remember thinking that about half of them were real. This is indeed starting to sound implausible.
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Is it so hard to say “Jewish People”? “Black people”? etc. Gah!
This feels pretty genuine. The tone is right, and none of these are arguments that I haven’t seen ASJ’s use. In particular, answering “what do you believe” by going into detail about what races are better than what other ones is immensely familiar.
Insert obligatory disclaimer about how I haven’t rated one false yet. I think we are just an easy group to impersonate. I’ll do another pass once I’ve seen more.
Walter’s ASJ picks
#1: ASJ, unsure
#2: ASJ, certain
#3: ASJ, certain
#4: ASJ, unsure
#5: ASJ, certain
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The links, the quotes, and the explicit racism convince me that this is real. If I tried to do this, my instinct would be to fake a moderate anti so that my true beliefs don’t slip out too badly. I certainly wouldn’t try to imitate a hardcore NRXer, because I would do a bad job of imitating them and would also be quite uncomfortable writing it.
I also thought one of the SJ entries might have been an NRXer in disguise; I think this might be the same person.
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You don’t have to be an NRXer to say that humans have innate racial differences that extend to intelligence. I think that’s true, and I’m obviously not NRX or Alt Right. I’m brown, so they wouldn’t want me anyways.
You can say some races are more intelligent (on average) than others and still argue for racial justice, the welfare-state, or the international proletarian revolution.
You just can’t argue for using the environment to raise one race to the level of another (affirmative action, forced busing, etc) because that’s impossible.
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The interesting part about the innate intelligence difference research is that they claim higher IQs for Jews and Asians. If it was fake research that was intended to back up racism, you’d expect it to show that white people have the highest IQ.
Such mismatches between study outcomes and what people would (probably) want to be true is evidence that the outcomes are not (purely) caused by biased research. However, there is still the possibility of confounders (IQ can be affected by environmental factors, which in turn may be correlated with ethnicity).
However, as you said, it really is irrelevant when you seek fair and equal treatment of individuals, rather than groups.
To play the advocate of the devil:
We can lower some ethnic groups to the level of others though, for instance by putting lead in the drinking water of various groups to even out the scores:
http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/newscience/iq-effects-childhood-lead-exposure-persist-in-adults
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Replying to Aapje, one could of course say that the result that white Protestants are not the world’s highest-IQ group was carefully forged by racists to throw people off the trail. I’m not endorsing this position–I tend to be reluctant to endorse any position on topics that are too culture-warry, but it’s easy for me to imagine bad arguments employed by people who just want to show they’re fighting the “bad guys.”
Re using lead in the drinking water– what I’ve mainly heard, from people more SJ-leaning than myself, is just to dismiss IQ as an inherently racist construct and not worry about equalizing the scores.
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@imperfectlycompetitive
My experience is that advocates generally err in exaggerating their position, not intentionally weakening it to gain browny points with the other side or neutrals. So I think that your assumption of strategic behavior is very unlikely.
Then again, I may suffer from the ‘criminals are stupid’ fallacy that the police tend to have (they notice dumb criminals more than smart criminals, so their sampling is severely biased). Similarly, I may be fooled by the smart advocates way more than the dumb advocates.
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A logical consequence of caring about equal outcomes, rather than equal opportunity, is that the ‘non-identity’ characteristics of individuals (like IQ) don’t matter. Especially if the default assumption is that all failure is due to oppression and finding the cause with the person is victim blaming.
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I know people like this exist, but probably more often as a stereotype than a real person, so guess it’s a fake.
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Unsure again, seems radical to the point where it might be a strawman. But on the other hand, I’d expect most Pro-SJ people would feel really uneasy with arguing for a few of these positions and probably look for something easier.
Gut feeling says sincere though, and I’ve precommitted to give it the deciding vote instead of risking to outsmart myself with well-crafted arguments.
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I’m voting that it’s fake but I’d also vote it as the most effective at vaguely shifting my views towards anti purely for the contents of the “this, this, this, this,” list of links.
*shudder*
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Also voting fake because the HBD argument feels like a weakman, I know some people in the anti-groups who’d make those kinds of statements but far far more would couch them in a lot more caveats to make sure the statements are more correct.
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Oh man, they went straight for the JQ.
I’m inclined to say that this is fake due to the aggressive tone. It seems like an SJ person just researched some anti-SJ and HBD arguments and threw them together without actually believing them. There are absolutely some alt right people who think and speak this way, but in the context of this blog, I think it’s more likely to be a fake.
I am interested in hearin some SJ responses to the question that the author poses about Jews though. I certainly don’t think it’s a knock-down argument against anything SJs believe, but it’s interesting to think about nonetheless. One thing I find interesting is that SJs steadfastly refuse to blame the economic situation of Anerican blacks on black culture, but they’re happy to attribute Jewish success to Jewish culture.
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The difficulty is that Ozy seems to have reached out to people outside this blog, to get more anti-SJ submissions.
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Gahhhhhhh… ok, I’m going to officially switch my vote to genuine, because of the word “ressentiment”. No one’s going to use that word unless they’re a massive Nietzsche fan, or unless this was an SJW who researched the role of “alt right reactionary” amazingly well.
Frankly these are pretty close to my own views. Except the bit about “everyone should follow my discouse norms”. Also, “blacks will never be as successful as Jews without genetic engineering” is too strong a claim, although it’s possible that there may be something to it.
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And another thing: they even capitalized “White”!
Seriously, if an SJ wrote this, then bravo, you spend a lot of time readin opposing views.
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I did not reach out to people outside this blog to get more anti-SJ submissions. I received more than enough submissions simply by announcing the contest on my blog.
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I went back and you/they did indeed say something quite different, that I misremember/mangled a lot.
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Every time I see the acronym ‘HBD’ my brain tells me it says ‘Happy Birthday’ and I have to remind myself that no, this is a different thing.
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Voted fake because the tone seems off to me, not enough like someone addressing an audience they know to be hostile but not enough like someone addressing a receptive audience either. They throw out things that non-HBDers find repulsive, but act as though they are trying to convince that isn’t already HBD-ers. Their words are couched in this form taht reads to me like someone said “There, that’s enough that these bad ideas count as hidden!” instead of “There, that will prevent people from noticing these are ideas they have been trained to reject until they see their validity!”
Also, while I know there are Actual Racists on the anti-SJ side, there are a lot LESS of them than SJ accuses. So given an essay from an Actual Racist that may or may not be a fake based on what SJ thinks its opponents think, the odds are that it’s fake.
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The writer is unlikable, mentioning Chesterton seemed a little on-the-nose, and the three answers don’t really quite fit together as a unified set. However, each individual answer makes enough sense on its own terms that either this is a real (albeit rather non-central) anti-, or it’s a very good fake. I voted anti- but this one was CLOSE.
I especially liked the no-nonsense GG answer and the claim that “SJ is secular Christianity” (a defensible position one rarely hears expressed)
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