Tags
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 argue using logic and evidence. I try to be nice about it. I gently mock my opponents’ incorrect facts, unfair argumentation, and motivated reasoning, but I try not to make it personal.
I do this because I feel it is the best way to make a positive difference.
I recognize that to a mob, this is inferior to pure tribal signalling and chimp rage. However, in my opinion these things are dangerous and destructive when wielded from power, although they are effective. By contrast, they fail when attempted from weakness. Progressivism is strong; neoreaction is beyond weak.
Of course I wish that everyone would care about truth and they would be polite, but in reality they cannot and/or will not, and what they are doing is effective. So, “should” is kind of ridiculous applied here. “Should” people do something they cannot and will not, and which works against their perceived interest? I am an atheist, so “should” leaves me cold.
I suppose, though, that in my irrational heart I think that people “should” be nicer, and more logical and evidence-based. FWIW.
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 started out wanting to make the world a better place for everyone, which was a part of the progressive morality that I was raised with. This led me to libertarianism, when I realized that rights and democracy were fundamentally opposed. I proceeded to anarchism, when I dropped the belief in rights as jejune superstition, and began to accept innate human diversity. Finally I settled for neoreaction when I realized anarchism was improbable in the extreme for humans as they are. I still want the world to be better. I still espouse politics that I feel would be best for most people. What people need most is stable, sane, and effective government. This is true in the West, but it’s obviously true in the Third World.
What would convince me I am wrong? Well, here are some possibilities that would really undermine my ideology:
- proof that humans are, generally, not driven by status-seeking, not greedy, not powerlustful, and/or not tribal and nepotistic; and that they are not unconsciously Machiavellian about their motives.
- proof that IQ is unreal and/or uncorrelated with various desirable outcomes, including national income and relatively good government.
- proof that intelligence, conscientiousness and criminality are not highly heritable.
- proof that supernatural things (rights, God, morality) exist.
None of those seem likely to me. Here’s a few things which seem possible, albeit unlikely, and difficult to understand within neoreaction:
- a democracy which is not moving leftward over the long run.
- a state-run welfare system that does not create a dependent class.
- a class of educated and liberated women with above replacement fertility.
- a democratic state which is financially responsible, that is, which does not have increasing debt and other financial obligations over the long run.
- a limited government that stays limited over the long run.
Explain Gamergate.
Which sex from evolutionary time was into hunting, competition, war, territory, and dominance? Simulate those things, and what sex will that appeal to? Similarly: simulate beautiful young women to gaze at; who will that appeal to?
Gaming appeals to men much more than women. It’s biological.
The existence of any domain in life that is dominated by their suspect classes (cis/white/male) is potentially suspect to progressives, because it violates their axiomatic belief in equality. If everyone is equal, then the only possible explanation for any disproportion in group representation — for any group — must be discrimination, which is always wrong, except when it’s not. Biology is not an acceptable explanation.
As such, progressives began to criticize gaming, including game content, gaming culture, and gamer demographics. In particular they criticized the representation of women in games, virtual violence, and the highly male skewing of serious gamers. Progressives attempted to use criticism to change gaming and games.
This would have worked fine before the Internet. But on the Internet, one can talk back anonymously, and men did. Gamergate represents a backlash, a revolt against unwanted progressive criticism and SJW entryism. A sizable minority of gamers, as well as trollish third parties looking for lolz, organized well enough to exert some commercial pressure on game magazines and developers to push back against the progressives.
The conflict almost immediately became largely tribal, divorced from any real “issues”.
jossedley said:
I joked a while back that it would be funny if Moldbug and Arthur Chu entered the ITT; both would instantly be written off as fakes.
IMHO this is a very well done satire of Moldbug or somebody with his style, and fake. I’d speculate that it was by the author of #7, but that would mean one of them was real.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Nita said:
Moldbug’s style is smarmy and oblique, this guy is cold and direct. (But the content does seem similar, of course.)
LikeLiked by 3 people
Doyle said:
Maybe this is engaging on the merits too much to be allowed for an ITT, but France has a much higher fertility rate (2.01, barely above replacement) than South Korea, and also has much more egalitarian gender norms. How do people like this square that particular circle?
LikeLike
Fisher said:
Something about it feels like someone repeating things that they have read, not what they believe. The Gamergate explanation especially seems like someone answering the question “assuming beliefs x,y, and z, construct a self-consistent explanation for phenomenon gg.” It’s coherent, but so novel that it smacks of being newly created.
Fake.
LikeLiked by 1 person
tcheasdfjkl said:
Argh:
“Which sex from evolutionary time was into hunting, competition, war, territory, and dominance? Simulate those things, and what sex will that appeal to? Similarly: simulate beautiful young women to gaze at; who will that appeal to?
Gaming appeals to men much more than women. It’s biological.”
(leaving aside my other objections) as though these things were inherent properties of video games
(especially “beautiful young women to gaze at”)
Anyway, I can’t possibly evaluate this entry.
LikeLiked by 4 people
argleblarglebarglebah said:
Voted anti, because this person seems to understand neoreactionary beliefs to a level of detail that I wouldn’t expect a pro-SJ person to be able to fake convincingly. I certainly couldn’t write this, even though (I think) I can evaluate it.
LikeLike
absurdseagull said:
The polls as of now (low sample size) show that the leading two options are “Anti-SJ and I’m Pro-SJ” and “Pro-SJ and I’m Anti-SJ”
This is very interesting. I voted anti-SJ because all of the arguments seem plausible starting from different initial assumptions (plausible not meaning correct, imo, but arguments that I could believe if I didn’t know better / have empirical reality as basis).
However, if the votes continue this pattern, this probably gives us a pretty good idea of what an anti-SJ “steelman” from the SJ position would look like. (I agree with Ozy’s post against steelmanning).
LikeLike
philosoraptorjeff said:
I think the explanation for that pattern is pretty simple – this person comes across as sufficiently repulsive that no-one wants to be seen as on his side. (I’d be shocked it if weren’t a “him”.) I voted “anti and I’m anti” but definitely had to hold my nose to do so, because this is a very different kind of anti from mine. So much so, that I agree with more than half the pro-SJ essays far more than I do with this person.
LikeLike
absurdseagull said:
If I may ask… what exactly is so repulsive about it? Aside from the atheism, a number of Republican acquaintances have gotten behind every single position listed. They’re not that far-fetched imo; just right-wing.
LikeLike
Elzh said:
To absurdseagull: I think that what jeff is picking up on is the author’s presumption that their logic is right and the odd sidestepping of the prompt that they keep doing. For example, they refer to others as chimps:
It’s not necessarily cruel in intent, but it certainly came off as a bit self-satisfied.
And then the list of reasons that their ideology would be challenged by consists of things like:
These aren’t directly related to sj. The status-seeking humans bit especially seems weird and irrelevant, as though sj arguments are somehow predicated on the notion that humans aren’t status-seeking.
The IQ also seems like a race-related thing, but for the life of me I can’t see why IQ would actually matter. There are pro-sj and anti-HBD arguments that don’t rely on IQ not being real. The same for heritability.
As for the last one, it appears to be a really weird strawman of sj to even vaguely connect beliefs in supernatural things to sj. It also seems quite uncharitable to class morality under supernatural things.
The parts after these become extremely jargon-filled and difficult to read (for a non-NRx like me). This also probably leads to an impression of inscrutability.
LikeLike
Kuyan Judith said:
Personally, I said “Anti-SJ and I’m Pro-SJ” because it seemed so different from most of the anti-SJ writing I’ve seen that I didn’t think it could be anyone’s model of a TYPICAL anti-SJ writer, which is what I’d expect someone trying to fake being anti-SJ to imitate.
LikeLike
Lawrence D'Anna said:
This line is a real howler:
“I am an atheist, so “should” leaves me cold.”
An outright endorsement of moral anti-realism, because “I am an atheist”? I have never heard anyone say that. That position is a theist’s straw man.
It’s a pretty good fake of a neoreactionary, but I think that line gives it away. Author is religious and pro-SJ.
LikeLiked by 3 people
dantobias (@dantobias) said:
I’ve voted “true anti” for so many of the past “anti-SJ” essays that it’s time I balance things, so I’ll vote “pro” for this one, which has some strawmannish things like saying rights are a “jejune superstition”.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Walter said:
This entrant reads correctly to me, as ASJ by way of NRx. It is an easy position to fake, of course, but nothing about this jumps out at me as a tell of an imposter.
Walter’s ASJ picks
#1: ASJ, unsure
#2: ASJ, certain
#3: ASJ, certain
#4: ASJ, unsure
#5: ASJ, certain
#6: SJ, certain
#7: ASJ, certain
LikeLike
jdbreck said:
I voted that this is genuine anti. Like other bits of neoreaction I’ve read, it seems to be hinting that the world would be better off if ruled by the right sort of people, and that the author is exactly that right sort of person.
LikeLike
Rhand said:
This is a common strawman that gets thrown at neoreactionaries, but I don’t think it’s true. For one, most of them are hermits who prefer to be left to their own devices rather than rule people.
For another, they envision a “hyperfederalist” system of small states, and many (not all) envision ethnonationalism as the basis of those states.
In that framework, White people of Kentucky (as an example) should be ruled by a great man from Kentucky, not by a neoreactionary coastal elite.
LikeLike
Rhand said:
Nobody but a committed anti-SJ (like me) could sift through Nick Land’s gargantuan ramblings to arrive at his incisive (and correct) critique of social democracy. I just can’t see a pro-SJ being that well-versed in neoreactionary thought. I’ve never seen any SJ person even acknowledge neoreaction beyond saying they are racist monarchists.
LikeLike
pansnarrans said:
OK, as this is fairly early in the comments: can someone tell me what “anti-SJ” means? I’ve been vaguely unclear on this for a while now, but the anti-SJ ITTs are really bringing it home for me. The first of these was basically defending truth over orthodoxy, which in theory at least is irrelevant to whether someone is for or against social justice as I understand it (I’m British, had never heard the term “social justice” before reading SSC, and from context have been translating it in my head as “left-wing identity politics”). This one is stated to be neo-reactionary, which is a totally different kettle of fish.
(Haven’t read the other five as I realised I may be confused about the whole basis of this, and also because I wanted to queue-jump the comments.)
LikeLike
Toggle said:
Hoo boy. Even answering the question of what social justice *is* might cause an argument accidentally, but I’ll try. Left-wing identity politics are an essential component of social justice, but not a complete picture. It refers to a loose confederation of identity-focused communities organized around political action, and the connective tissue (distinct social and ideological patterns) used to bind them together into a coherent whole. In particular, the notion of ‘privilege’ allows different groups to express their grievances in mutually intelligible ways, especially when supplemented by notions like ‘intersectionality’. Most of this framework is the result of left-wing academics that was later released out in to the wild, so it can get surprisingly jargony. It’s also a pretty distinctly American phenomenon; I’m not sure I’d call the Fallists an example of social justice, for example.
The anti-social-justice section is open to just about anybody who opposes, resists, or strongly dislike this phenomenon. That includes a very wide range of people, so we’re getting a wide range of different types of ASJ essays.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Rhand said:
I agree. You can reject social justice because you think HBD is true, or you can reject social justice because you think it doesn’t focus enough on class struggle. Anti-social justice is so wide that it includes socialists and reactionaries alike.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Lawrence D'Anna said:
“Social Justice” is one form of left wing identity politics which seems to be particularly popular right now, and “anti Social Justice” (Antisocial Justice?) is everyone who’s against it. Anti is much more heterogeneous than pro.
Many recent internet controversies serve as wedge issues between SJ and ASJ, such as #racefail, #GamerGate, #shirtstorm, Brendan Eich, Sad Puppies, Tim Hunt, BLM (especially arguments about BLV vs “all lives matter”), everything Milo Yiannopoulos has ever said, the MRM, Cassie Jaye, Jordan Peterson.
LikeLiked by 1 person
pansnarrans said:
I was looking more for a dictionary-style definition. If I’d been asked to define “social justice” as it seems to be defined here and on SSC, I’d have said something like “opposition to prejudice based on non-selected demographics”. In other words, anti-racism, anti-sexism etc.
By that definition, “anti-SJ” means people who are in favour of such prejudice, but I strongly suspect that’s utterly unfair. And it doesn’t seem to describe a lot of people who identify as anti-SJ.
My instinct is that “SJ” means exactly what I described, while “anti-SJ” means people who are fed up with SJs who use unreasonable tactics, like misusing statistics, shaming, doxxing and so on. But that leaves a gap. Specifically, it means I’m SJ and anti-SJ at the same time.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Lawrence D'Anna said:
I don’t think social justice can be defined with a dictionary-style definition, any more than the ideology of the Republican Party can be. Feminists and MRAs both claim to be anti-sexist. Ideologies can only be defined extensionally.
LikeLiked by 2 people
jdbreck said:
I think your definition of SJ is about right, and from the content of the Anti essays we’ve seen so far it seems that both of your possible definitions of AntiSJ are also possibly true (for some) as well as some additional possible types of AntiSJ.
LikeLike
absurdseagull said:
Here’s a trick I think works, based on the discussions had in the comments before – pro-SJ people define SJ by principles, anti-SJ people define SJ by tactics.
So from a pro-SJ perspective, I’ll copy my definition from another thread where I define SJ broadly as “The belief that inequality driven by society is wrong and that people ought work towards ending it. Further, if natural inequality is able to be remedied by technology in such a way as to increase the total standard of living, it is morally desirable.”
I notably don’t consider identity politics or the concept of privilege as integral to social justice (otherwise a whole host of SJ politics including anarchist SJ politics wouldn’t make sense to me).
The self-identified anti-SJ crowd on this website, and I’m reaching here to try to represent arguments accurately, seems to define SJ more as:
“A branch of left-wing politics that centers issues of identity. Contrary to traditional modernist liberalism, SJ believes that one’s identity is integral to one’s epistemology and the types of statements one ought be allowed to express. SJ is characterized by use of ‘privilege’ politics and a focus on appearance/call-outs.”
Based on my understanding, the anti-SJ crowd focuses more on tactics and specific instances of people behaving badly in the name of SJ.
Anti-SJ and other Pro-SJ people, feel free to edit, correct or disagree with my definitions.
Also, I don’t think this definition of anti-SJ characterizes people irl, in non-English-speaking countries or even on other parts of the internet very well. The rationalist community is fairly insular after all and oh so many people live in the Bay Area…
LikeLiked by 5 people
jossedley said:
@absurdseagull – I think that’s very insightful. A gloss that I’d add is that I think at least some people who identify as ASJ are supportive of the SJ principles you articulate*, and work to implement those principles. Do you think many SJ people are strongly opposed to the tactics? (I.e., sufficiently strongly to take action against them?)
* Although “equality” always breaks down to a definitional problem at some point, moreso when we have to define “driven by society.” I think most people stop short of Harrison Bergeron’s society, but where exactly you stop might be an issue to discuss.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Lawrence D'Anna said:
@absurdseagull
You make it sound like the only point of disagreement is about what the term “social justice” really means. I think there’s a kernel of truth in that, in that there’s an intersection of liberal anti-SJ and liberal pro-SJ people that basically only disagree about what “SJ” and associated terminology means.
But mostly I think that’s false. Pro and Anti tend to disagree on a number of specific wedge issues like:
– Certain individuals one side thinks are scumbags, and the other side insists are mostly harmless. (Milo, Anita, …)
– Are there more than two genders? Is gender a social construct?
– non-binary pronouns
– Process issues in rape cases, both criminal and under title IX
– How serious a problem is “online harassment” and what should be done about it?
– Are social theories like “privilege”, “rape culture”, and “patriarchy” accurate?
– Cultural Appropriation
– Donglegate, Elevatorgate, Tim Hunt, shirtstorm, Brendan Eich
LikeLike
absurdseagull said:
@jossedly People I know would and do object to some tactics (softly so as not to replicate the issues). Therefore, the tactics they disagree with are done by other people. I don’t have any percentages. That’s all I can really say, I’ve been trying to say more but I really can’t. Some anonymous double-blind surveys would be nice at this point, to try to get some statistics.
LikeLiked by 2 people
absurdseagull said:
@Lawrence
I didn’t mean to imply that was the only distinction! I meant to imply that this seemed like a major source of contention -> something like -log(P(sj = ideals | pro-SJ)/P(sj = ideals | anti-SJ)) >> 0 , -log(P(sj = tactics | anti-SJ)/P(sj = tactics | pro-sj)) >> 0.
Maybe not >>, maybe just about 0.8-2, (log being natural log ofc).
Am just going to stop there, since I’m trying to focus on determining SJ and non-SJ arguments, not the validity of such arguments.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Lawrence D'Anna said:
@absurdseagull, ah my mistake. Thanks for clarifying.
LikeLike
No one said:
The most prominent line in the sand I can think of that really seems to cut to the heart of the divide between SJs and everyone else is their stance on racism/sexism/whateverism being redefined to require power plus the normal definition of the term. (Which in practice seems to only mean that whites can be racist, men can be sexist, etc)
Much of my social group is considered Anti because they disagree on this position, even while agreeing on most other points that people define as SJ ideals, including all the standard sound bytes of “women and minorities should be treated just as well as anyone else”, “avoid discriminating on race/gender/religion/class/etc” and all that.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Aapje said:
I think that a key value for most progressive anti-SJ people is the rejection of SJ dogma.
In that world view, most of SJ shares certain dogma that is false and completely undermines any ability to understand the world and (thus) to actually achieve their goals.
IMHO, when anti-SJ people argue about SJ hypocrisy (like valuing gender role enforcement on women differently than on men, inherent in dismissing the existence of female privilege next to male privilege), false historic accounts of the patriarchy, misrepresentations of fact (like reducing workplace differences to the wage gap or dismissing DV or rape statistics that show (near) parity), etc; these are all intended to break down this dogma.
None of these arguments attack the core SJ terminal values of equality, human rights, etc. Unfortunately (from my perspective), many pro-SJ people see the rejection of their dogma as an attack on their values, which leads to communication breakdowns and the level of hostility between the groups that we see.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Toggle said:
@No one,
I think that’s a *really* insightful line that captures a lot of what (I think) makes social justice distinct from the historical civil rights movement, or even just omnidirectional beneficence.
In particular, the framing ‘racism is power + bigotry’ moves the center of moral gravity. Naively, a person might say that racial animus is bad, and that power becomes bad when it reinforces racial animus. But under this definition, a person is saying that racial animus is bad *when it strengthens those in power*, leaving room for it to be acceptable or even good otherwise. That leads to *very* different modes of behavior.
In theory, you could still say something like ‘bigotry is inherently bad, the system is not inherently bad, but my focus isn’t really on those things separately and I want to focus my activism on the special evil of bigotry intersecting with the system i.e. racism.’ But at least from the outside, it seems that the much more common(/visible/relevant?) outcome is ‘prejudice is morally justified when dismantling the structures of privilege, which are inherently bad’.
Might just be confirmation bias speaking, of course. But out in the wild, I’d be quite surprised to encounter somebody who A) argued that people shouldn’t make broad negative generalizations about white people, and B) thought of social justice as an important source of moral authority.
LikeLiked by 1 person
pansnarrans said:
Thanks for everyone who replied to this. I think I’ve been defining anti-SJ as further from the middle ground than it’s used here. Personally I’d describe myself as “SJ who hates nasty tactics used by some SJ bad apples”, said tactics being things like redefining “racism” so that you get to accuse other people of racism on ridiculously trumped-up charges, while insisting you cannot logically be a racist even while yelling racist abuse at other people. And the this-person-doesn’t-share-my-beliefs-so-I’ll gather-a-mob-and-get-them-fired thing (not only used by the left, of course). I guess I’m anti-SJ insofar as this site’s confirmed.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Rhand said:
I will define social justice as the following:
A predominately American movement that focuses on progressive identity politics and the advancement of historically marginalized groups, such as Black, LGBT, and Female people.
That’s as charitable as I can get.
—————————————————-
People oppose social justice because of a few reasons. Some are:
1) The over-focus on marginalized groups tramples on fundamental rights and values like free speech and due process. Most libertarians and some liberals fall into this group.
2) The over-focus on identity politics distracts from the more exigent issue of class struggle. Most socialists that oppose social justice fall into this group.
3) Social justice is on a collision course with Christian and conservative values. Many on the Religious Right hold this view, but they don’t exist on the internet so they don’t matter to us.
4) Biological equality is a lie and social democracy is generally undesirable. Given that social justice is premised on these things, it is also undesirable. Many neoreactionaries and “alt right” denizens fall into this group.
LikeLiked by 2 people
absurdseagull said:
Are you serious? Conservative Christians aren’t some backwater yuppies who can’t use computers. They exist in a number of places on the internet – if you want to find out, go to your favorite general chat forum (for like idk, game development or something not to do with politics/religion) and start having an argument about religion or politics in the Uncategorized section. They’ll come out. There are a LOT of Christian blogs as well and conservatives are bloggers too, despite popular blogging sites like Medium emphasizing the left-wing voices.
The religious right does exist on the internet. A simple search engine and the ability to pay attention can tell you that much.
Also, for 2, in my experience, a number of leftists (to encompass both socialists and anarchists) tend to both critique mainstream SJ and identify as pro-SJ. Same with 1, tbh, though not nearly to the same extent. Some of the most cogent critiques of concepts like identity politics, cultural appropriation (what a garbage concept), etc. came from social justice leftists who didn’t feel social justice was doing a good job.
So I think it largely comes down to self-identification in the end. And that Ozy’s blog over-represents 1 as the most common viewpoint.
However, anti-SJ #6 doesn’t fall into any of the neat categories you described so I will also append category 5:
5) People, especially marginalized people, who may not have a problem with identity politics, but have been personally hurt (including having a friend be hurt) by social justice concepts/activism or believe it to be harmful in its present state. This overlaps with 1 and 2, but I think it’s important to note that people who are part of SJ’s “target audience” aren’t necessarily going to agree with it and that some people are seriously hurt enough to leave social justice forever for these things.
Side note: These cases are a reminder to those who care about social justice to restrain developments like call-out culture. Though I feel like it preceded modern social justice to a large extent and the reactive justice of Twitter and Tumblr may not be representative of social justice. For example, it is illegal to deny the Holocaust in Germany (which I can interpret as an intolerable denial of free speech rights) and a number of people are supportive of violence against racists, etc.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Aapje said:
One of the issues with self-labeling is that the benefit is different based on whether other people accept your label. There is a risk that you are not accepted by that group, but are also rejected by the ‘other side,’ leaving you under attack from both sides.
I also think that it’s extremely revealing whom the mainstream accept as part of the group and whom they don’t. I’ve never seen a feminist denounce Andrea Dworkin as not being a feminist, though many reject C.H. Sommers, This is very revealing, IMO.
My experience is that many feminists claim that only people who believe in the (greater) oppression of women can call themselves feminists, which shows me that they define their movement not (merely) by terminal values, but by a belief in how society works.
The big danger of defining the ingroup by a subjective view on reality is that counterarguments are rejected as being immoral and thus they may not be true, regardless of whether reality agrees.
LikeLiked by 1 person
jossedley said:
In Catholic circles, modern social justice means mostly open borders and economic equality. Some time ago, it often translated to support for the Marxist movements in Central and South America. I haven’t ready anyone arguing against Catholic social justice in this forum, but I hope someone does, because it would be hilarious.
Here, you can kind of see the kind of people who identify as being part of the social justice movement. It’s a broader constellation than I would have guessed too.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Doyle said:
The heritability of conscientiousness is .09, so it is not highly heritable.
LikeLike
Doyle said:
Ok actually I might be wrong about this, I did some googling and encountered the claim it was .44 . The original source was this: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/2007ScienceGeneticallyCapitalist.pdf
LikeLike
Elzh said:
The author uses “heritability” slightly oddly. It doesn’t mean the amount of a trait that is based on genes. It means the percent of variation in a trait that is caused by genetics. They didn’t elaborate, but it seemed subtly off.
I think they’re a genuine ASJ, because (as mentioned above) they use so much jargon it almost becomes hard to read. They also base their ideas heavily on evopsych, which is a noncentral enough ASJ idea that I don’t think it would occur for a pro-SJ.
LikeLike
Doyle said:
Would an example of this being relevant be a trait where there was very little variability in absolute terms but what variability there was was all due to genetics?
LikeLiked by 1 person
argleblarglebarglebah said:
Yes, among others.
For example: height is very highly heritable in the US. It is much less heritable in Ghana, because a larger percentage of the variability is due to non-genetic factors like malnutrition.
Also some traits you might expect to be very much due to genetics, like number of fingers, are in fact not very heritable, because you are much more likely to lose fingers due to an accident than genetics. On the other hand,some traits you might expect to be not due to genetics at all, like educational achievement, are fairly heritable because they’re correlated with heritable traits, in this case IQ.
As you can see, the heritability of a trait isn’t really about the trait or genes, it’s about the particular situation the population finds itself in. Different situations will cause more or less variation in the trait because of non-genetic factors, and therefore proportionally less or more variation in the trait due to genetics. If you don’t apply common sense you will find some very weird things are “highly heritable”.
LikeLiked by 2 people
argleblarglebarglebah said:
That is a very common misunderstanding, so I’m not going to hold it against them.
Or at least, I’m not going to hold it against their chances of being genuine. I’m sure as hell going to hold it against their actual position.
LikeLiked by 1 person
rlms said:
I think this is a pro-SJ person who has interpreted “anti-SJ” as NRx.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Pingback: SJ and Anti-SJ ITT: The Results! | Thing of Things