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 think my core value in discourse is intellectual humility: I try not to forget that I could always be wrong.
For one thing it is simply *true* that I’m almost certainly wrong about a lot of stuff, because most people are. But also this approach has useful consequences. It incentivizes me not to dismiss other people’s opinions out of hand if they seem silly to me – I learn more when I assume others have good or at least interesting reasons for believing what they believe, and that even if they are wrong, there is at least something useful I could learn from them and it is likely that I should update my opinions at least a bit in *some* direction as a result of listening to someone I disagree with. It also means it’s a really bad idea to yell at people I disagree with, because they could be right.
(To be honest that’s not really my true rejection of yelling at people. I just don’t like it when people yell. But I admit it gets a little harder not to yell when I feel extremely certain that someone is wrong, like when they repeatedly assert something that I know to be false. So remembering that people have useful things to say is useful in making me less tempted to yell.)
I also think it’s important to present my ideas in a way that isn’t unnecessarily inflammatory. I want people to actually hear, understand, and consider my ideas, and it’s gonna be really hard for them to do that if I make it sound like I’m attacking them. (This is kind of a “tone argument” I guess – I respect the idea that people *should* be willing to hear truth no matter how it’s presented, but in practice that’s pretty unlikely to happen because that’s just not how human psychology naturally works. Making truth feel like an attack makes people want to defend themselves, and then you get a battle instead of a discussion. Plus it’s just better not to inflict unpleasant emotions on people when you can avoid it.)
Should others follow these norms: well, broadly, yes, because this is the strategy that has the best chance of arriving at the truth, and because it makes the world a nicer place to be. I do understand that this can be hard for people; sometimes people lash out out of pain, and I do have sympathy for that, and I will try to interpret the lashing out charitably anyway. But I do want people to adopt these goals and aspire to them, even if they don’t always live up to them.
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 actually pretty strongly value some of the same things that social justice as a whole tends to value: equality, autonomy, making it easier for people to live their life as their true selves, trying to weaken stereotypes. I was sort of in social justice for a while. Unfortunately, I have come to believe that the actual social justice movement we have is not a good way to uphold these values, both because it is sometimes actually counterproductive and because it sometimes goes against other things I value.
One of those other things, as I mentioned above, is intellectual humility. There are certainly exceptions to this generalization, but as a whole, modern social justice is not good at this. Social science is complicated! If we want to figure out the best ways to advance equality and justice, we need to be able to discuss, at length and with actual disagreements and including people with other worldviews, what the current state of the world is and what interventions are actually helpful. In most social justice spaces I’ve seen, it’s difficult to disagree about a point of fact (or about goals or priorities, for that matter) without being treated with extreme suspicion and sometimes actually shouted down and sort of shunned henceforth.
(I think being shouted at is probably more likely on Tumblr than in real life, but (a) for one, Tumblr is a pretty big part of social justice culture, so I don’t think we should entirely dismiss it, and (b) I’ve been to a community meeting about housing in the Mission in San Francisco, where the anti-new-market-rate-housing contingent is pretty social-justice-y in their language and ideals, and many members of that contingent actually did shout down people who disagreed with them, which is an even worse experience than being yelled at on the Internet )
(Related gripe: social justice language is often used in the service of economically terrible ideas, and economic consequences disagreement is dismayingly often treated as values disagreement, which also facilitates dissenters being ignored.)
Also relatedly, social justice rhetoric tends to lack nuance to the point where it becomes inaccurate even when trying to make a good point. Groups are often essentialized and – ironically – almost treated as monoliths (“every woman has experienced this”, “if you’re a man you don’t know how this feels”), which erases lots of diversity of experience. I’m a person who has had a somewhat unusual life experience for my gender (I think), so this sometimes feels personally grating, too.
This also means that in trying to highlight what may be an actual difference in rates of victimization by demographic (different rates of rape by gender, different rates of police brutality by race), social justice advocates end up exaggerating the risks faced by members of these groups, which basically causes people to unnecessarily live in fear.
The social justice movement as a whole seems to not be very good at updating its beliefs about power with new evidence. This is most important when it comes to the movement’s own power: social justice seems to often consider itself the underdog even when it’s actually not, and this is dangerous. But also, like, I think it’s quite debatable at this point whether men can really be said to be “privileged” over women in the modern United States as a whole – and even if social justice is currently right about this, I don’t have faith that it will update accordingly if this changes.
I think there’s also too much emphasis on pretty superficial things like the definitional debate of what exactly words like “racism” mean and who can have what hairstyles and what the best words are to refer to one or another demographic group. It’s not that I think all conversations need to be about The Most Important Thing, it’s just that these superficial conversations get far, far more heated than necessary. I mean, I’d rather not have yelling matches over anything, but if we have to have some, I’d rather they at least be about something important!
So to sum up: I think the social justice movement starts from some of the right principles, but it implements them really poorly, mostly by having bad epistemic norms (which come with bad discourse norms).
What would convince me differently: primarily, if you could convince me that most pro-social-justice people do value intellectual humility, nuance, and kindness, and mostly avoid the failure modes I’ve described.
(Or perhaps if you could convince me that, actually, the experiences of different demographic groups are more sharply different than I realize, that would probably lead me to accept a lot more strong social justice claims as true, which would probably lead me to re-identify with social justice as well.)
Explain Gamergate.
I’m sure there were earnest and well-meaning people involved in Gamergate, but at least from the outside it mostly seemed to be kind of a shitfest of toxoplasma which looked reeeally unappealing to me. Luckily as a non-gamer I didn’t have any reason to participate or even spend any time learning about it. (A bit uncharitably – one of the reasons I’m not in social justice anymore is precisely because I don’t like yelling at people on the Internet!) So I don’t really have a coherent picture of it, just some isolated impressions.
I think it started with the Zoepost? In which one Eron Gjoni posted chatlogs between him and his ex, Zoe Quinn, who had apparently cheated on him a lot and also emotionally abused him. I do not think anybody deserves to have their sex life made public, but on the other hand it is vitally important that abuse victims be able to speak out about their abuse, so this is sort of an icky situation all around.
“Ethics in video game journalism” became a punchline but I have to assume it was some people’s actual concern. Again, as a non-gamer, I had no reason to investigate this. (Okay I do sometimes have a temptation to breathlessly follow Internet drama, but in this case the drama was just soooo much that it was not even tempting.)
There seemed to be quite a lot of harassment of everyone by everyone. Harassment is bad. Agh. Why.
That’s all I have, I think.
Lawrence D'Anna said:
Another really lukewarm one. I’m guessing real.
LikeLike
Katelyn Ailuros said:
This is one of those “these are most likely their actual sincere values and the only real question is whether or not they actually consider themself to be anti-SJ” entries.
LikeLiked by 2 people
sniffnoy said:
The recognition that SJ is not, in fact, always the underdog, suggests it’s real to me.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Aapje said:
Same here, that is a pretty common anti-SJ argument that seems unrecognized by most SJ people. Although, on this blog you’d probably find the SJ people who are more likely to recognize it…
LikeLike
Simon said:
The thing I notice, most of the anti-SJW don’t seem to vehemently disagree with actual stated SJW values (ie anti-racism, equality and so forth). They may have their reservations about some of them but sounds like they are open to a debate and willing to have their minds changed. The thing that drives them away is the awful and toxic culture associated with them, not the values themselves which can be debated on their merits.
LikeLike
falenas108 said:
Or at least, that’s what many SJ people think the most plausible disagreement would be.
LikeLike
Aapje said:
I think that the anti-SJ people who disagree with SJ values generally wouldn’t read a blog like this. They debates don’t match their beliefs sufficiently for them to find value in it, and it’s not objectionable enough to hate-read either.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Sylocat said:
Back when Ozy first proposed the ITT, many commenters were predicting that there’d be a conflict of category definitions re: who belongs in which column.
LikeLike
Aapje said:
I can see some debates happening about whether the wrapper matches the cookie, when Ozy tells us the actual self-labeling of the contributors.
LikeLike
silver and ivory said:
For some reason, this feels as though a pro-sj is mostly talking about their differences with mainstream sj.
This part in particular feels weird- like, I agree, but it also doesn’t seem like the type of thing you’d bring up as a major issue with sj.
Or at least, it’s not what *I* would bring up.
Overall the whole essay just seems… too mild, I guess?
LikeLike
Katelyn Ailuros said:
On the one hand, “how are you going to pay for that” is often brought up as an excuse to completely dismiss certain pro-SJ ideas, even when there’s a perfectly good answer.
On the other hand, pointing out that someone’s Cool Leftist Idea has completely failed to address the “things cost money” issue often gets you shouted down with “how dare you care about money more than people”.
LikeLike
dantobias (@dantobias) said:
Another one that could be either way, without needing all that much change to be counted as the other side. I’ll go with “sincere”.
LikeLike
argleblarglebarglebah said:
I voted pro, because this one in particular seems to have detailed knowledge of SJ arguments (“like the definitional debate of what exactly words like “racism” mean and who can have what hairstyles” being an obvious reference to the debate over dreadlocks) but claims to very much not like being yelled at. I’d expect this person to avoid SJ spaces if they in fact did not like getting yelled at, but this seems like the sort of anti who interacts often with SJs if they are an anti.
Of course, the simplest way to resolve the contradiction in the context of an ITT is that they aren’t an anti at all.
LikeLiked by 1 person
silver and ivory said:
I detest being yelled at and have become slowly more emotionally vulnerable to Difficult Conversations, especially about racism, but I still tend to stick around SJ conversations.
I don’t think it’s must of a contradiction at all; maybe they hate being yelled at because of negative associations with SJ.
LikeLike
philosoraptorjeff said:
The dreadlock thing is a fairly well-known and – important for its spread in certain parts of the Internet – relatively easy-to-mock SJ position. I don’t think knowing about it requires that intimate a knowledge of SJ arguments, not enough to be a tell in this context at least.
LikeLiked by 1 person
tcheasdfjkl said:
So you were right about me being an impostor (sort of – I do endorse a lot of what I wrote above), but the hairstyles thing was on my mind precisely because I had been encountering anti-SJ complaints about it. I think you reached the right conclusion by the wrong method 😛
LikeLiked by 2 people
jdbreck said:
I voted that this one is Pro. Everything they write sounds Pro to me, but then again, if they are surrounded by the most hardcore type of ProSJ people, they might genuinely see themselves as Anti based on the difference.
LikeLike
Autolykos said:
It don’t know what the thing is with all the recent posts. Are we just hitting a series of really mushy lukewarm posts, or am I starting to get bored and everything kinda looks the same to me?
Again, too little to go on, but my gut says legit this time, and I might as well follow it.
Could have just as well flipped a coin. Meh.
LikeLike
Walter said:
This feels a lot like the previous. Definitely a person who knows SJ, but do they identify as ASJ or SJ but thinks it needs to improve? JHard to say. My guess is that this is an SJ person voicing their grievances with the movements less praiseworthy tendencies.
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
#8: ASJ, certain
#9: SJ, certain
#10: SJ, unsure
#11: ASJ, unsure
#12: ASJ, certain
#13: SJ, certain
#14: SJ, unsure
#15: SJ, unsure
LikeLike
injygo said:
I’d like to publicly state that I think this is theunitofcaring before the actual identity of the writer is made known.
LikeLike
tcheasdfjkl said:
I guess I’m somewhat flattered that both my pro and anti entries were attributed by someone to people whose writing I respect a lot (someone thought my SJ essay was by Ozy). Though perhaps that also shows some unoriginality on my part. (And indeed, my views have been influenced a lot by both of them.)
LikeLike
Fisher said:
I think I’m actually going not vote fake here. Not because of the content (I think I’ve realized that I completely lack the ability to identify someone faking being anti-SJ based on content) but rather based on style. You know, the written uptalking? And adjectives like “icky.” ITT is complicated!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Pingback: SJ and Anti-SJ ITT: The Results! | Thing of Things