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It is the VERY LAST Intellectual Turing Test post!
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?
Seek the truth, above all else. Truth has led us from hunter-gatherers in Africa to the moon, and hopefully beyond. True beliefs let us understand the world. While I recognize that some people have trouble with certain true beliefs, or with respectful engagement about their beliefs, they should recognize that as their problem, and deal with it by going to a party, playing games on their computer, or otherwise relaxing in a way that doesn’t inhibit the free speech of others.
One shouldn’t be a dick to people: Ozy should be referred to as they and telling people you think that they’re morons because of their genetics should be reserved for special cases. But that doesn’t change what is true, and we should be careful to segregate the polite from the true, in the same way that America might believe Turkey committed genocide against the Armenians, but that doesn’t mean America needs to announce this to the world.
Truth is important, and the more truth-seeking people in a society, the better we all are. Leaving moral non-realism aside, yes. Like I do, when a conversation involves more shouting or fighting than I prefer, people should feel free to leave a conversation that is harmful to them. However, systematic promotion of the idea that it is good to leave a conversation if it involves ideas you disagree with, as SJ promotes (nobody should have to listen to people attacking their identity), is harmful to our ability to generate truth and find truth.
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?
Free, open, and honest discussion is the best way to promote true beliefs. If someone showed me that we have a reliable method to identify beliefs that are false but convincing, and that racism/sexism/etc were some of those beliefs, or an equivalent, I would become significantly more supportive of SJ.
Explain Gamergate.
Gamergate was a three stage process, each step having a tangential relation to the next.
In the first stage, someone made a post warning others about his abuser. To the surprise of nobody on the anti-SJ side, feminists instinctively rallied around an abusive woman rather than her victim. I worry that this is just me attacking the outgroup for everything possible, but it really does cement my feeling that SJ feminism has equality as a rather thin fig leaf over the agenda of promoting the rights and status of women. I understand that people might want to promote the rights and status of their own group, particularly if their group has suffered recently or presently, but the pious hypocritical claims of being for equality are hard to stomach when this sort of thing happens.
In the second stage, it was pointed out that, shockingly, an abuser had done unethical things. This exposed, and served as ignition for, a broader frustration due to the gap between heavy gamers, and the games media who nominally wrote for them. Very differing ideas about games (the audience tends to be more interested in displays of skill, chances to acquire skill, and competition, while a bunch of english majors are, to nobody’s surprise, more interested in the stories told), ongoing ethical issues (a cozy relationship between publishers and the media), and a correlation with the push to exclude people with “wrong” social norms (often genuinely harmful ones, but the “you shouldn’t have a place anywhere, you should just die and not inflict yourself on anyone else” message being pushed by the SJ newcomers is far worse).
In the third stage, it became, like every issue in the age of twitter that is given sufficient oxygen, a giant clusterfuck that is impossible to follow, or understand, as anything other than tribal warfare.
jossedley said:
I thought most likely real. A little heavy on buzzwords, but the analytical style reads ASJ to me.
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Toggle said:
Insincere, is my guess. The author reduces their opposition to social justice down to a single overriding issue- truth. While ‘truth’ is a theme that’s present in almost all the ASJ essays, it’s rarely the only one. ASJ itself is more of a hodgepodge. I’m kind of suspicious of any essay that tries to reduce it to a single premise.
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Autolykos said:
Could be either, really. But nothing in it strikes me as off, so I’m voting for true.
To nail my pants to the mast, here’s how I voted on all the posts:
Pro: +-+-+ +++– -+-+- +-
Anti: +-+– ++–+ +-++- —
+ means the writer is Pro-SJ, – means the writer is Anti-SJ
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sniffnoy said:
Since this is the last post before the wrap-up, I’ll post my guesses: (+ means pro, – means anti)
+-++-+-+-+++++-++
—-+—-+++—-+
Notes: On each side, I judged 12 to be real and 5 to be fake. Obviously, that’s not possible; I should have the same number of “pros” and “antis” on each side, not the same number of “reals” and “fakes”. But, I guess I’m more easily fooled than that.
The best case is that I got 10 on each side correct and 7 on each side wrong (for a total “score” of 20/34). The worst case is that I got none of them correct (although that seems unlikely).
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sniffnoy said:
Oops, I didn’t account for the blog software formatting repeated hyphens into dashes. Let’s try that again with spaces…
+ – + + – + – + – + + + + + – + +
– – – – + – – – – + + + – – – – +
(And no, I didn’t see Autolykos’s comment before posting mine. 😛 )
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sniffnoy said:
Oops, math error. Actual best case would be 27/34, not 20/34; actual worst case would be 7/34, not 0.
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dantobias (@dantobias) said:
Yet another somewhat centrist rationalist position that really could go either way… I’ll vote “fake (pro-SJ)” this time because my past votes are too far in the “real anti-SJ” direction.
Will there be an answer key subsequently?
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dantobias (@dantobias) said:
And my final tally, in the same format as others here:
pro: – + + + + – – + + + + – + + – + +
anti: + – – – – + + – + – + – – + – – +
so I voted 12 out of 17 of the “pro” responses as pro, and 10 out of 17 of the “anti” responses as anti, and obviously some of these are wrong.
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Aapje said:
Voted anti, but this one was really hard.
The bit about the Armenian genocide caused a feeling of cultural disconnect. In my country, we have a large number of people of Turkish origin, who tend to be ‘anti-racist’, and also mostly supportive of Turkish nationalism. So it has become a right-wing loyalty test to ask the question whether the genocide happened. The answer is used to determine if the person supports Western values or not.
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jdbreck said:
I voted that this is genuine Anti, but mostly because I kept having to reread sentences to try to figure out what it meant, which signaled to me that the writer is using insider jargon and buzzwords that don’t give me the information they would give a fellow insider. But I’m uncertain about my vote, it could be that the writer is faking it but just has a writing style that isn’t my cup of tea.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
SO looking forward to the reveal (hopefully tomorrow?).
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
I guess I’m voting this is real. But I can’t really tell.
My final ballot:
pro: +-+– –+++ +–++ -+
anti: +—+ -+-++ +—- +-
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
ugh
pro: + – + – -, – – + + +, + – – + +, – +
anti: + – – – +, – + – + +, + – – – – , + –
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argleblarglebarglebah said:
This person’s answer to 2 is way too short, and it seems pretty generic. Voted pro.
Overall:
Pro : APAPA APPAP PPAAA PA (8P/9A)
Anti: PPAAA AAPPA PAAAP AP (7P/10A)
The totals mean my answers aren’t completely consistent, but they’re honestly pretty close considering I wasn’t keeping track.
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Katelyn Ailuros said:
Again with the significantly more detailed answer about GG than the other two things.
I don’t know what it means, but I do know that throughout this whole ITT I’ve heard more talk about GG than in its entire prior existence.
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Aapje said:
At the beginning of this experiment, I thought that have the GamerGate question was rather off putting. I’ve also heard many people who really want to avoid that topic.
So the choice to have that question may have greatly biased the participants to people who care about
dramaGamerGate.LikeLiked by 1 person
Lawrence D'Anna said:
I think asking about meaningless drama was a great idea!
It works because it’s meaningless, because the underlying issues are so unimportant. The whole thing is a social construct. It’s an epiphenomenon.
Asking a SJ or anti-SJ to “explain” GamerGate is like asking protestants and catholics to explain transubstantiation or the nature of the trinity. The answer is going to be complete gibberish, but there is such a thing as the correct gibberish from the perspective of each side. The explanation is an opportunity to display cultural fluency. It shows you know how to play with the map. It doesn’t matter that the territory doesn’t exist.
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ozymandias said:
I was just trying to understand Gamergate.
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Aapje said:
Ozy, that made me LOL
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tcheasdfjkl said:
@Ozy, do you understand Gamergate better than you did before?
@Lawrence d’Anna
The problem is that there are SJ and anti-SJ people who weren’t really in the conflict. I could construct an SJ-fluent explanation of Gamergate but it wouldn’t be my actual opinion. When I was deciding whether to participate in the ITT that question was definitely a point against.
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silver and ivory said:
I’m kind of skeptical about this one, given how it doesn’t mention much about sj at all. Seems extremely rationalist-y, but not particularly sincere.
To be clear, will we have reveals of their true allegiances at some point?
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Toggle said:
Some preliminary results from my in-progress spreadsheet:
One average, people think rate putatively SJ essays as sincere 66.18% to 33.82%, and that putatively ASJ essays are sincere 67.0% to 33.0%, which is remarkably similar.
In the SJ set, the most convincing essay (#10) was rated sincere by 90.98% of voters, and the least convincing essay (#5) was rated insincere by 74.76% of voters.
In the ASJ set, the most convincing essay (#16) was rated sincere by 87.4% of voters, and the least convincing essay (#11) was rated insincere by 84.66% of voters. (Essay #16 is probably subject to change, since people are still voting on it actively).
Where the data is available, SJ-identified voters and ASJ-identified voters typically disagree with one another by less than ten percentage points, and often agreed by less than a point. Antis were more likely to think that SJ essays 9,13, 14, and 15 were sincere, and Pro-SJ voters favored 16 and 17. In the ASJ essays, Antis favored 3, 8 12, and 15, while Pro-SJ voters thought essays 1,6,7,9, 10, 11, and 16 were more sincere.
Participation fell according to what appears to be a pretty typical exponential decay function, from a max of 660 at the beginning to a low of 99. (Wouldn’t be too hard to calculate this readership’s half-life, I suspect.) The election clearly interrupted the otherwise smooth curve, with an uptick immediately before and a significant drop right after.
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Toggle said:
The big difference I’m seeing so far is that reader’s confidence in pro-SJ essays is symmetric about the mean, whereas ASJ is not. It has a few very unconvincing outliers and high-confidence results are modal.
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jossedley said:
Interestingly, votes are still trickling in, even on the early SJ essays. Ideally, we could take a count just before Ozy announces the authors.
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Walter said:
Hmm…I think I’m going to call this one an imposter. I’ve said a couple of times that I expect ASJ’s to talk about truth as their norm, but that is generally accompanied by some kind of explanation as to what parts of SJ they find to be untrue. This just kind of dangles it out there.
Then, too, the entry seems designed to offend, to some degree. A person genuinely arguing for that position probably wouldn’t have reserved “special circumstances” for insulting someone based on their genes, etc.
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
#16: ASJ, certain
#17: SJ, certain
Rounding things off with a big thank you to Ozy for hosting this stuff. Great fun these past couple weeks.
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name withheld said:
these posts have convinced me to identify as anti-sj after previously identifying strongly as sj. my beliefs did not change significantly, but it seems to me that the union of the good points on both sides ends up looking reasonably similar to this post.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
Not going to wait and see which anti-SJ posts were actually written by SJ people? 🙂
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name withheld said:
it seems to me that it doesn’t much matter who was arguing for the position, if I found the position convincing because of it. I’m curious, but my conclusions don’t depend on the politics of the person who wrote this.
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tcheasdfjkl said:
Hmm, but if your beliefs haven’t changed and only the label has, then maybe it makes sense to ask whether the label is an accurate one?
Also I guess I’m surprised that this post which hardly answers “why do you believe what you believe” is so strongly convincing.
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Aapje said:
The other person said ‘these posts,’ so I assume that the decision was made based on multiple anti-SJ submissions, not this particular one.
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mzimu said:
Hi, I’m a long time reader-lurker of this blog, just wanted to put my ballot in the comments:
pro: – – + + – – – + + + + – – – + + + (9P/8A)
anti: + – + + + – – – + + + – – + – – + (9P/8A)
Thank you Ozy for running this ITT, it was fun to read and compare all those short essays.
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mzimu said:
So my results are 15/17 for pro-SJ entries and 11/17 for anti-SJ ones. I’m more pro-SJ myself, so I’m reasonably happy with my number of misses.
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serpentineeyelash said:
Hi, I’m another lurker summarizing my guesses.
I found it much easier to decide whether the Pro-SJ essays were real or fake. My guesses on those are:
AAPPP APPAP PPAAA PA (total: 9P/8A)
Even though I am sort-of Anti-SJW-ish, I found it much more difficult to judge the veracity of the Anti-SJ essays, because the “Anti-SJ” position runs the gamut from dissident-left to far-right. I ended up guessing that almost all of them were real, though I know that can’t possibly be correct:
PAAAP PAPAA PAAAA AA (totals: 12A/5P)
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jossedley said:
My votes: (- means imitation, + means sincere, ? means ?)
SJ: -+++—+?++-+-?-+ (8 sincere, 7 imitation, 2 ?)
ASJ: ++?–+-+-+-++++++ (11 sincere, 5 imitation, 1 ?)
The numbers don’t add up, but charitably, I’d like to think that it means that the participants are pretty good at passing the ITT, or at least better at it than I am at judging. My intuition is that ASJ is easier to imitate than SJ because it covers a wider range of opinions and doens’t have a common jargon. If so, I’d expect to be more wrong on the ASJ side.
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