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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.