Tags
On the anti-social-justice side, I am pleased to announce that Toggle, author of SJ #10, has won the Intellectual Turing Test. With an astonishing 91% of voters classifying him as a pro-social-justice person, he beat not only the other anti-social-justice participants but, in fact, all of the pro-social-justice participants. Let us cover him with glory and honor. Our runners-up are blacktrance (63%, author of #14) and my lovely husband Topher Brennan (64%, author of #2).
On the pro-social-justice side, our winner is Daniel, author of anti-SJ #2, with 85% of the vote. Our runners-up are Barry Deutsch (75%, author of #3), tcheasdfjkl (73%, author of #15), al-Aziz (70%, author of #6), Sylocat (70%, author of #11), Carl (61%, author of #10), and Data and Philosophy (55%, author of #17).
No one won the Strawman Award for Poorly Representing Your Own Side.
As you can see, there are two people on the SJ side who only turned in one submission: Data and Philosophy, who only turned in an anti-SJ submission, and Henry, who only turned in a pro-SJ submission. I ran both in the interests of confusing the audience.
By popular demand, about halfway through the ITT I switched the polls to a format that required the voter to identify themselves as pro-SJ or anti-SJ. This was to assuage concerns that anti-social-justice writers who played to the stereotypes of anti-social-justice readers would win the ITT without understanding the other side. The sample is unfortunately small, both because it was an change during the Turing Test and because of my own errors. However, the one disagreement was about al-Aziz, whom pro-SJ people consistently read as anti-SJ in spite of the fact that they are pro-SJ– the exact opposite of the usual concern.
In the anti-SJ Turing Test, there were two cases in which anti-SJ people and pro-SJ people disagreed with each other. Leonard (anti-SJ #7), who is anti-SJ, was read as being anti-SJ by SJ people and pro-SJ by anti-SJ people, perhaps because he is a neoreactionary. Meaningless Monicker (anti-SJ #9), who is pro-SJ, was perceived as anti-SJ by pro-SJ people and pro-SJ by anti-SJ people. In recognition of the fact that Meaningless Monicker won with only 51% of the vote, and it was pr-SJ people who pushed her over, I did not list her as a runner-up.
Full rankings appear below with links to their posts and other identifying information (if provided to me). The anti-SJ participants are ranked based on their score on the pro-SJ posts, while the pro-SJ participants are ranked based on their score on the anti-SJ posts.
Anti-SJ Rankings:
- Toggle, togglesbloggle on Tumblr, SJ #10, 91% pro-SJ, anti-SJ #4, 79% anti-SJ.
- Topher Brennan, SJ #2, 64% pro-SJ, anti-SJ #13, 84% anti-SJ.
- blacktrance, SJ #14, 63% pro-SJ, anti-SJ #8, 78% anti-SJ.
- Jossedley, SJ #7, 41% pro-SJ, anti-SJ #12, 78% anti-SJ.
- John/Literal Head Cannon, author of Ginny Weasley and the Sealed Intelligence, SJ #6, 40% pro-SJ, anti-SJ #1, 53% anti-SJ.
- Alexhard, SJ #12, 35% pro-SJ, anti-SJ #5, 59% anti-SJ
- Leonard, SJ #1, 30% pro-SJ, anti-SJ #7, 52% anti-SJ
- Meghan, SJ #5, 25% pro-SJ, anti-SJ #16, 87% anti-SJ
SJ Rankings:
- Daniel, ITT SJ #17, 71% pro-SJ, ITT anti-SJ #2, 85% anti-SJ.
- Barry Deutsch, ITT SJ #15, 54% pro-SJ, ITT anti-SJ #3, 75% anti-SJ.
- tcheasdfjkl, tchtchtchtchtch on Tumblr, ITT SJ #16, 84% pro-SJ, ITT anti-SJ #15, 73% anti-SJ.
- al-Aziz, blogs at The Reconstructionist Blog, ITT SJ #9, 54% pro-SJ, ITT anti-SJ #6, 70% anti-SJ.
- Sylocat, ITT SJ #11, 83% pro-SJ, ITT anti-SJ #14, 70% anti-SJ
- Carl, ITT SJ #8, 80% pro-SJ, ITT anti-SJ #10, 61% anti-SJ.
- Data and Philosophy, ITT anti-SJ #17, 55% anti-SJ.
- Meaningless Monicker, ITT SJ #3, 74% pro-SJ, ITT anti-SJ #9, 51% anti-SJ.
- Katelyn Tempest Ailuros, wingedcatgirl on Twitter and Tumblr, ITT SJ #4, 84% pro-SJ, ITT anti-SJ #11, 15% anti-SJ.
- Henry, ITT SJ #13, 65% pro-SJ.
Thing of Things 
Thank you for organizing and running this! Participating in it was fun.
LikeLiked by 15 people
And thanks to the participants! Following was fun as well 🙂
LikeLiked by 9 people
Maybe no-one won the Strawman Award, but I did come closer than anyone else, by a percentage point. My Reddit name is /u/LiteralHeadCannon, by the way. Actual head-mounted projectile weapon. 😛
Will have to think about the results for a while.
LikeLike
Nope, Leonard got closer than you. (Sorry Leonard.)
LikeLike
Oh, aha, missed him.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ha, now I feel pretty smug about judging your sincere entry realistic. (I thought you sounded like /u/osberend, in case you’re curious.)
Were you also anon56743 in the comment thread?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Heh, now I see that we were both thinking of Osberend in that comment thread. (Specifically, I was pretty sure I’d seen him on Tumblr espouse the more or less the belief about maliciousness whose sincerity people were questioning there.)
LikeLike
Nope, just John. 🙂
LikeLike
Thanks, Ozy! I receive your praise in a doofy and socially awkward manner, according to the ancient traditions of my people.
The closest thing I have to a blog is togglesbloggle.tumblr.com, so anyone who liked my writing here should feel free to look me up there. I rarely discuss (anti-)social justice issues; it’s more prone to long digressions about phytoplankton or something.
If people are interested, I wouldn’t mind doing a short writeup on how I constructed the beliefs and writing style that was used in SJ10.
LikeLiked by 3 people
I’m interested in that sort of writeup for everyone; I kind of hope everyone comes in and breaks down what they said and why.
LikeLiked by 6 people
You’ve seen the other essays and the discussions in comments. Would your entries be different if you wrote them now / would you change anything to make them more convincing or more precisely worded?
LikeLike
Not much, but that might just be resting on my laurels. My honest essay (anti #4) left a few people confused, so I’d think about clarifying a couple sections in there.
The big issue is probably the ‘what would change your mind?’ half of question 2. There was a fair bit of discussion about why I didn’t answer it directly, and the true answer is “I had a brain fart and forgot that that was part of the question.” (I read the questions early, and then put them away while I thought about my answers off and on for a week.)
Overall, most of the answers to that section were variants on ‘it turns out my fundamental understanding of the universe is wrong.’ I don’t think mine would have been much different, and with due respect to Ozy, that question seems to be making some positivist assumptions that most of the authors didn’t share, so it didn’t swing things *that* much. But still, I would probably add in some discussion there just so I didn’t feel like I might be getting away with something.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Thanks for organizing this! This was fun.
I’m very pleased to have come in second. But it’s interesting/appalling to me that I was the SJ-advocate least likely to be taken for an SJ advocate. (Tied with al-Aziz).
LikeLiked by 4 people
I think your answer was just short and hence not super detailed, so there wasn’t much opportunity for you to demonstrate SJ fluency and people may have taken the brevity as like, an easy way for an impostor to avoid being noticed, or as evidence of shallow and not well developed views (which is more likely for an impostor).
LikeLiked by 3 people
I saw people respond that way, and it made me regret writing such a short entry. As I recall, I was simply in a rush that day, and had to limit the time I spent writing my entries.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Your overall answer was short and didn’t have much to it, which is suspicious for the same reason a Mafia/Werewolf player who avoids talking very much is suspicious: someone who avoids giving information about themselves, in a context where some people are lying about who they are, reads as someone avoiding opportunities to let slip that they are not who they say they are. And your answer for the GG question was, like, comically anticharitable as well as deeply hypocritical.
That honestly confuses me. In your anti essay, you give a summary of GG’s arguments that is completely fair and believable, I agree with it as a GG-er, and there’s nothing you threw in to make it wrong or malicious. But in your pro-SJ essay, as well as your commentary outside this ITT, you don’t merely act as though you do not believe the pro-GG argument you lay out — you act as though the argument *does not exist at all*. Not “GG people say it is about this but they are wrong because of Reason X,” but “GG people never have any argument for it beyond the fact they hate women and are Bad and must be punished for being unpopular.”
LikeLiked by 5 people
I would be very interested to read your rebuttal of the pro-GG argument you made in the anti-SJ post.
LikeLike
Huitzil:
I’ve never said, or written, anything that can be fairly paraphrased as “GG people… are Bad and must be punished for being unpopular.” That seems like a strawman.
GG is diverse. There’s no membership rules, no governing council; anyone who says they’re part of GG, is part of GG. I should have explicitly included that in my answer, and I regret not doing that.
Nonetheless, I don’t think there’s much question that GG the movement (although not every individual GGer) was misogynistic. The level of harassing, hateful comments directed at people like Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian (often including misogynistic slurs), and the over-the-top hatred of Sarkeesian, are hard to explain unless we admit that misogyny is in play.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Misogyny is in play” is a much, much weaker claim than “the underlying explanation was that there’s a fuck load of misogynistic men in gaming.”
The former statement claims that it played a role, but the latter statement claims that everyone was motivated by misogyny and that there stated concerns were all fake.
Anyway, this may just be sloppy writing where you expressed yourself badly due to time constraints, but it did read like a horrible generalization.
LikeLike
Sans:
Sure, why not? A rebuttal to my fake anti-SJW comments on Gamergate.
I wrote, “SJWs have been taking over a lot of culture – not with armed force, but with social pressure and unfair accusations of racism and misogyny (and other kinds of bigotry), designed to make all but the most stubborn opponents give in.”
This argument fails to consider that some critiques of games and other works for misogyny, racism, and other kinds of bigotry can be fair. The implication is that all such criticisms 1) are “accusations,” and 2) are “unfair”; that’s not true.
This is problematic because even relatively mild and politely stated feminism criticisms of games – such as Anita Sarkeesian’s – were interpreted by Gamergaters as unfair attacks, attempted censorship, and unacceptable. It’s hard to avoid concluding that many GGers consider any feminist criticism of games at all unacceptable.
This argument also attributes malice to those who make the criticisms – the criticisms are assumed to be “designed” to silence opponents, rather than being sincere.
“In the case of gaming, this was shown in unfair reviews that paid more attention to social justice issues than to if the gameplay was actually, you know, good.”
It’s not “unfair” for a review to consider social justice issues. Reviewers can consider whatever they want. If a reviewer wasn’t bothered by the gameplay but was bothered by the sexism, why is it wrong for them to write that?
“It showed in awards giving to undeserving, uninteresting games because they checked off the right social justice boxes.”
This is something the Sad Puppies and Gamergaters have in common: a belief that their view of what works are “undeserving, uninteresting” is objective, and if awards are given to what they deem bad work, it must be for corrupt and unfair reasons – rather than because people’s tastes differ.
“And it showed in people – not just fans but also game designers – being afraid of setting off a social justice mob just because a pose was “too sexy” or a game’s avatars were not the SJ-approved race or color.”
This argument alludes to the Overwatch controversy, in which a character’s victory pose was changed in response to criticism that the pose was too sexy in a way that was not only inappropriate but out of character. But there was no “social justice mob”; someone made a polite criticism on a forum the game creators created for exactly that purpose. The game designers agreed that the pose seemed out of character and changed it to a different pin-up style pose.
And yet, I saw GGer after GGer discuss it as if the Overwatch pose change was unforgivable censorship accomplished with mob hatred.
“But even more than that, SJW overreach, and people resenting SJW mob tactics, had pushed a lot of people until they were ready to push back.”
I don’t deny that sometimes SJ inspired folks act in repugnant ways. But so do anti-SJW folks (such as the Sad Puppy movement to get Irene Gallo fired for an uncivil comment Gallo wrote in personal Facebood comments). Treating this as a uniquely SJ problem, rather than a problem with any large, passionate group on social media, is partisan and incorrect.
I should mention that I’m not actually all that close to GamerGate; I followed the Rabid/Sad Puppies controversy much more closely (as you may have already inferred). But many of the Puppies (including leaders like Vox Day) self-identified as GamerGaters, and that strongly colored my impressions of Gamergate.
LikeLike
Aapje wrote:
“The former statement claims that it played a role, but the latter statement claims that everyone was motivated by misogyny and that there stated concerns were all fake.”
I don’t agree. If I say “there are a fuck load of cartoonists in Portland” – and I have, in fact, said that many times – that isn’t saying that everyone in Portland is a cartoonist. It means only that we have a lot of cartoonists compared to the normal expected average.
I do think there are a lot of misogynists in GamerGate, as evidenced both by the enormous amount of misogynistic abuse associated with GG, the over-the-top hatred of feminist critics like Sarkeesian, and by the strong tendency to make excuses for the misogyny or to deny that it happens.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that GG started out with a false accusation that a female game designer had slept with a journalist for a good review, rather than (say) starting out by pointing out that advertising in game magazines created a strong incentive for magazines to publish good reviews from major advertisers.
I don’t think that means “everyone” in GG is motivated by misogyny; nor do I think that other stated concerns were all fake.
That said, I agree that what I wrote was intemperate and not nuanced, and if I could I’d rewrite it.
LikeLike
You didn’t say say “there’s a fuck load of misogynistic men in GG,” but “in gaming.” This implies that GG consists of the subset of gamers that are misogynistic men. The distinction between gamers and GG seems intentional, which led me to assume that this was intended to convey meaning.
You only offered one explanation, without noting that other explanations exist. This also suggests that you believed that this was the main reason.
Now, I’m not saying that this is the only way that one can read these statements. Nor am I claiming that you weren’t just sloppy. However, I do claim that a non-trivial segment of the population will read such a statement as I did.
BLM became nationally recognized after the Michael Brown shooting, which turned out to be a justified shooting. A lot of feminists rallied around the Duke lacrosse case, which turned out to be a false accusation. So I don’t think that you can justify dismissing the stated motives of the GG movement merely by them picking a bad example to initially rally around, unless you are willing to dismiss the SJ movements as well for similar behavior. Movements of angry people generally simmer until there is a ‘final drop in the bucket’ where people project all their grievances on a ‘triggering’ case, regardless of the merits of that case.
It’s also very one-sided to just point out that the initial accusation was proven false, as if this proves that the GG people are malicious. What I’ve seen is that they generally did admit that the initial accusation was wrong and then worked hard at finding the truth. This resulted in very solid evidence that the reviewer was involved with the development of the game. It is a clear conflict of interest when someone who helps make a game also reviews it, without disclosing their involvement.
I disagree that it is necessarily misogynist to make a false allegation against a woman, if people are honestly mistaken (just like false accusations against men are not necessarily misandrist). My view on GamerGate is that the pro-GG people honestly thought they had a smoking gun, then felt validated by the one-sided response by the gaming press to this story, then figured out that their initial accusation was wrong and then worked very hard on finding the actual truth, which did validate their initial accusation of unethical behavior by the gaming press. This seems like a basic example of ‘citizen journalism,’ with the same flaws that are common to that.
DoritosGate was an accusation that reviewers were too much influenced by advertisers and it happened years before GamerGate. It was sort of a trial run for GG (even with the name).
I would argue that there are several reasons why GamerGate became a much bigger phenomenon that have nothing to do with misogyny. But my post is already too long, so if you want to hear those, ask me and I’ll put it in a new comment.
LikeLike
@Barry
“The level of harassing, hateful comments directed at people like Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian (often including misogynistic slurs), and the over-the-top hatred of Sarkeesian, are hard to explain unless we admit that misogyny is in play.”
I would buy that if I ever saw the SJ side claiming that that some harassment of women (on the SJ side) wasn’t motivated by misogyny.
Like, people apparently agree that you understand the gamergaters pov, is that not enough to warrant the level of hostility towards these people? Or is the only explanation really that they just hate women?
If gamergate was honest about their motivations, would you honestly not expect to see this level of hostility towards the people perceived as their enemy?
I mean, it just seems to me your jumping to the “misogyny” explanation because that is easier to say “oh they just hate women” than perhaps understanding that people are being hurt by the actions of you and others like you.
LikeLike
I think this comment thread is getting a little aggressive towards Barry and I would encourage people to relax and consider that there is another person at the end of the Internet cable.
LikeLike
Aajpe, your link seems less than credible. The headline announces “Zoe Quinn: ‘Depression Quest Dead in the Water Without Grayson’,” putting it in quote marks to indicate that this is something Quinn actually said. Then there’s a photo of Quinn with “THE SMOKING GUN” in big letters.
You have to go five paragraphs deep to find out that Quinn actually wrote “This game would have been dead in the water months ago without you all” in a list of acknowledgements, in which his name was one among dozens listed. So the story itself is framed in a misleading way.
Many of the other claims in the article are dubious, for example:
Really? In my most recent book, my list of acknowledgements not only includes some professional acquaintances, it includes several people I’ve never met. (In the internet age, it’s pretty common to get help here and there from people you never meet.) Is there some rule that only “intimates” are ever thanked in game acknowledgements?
Grayson says that he looked at an early copy of Depression Quest and gave a couple of comments. That’s not a level of involvement that would ordinarily warrant including a disclaimer in a list of greenlit games.
And even if you disagree with that, that omission hardly justifies the incredible amount of vitriolic abuse Quinn and Grayson were subjected to. There’s such a thing as proportionality. Even if I accept all of that biased article’s claims as true, Gamergate’s actions would still be disproportionate, wrong and abusive.
(Not to mention the torrent of rage towards Sarkeesian, whose sin is that she has feminist opinions about video games; she’s never claimed to be either a game developer or a journalist.)
By the way, #BlackLivesMatter started after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, and feminism existed for decades before the Duke false rape accusation. So no, neither movement began with a false accusation, unlike gamergate.
I think I’ve spent too much time discussing gamergate – after all, I’m not a gamer – so I may bow out of further responses regarding gamergate on this thread. (As I’ve said, I’m more interested in the Hugo Awards controversy, and that has probably colored my view of Gamergate.) Thanks for the discussion.
LikeLike
@Barry
I agree that the framing goes beyond the proof given, but the evidence given fully supports my claim. I didn’t give you the link for the framing, I gave it for the actual evidence on the page.
The developer thanked the reviewer for his help with creating the game, in the HTML. She said that he was a tester in a tweet and the reviewer said that he tested her game before release. That is 3 hard pieces of evidence that the reviewer was indeed involved with the development of the game.
I respectfully ask you to limit your criticism to my claims and the actual evidence, otherwise this discussion will run out of control, where you take me to task for things I didn’t claim.
That is your personal opinion. My opinion is that if the level of involvement is sufficient to thank someone in the credits, it is definitely enough to require that person to recuse himself or divulge the relationship when reviewing the game.
You don’t have to agree, but I hope that you do want to admit that other people can hold this opinion in good faith, without any misogyny necessary.
I was not defending the vitriol in any way.
Fact is that GamerGate is/was a fully open movement. There was no way for anyone to be prevented from using the Twitter tag or sending a mail (other than reporting vitriol, which GGers did do). This also goes for anti-GG and I’ve also seen harassment, doxxing, threats, etc against GG.
Ultimately, any accusation that the other side is mostly or collectively dishonest and is motivated by other motives than what they argue, is stereotyping, silencing and in general, assuming bad faith. I assume that you don’t like it if people say that (most) feminists are motivated by misandry and don’t actually care about rape victims or such. People who make those claims employ the same tactic that I read in your comments about GG.
My ‘discourse norm’ is that this has no place in the debate, no matter if it is a tactic used against ‘us’, or if ‘we’ can use it as a weapon against others. Perhaps you are willing to consider adopting this norm. If you didn’t you intended to violate this norm, I would argue that you can still adopt better phrasing. As some say: intent is not magic.
I agree that the initial incident itself is relatively minor compared to the response, but that is the nature of ‘trigger incidents.’ They become symbols of a greater dissatisfaction and people will often rally around the incident until the greater issue is addressed.
IMO, a major reason why GG became so big is that the gaming press & such did not say: ‘our bad, we will use stricter ethics guidelines’ or even ‘we will investigate if the accusations are true.’ They didn’t engage the actual criticism, but instead there was stereotyping of the critics as degenerates, censoring discussions, etc.
The result was that GG became less and less about the Grayson/Quinn story and increasingly about fighting the suppression of certain viewpoints, the hive mind of the media, gamers being stereotyped, etc, etc. This is similar to how BLM is less about bad behavior by specific cops/judges or single incidents, but more about arguing that there is a pattern of behavior(s) against black people.
IMHO, the anti-GG movement is also guilty of responding disproportionately, assuming bad faith, projecting grievances, etc. In general, shitstorms happen when too many people on both sides escalate.
So GG became a battlefield in the culture war and like all the culture war battlefields, you get simplistic narratives where huge groups of people get condensed down to dumb stereotypes. The claim that GG is motivated by misogyny is one such stereotype. As I argued before, some people read that stereotype in your GG argument and consider this a uncharitable point of view.
Note that I think that humans have many irrationalities that make them susceptible to stereotyping and this is something that no one is immune to. So I hope that you don’t regard this as a personal attack on your character, but rather, as a suggestion that you may want to re-evaluate your assessment of GG, to define it as X, Y and Z, rather than just Z.
LikeLike
Thanks Barry! Genuine food for thought.
On your (not unfair) point about gamers rejecting all feminist criticism I immediatly though of Liana Kerzner’s ‘Gamers Guide to Feminism’ series. Not as an example of gamers being accepting, but more of an example of a feminist working hard and with moderate success to explain feminism in acceptable terms to the least accepting of gamers.
On reflection though, I think I’ve seen you chatting with her on twitter so you are probably already aware of it. If not, the link’s below. The content itself is entry level stuff, but recent events have highlighted the value of communicating progressive values to the disaffected in terms that they are willing to hear.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Bravo and thanks to ozy and everyone who took part!
LikeLike
Toggle’s complete victory is fascinating, but I think it was due to a failure mode specific to this particular participating audience. Toggle’s entry doesn’t read like much like SJ in isolation, but it reads very much like a rationalist-sphere person with very ambivalent views on SJ, just barely SJ-aligned and not afraid to be SJ-critical. Add to that “I’m pretty enchanted with the whole ‘competing access’ conversation that’s happening right now,” a reference to a discussion occurring amongst some popular pro-SJ rationalists trying to promote better nuance in the ingroup, and that cements the image the audience sees, but only if they’re familiar with the way pro-SJ rationalists/adjacents treat the subject.
Basically, mugaSofer’s comment on the original SJ#10 post.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Also, goddamn Meghan’s Gamergate write-up was a thing of beauty (even if I disagree with it a lot). Really sad she didn’t provide a blog or tumblr link, to see if she has more similar essays.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Could be.
My general bet was that a sincere essay by any given SJ-aligned person is going to read very differently from a book report on social justice, unless that person is new or marginal in the community. If you’re a social justice type of person that doesn’t really have anything to prove, you’ve probably thought a lot about what makes you *distinct* within that community, and what your particular perspective brings to the table. That is, you’re not just toeing the party line, you’re doing creative and exciting things within it.
So the character had a sense of things that was conscientiously 95% consistent with existing SJ orthodoxy (and clearly deferential to it), but was also willing to be unique and a bit weird when those departures were permissible.
LikeLiked by 5 people
To me, that sounds like the accusation is that Toggle knew their audience and catered to it. While the precise methods of doing that are particular to this audience, I think it is firmly in a category of known and established ways to succeed at impersonation.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It wasn’t an accusation. And in the first post announcing the ITT, there were plenty of comments about how the pro-SJ posts would be more ambivalent due to the audience involved, (only in the rattumb/adjacent region do you find pro-SJ people with the “my issues with SJ/the left/feminism let me show you them).
But ti does mean that the ideas drawn from the results of the ITT are much more limited in their applicability.
LikeLike
Heh. I was expecting to win the Strawman Award, after I wrote my pro-SJ entry in like half an hour at 3 AM since I’d forgotten I’d even signed up for the contest.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Wait wait wait, I just looked again… I was the third-MOST-obvious pro-SJ entry?
I’m almost scared to read the comment thread on that one now.
LikeLike
I am al-Aziz, and am pleased at the altitude of my ranking.
I do in fact have a blog, and if you wanted to read more of my opinions then, well, there they are! 🙂
LikeLiked by 5 people
I’m afab and bigender, but am amused that some commenters thought I was a trans woman.
LikeLike
I really thought your anti-SJ entry was sincere. Well done!
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks everyone for writing and commenting, and to Ozy for doing it. I enjoyed reading the essays and think I learned a lot. For example, in many cases, I surprised to learn which commenters see themselves as SJ or ASJ, and where they personally thought the line was. I’ll probably also add some thoughts to my essays over the next few days.
LikeLiked by 5 people
Yeah, as a number of people predicted, there were some big category disagreements about who even belongs in which column.
It’s interesting that a bunch of petty flame wars have seemingly redefined an entire political philosophy as being about personalities rather than issues. I mean, I feel like I’m in the minority just for thinking that “social justice” is about what positions you hold rather than who your Tumblr/Twitter buddies are.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I believe that humans are immensely sensitive to social pressure (which is why gender & other norms are not just something we ignore). It’s likely that we couldn’t have build up civilization without it, so it’s not even a bad thing, per se (just not rational).
The logical consequence is that people often first pick a tribe (and thus label) and then redefine the label to their liking. As such, you’ve got SJs who could easily be classified anti’s and vice versa.
With the increasing balkanization, this will probably get worse, where increasingly, you will get two tribes who hate each other deeply, but where it’s pretty easy to find people in the other tribe that are closer to one’s beliefs than some other people who are ostensibly ‘like us.’
As this process continues, it becomes increasingly hard to preserve tribe unity by focusing on actual issues, so it will probably become more and more about personalities and fake issues that are more virtue signalling than actual concerns.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Good points, though I’m skeptical that the balkanization is increasing. I think it’s just that more of the conflicts are getting fought in public rather than simmering quietly in the shadows like they were before.
This is not necessarily a productive thing, of course, and it’s exacerbated by the gamified mechanics of the social media platforms they’re aired on, but I don’t think it’s anything really new or unique.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Some remarks about my submissions:
– Though I’m anti-SJ, I endorse most of my SJ submission. I put myself on the anti-SJ side because I think its reasons are more decisive, and because even though the SJ points are correct in theory, they don’t have much to do with the theory or practice of the mainstream of the actual movement, apart from sometimes being used as intellectual cover.
– Coming up with examples to support my case was somewhat difficult even when I was arguing for my own side.
– It’s easier for me to write as if I were responding to an opponent rather than starting from scratch. This was expected for anti-SJ submissions, but it was suspect for SJ.
– Some pointed out that the use of “blacks” in my SJ submission. I considered saying “PoC” instead, but I thought that’d look fake because it’s not a term the readers of this blog are likely to use even if they’re SJ, and it’d look like I was trying too hard. And “African-American” sounds too wooden.
LikeLiked by 2 people
About that last point, I think the term you want is “black people”.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Melanin enriched is the best, IMO. It sounds like a healthy food supplement.
LikeLike
Same, in reverse.
While it would have been a greater challenge to construct a persona & belief system that is genuinely significantly different from my own, and in the ITT context it was perhaps a copout not to do that, I decided it would actually be a more valuable intellectual exercise for me to present a slightly-alternate-reality version of myself who was disenchanted with SJ.
The hardest part of this was writing the essay in such a way that it wouldn’t be clearly paired with my pro-SJ entry. By default I write in lists and bullet points, which I did a lot in my pro-SJ entry, so I couldn’t do it in my anti-SJ entry. But of course trying to use a writing style one doesn’t normally use increases the risk of the result sounding stiff and weird. I think I did fine, though.
Questions 1 and 3 were hard for the same reason – my opinions on discourse and random Internet conflicts aren’t particularly ideological. I basically just changed the emphasis.
By contrast, question 2 was easy – I brainstormed by listing a bunch of SJ failure modes and also things I’m unsure/ambivalent about with regard to SJ, then wrote it up. In a sense this was easier to write than my pro-SJ answer to #2. I’m not sure if this says something about my ideology or if it’s just that my anti-SJ answer was less constrained by truth so I didn’t have to examine everything I said for imprecision.
LikeLike
(“more valuable intellectual exercise” in that it helps me understand my own views better. Perhaps this is not quite the point of an ITT but I guess it worked pretty well?)
LikeLike
Scoring myself.
Walter SJ Picks:
1: ASJ, truly ASJ ==> Correct
2: SJ, truly ASJ ==> Wrong
3: SJ, truly SJ ==> Correct
4: SJ, truly SJ ==> Correct
5: ASJ, truly ASJ ==> Correct
6: ASJ truly ASJ ==> Correct
7: SJ, truly ASJ ==> Wrong
8: SJ, truly SJ ==> Correct
9: SJ, truly SJ ==> Correct
10: SJ, truly ASJ ==> Wrong
11: SJ, truly SJ ==> Correct
12: ASJ, truly ASJ ==> Correct
13: ASJ, truly SJ ==> Wrong
14: ASJ, truly ASJ ==> Correct
15: SJ, truly SJ ==> Correct
16: SJ, truly SJ==> Correct
17: SJ, truly SJ==> Correct
Looks like 13 correct, 4 wrong.
Walter’s ASJ picks
#1: ASJ, truly ASJ ==> Correct
#2: ASJ, truly SJ ==> Wrong
#3: ASJ, truly SJ ==> Wrong
#4: ASJ, truly ASJ ==> Correct
#5: ASJ, truly ASJ ==> Correct
#6: SJ, truly SJ ==> Correct
#7: ASJ, truly ASJ ==> Correct
#8: ASJ, truly ASJ ==> Correct
#9: SJ, truly SJ ==> Correct
#10: SJ, truly SJ ==> Correct
#11: ASJ, truly SJ ==> Wrong
#12: ASJ, truly ASJ ==> Correct
#13: SJ, truly ASJ ==> Wrong
#14: SJ, truly SJ ==> Correct
#15: SJ, truly SJ==> Correct
#16: ASJ, truly ASJ ==> Correct
#17: SJ, truly SJ ==> Correct
Looks like 13 correct, 4 wrong.
I’m pretty proud of this result. Little over 75%. *pats self on back*
Thanks for running this Ozy! Great fun.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Looks like in both sets I had 3 missed impersonators, 1 rejecting of a genuine person.
LikeLike
I regret not keeping a running total like Walter, now I have to go back through 34 comments sections to see how I voted 😦
So, Ozy, did you learn about gamergate? That question did seem to create the most… creative response.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Scoring the hive mind:
Looks like the “impersonate SJ” side of things worked pretty well flawlessly.
Out of 9 SJ people who tried to present as SJ, every one of them passed. By contrast, 5 out of 8 ASJ participants who tried to present as SJ got < 50% passing grades.
That's quite impressive, not just screening out most ASJ impersonators, but, even better, NOT screening out any genuine SJ participants.
On the other side…
The ASJ side of the test was almost useless, basically everyone passed. Every ASJ was rated as ASJ, but so were all but one SJ participant.
I guess, once again, no false positives, but the hivemind let every SJ impersonator except one through.
LikeLiked by 4 people
I wonder if a factor in this might have been, as at least one person hypothesized, that a number of the pro-SJ people were using the anti-SJ entries as an excuse to vent actual frustrations with the ingroup rather than focusing on constructing a false persona, so their answers might read as more honest because they were to some extent genuinely honest answers.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Of course, this assumes that people on the anti-SJ side didn’t do the same thing. Did anyone?
LikeLike
It looks like the hivemind got 11 wrong, for 23 out of 34 correct.
LikeLike
I’m relieved to report that all the SJ entries I found particularly repugnant (5, 6, 7, 14) were fake.
LikeLiked by 5 people
Further thoughts on the test itself:
Did anyone else find themselves stymied for a while by an inability to pin down what even constituted a “discourse norm?” I remember at least one of the actual answerers mentioning this problem as well, and it was a big hurdle for me in both of my entries.
LikeLike
I guess I’ve read so many discussions about SJ & discourse norms that this question made a lot of sense to me.
LikeLike
Huh, so I got 10 right and 7 wrong on each side. 20/34. That’s, uh, a little better than chance…
LikeLiked by 2 people
Do you have any ideas on what kinds of things mislead you?
LikeLike
Interesting question! Let’s take a look at what I got wrong.
SJ, real, I said fake: 15
SJ, fake, I said real: 1, 6, 10, 12, 14
Anti, real, I said fake: 5, 12
Anti, fake, I said real: 2, 3, 9, 14, 15
(You’ll notice this is inconsistent with what I wrote above/earlier; going by the comment I left on it, I apparently voted real on SJ #9, not fake as I recorded. So in fact I got 21/34. Man, my numbers would have been so symmetric otherwise…)
So, looking at each category:
SJ & real, I said fake: Only example here is #15, so it’s hard to say. I don’t recall what I might have thought here, but my suspicion is that it’s what others have pointed out above: It’s very bare-bones, doesn’t exhibit much that’s particularly SJ in the first two answers, and makes a sudden turn for the worse on the third question.
Anti & real, I said fake: There’s only two to go with here, #5 and #12. On the former I recorded my reasoning in the comments — it seemed like a mishmash of different, incompatible posititons, each of which individually could be called “anti-SJ”, but don’t fit together into anything coherent. (It still seems like that. 😛 ) #12… well, I could detail my reasoning here, and what parts made me think it was SJ, but it’s a pretty close call, and anyway I don’t know how much it would help. I think maybe the best summary is, to me it seemed to have a pretty SJ-style of consequentialism to it. In any case, It doesn’t seem to have much in common with Anti #5 or SJ #15.
So, I’m not seeing a common thread among my false positives.
How about the false negatives? I had a lot more of these.
SJ & fake, I said real: I don’t know that there’s any common thread here. #6 was I’m pretty sure a “this is too bizarre to be fake” due to its answer to the second question, so good job there LHC. #10 had a very real-sounding answer to #2. Like, this isn’t just someone writing about this, this is someone who cares about this. Good rhetorical style. So good job there Toogle. As for the other three… I dunno, #1, #12, and #14 all seem pretty generic. Not seeing much. Maybe I could get a better idea of the common thread if I compared it to the true positives, but I don’t want to put in that time right now…
Finally, anti & fake, I said real: Yeah, again I dunno. #2 hits the right tone and rhetorical style, certainly, similar to Toggle above, so again, good job there Daniel. #3 mentions immigrating from a Soviet-sphere country, which certainly adds to believability; my experience is people from there tend to be pretty wary of Leftism (as opposed to liberalism). Fro #9, I think the “three C’s” did a lot to convince me; bothering to come up with that is, like, really taking the whole “persona” thing seriously! To repeat the old Teller quote: “Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” So hats off to Meaningless Monicker. With #14, I think the “why I left” frame did a lot to convince me — you fool, Sniffnoy, that’s an easy trick!
If there’s a common thread here, I guess, it’s doing the things that make it seem like this is a particular person speaking and not just a bunch of assorted anti-SJ points. #15 seems to be the only exception: Going by the comment I left, the tipping point there seems to have been the recognition that SJ often considers itself the underdog in situations where it’s not, something I don’t think I’ve otherwise seen SJers acknowledge.
So, I don’t know how helpful that is, but there you go.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“#6 was I’m pretty sure a “this is too bizarre to be fake” due to its answer to the second question, so good job there”
I wrote #6 and am pro, so you were right.
I wrote the essay in a bit of hurry, so it probably wasn’t the best quality of work.
Also, this is awkward but thanks to Ozy for running this. I didn’t thank them earlier and then I realized that I probably should…
LikeLike
@sniffnoy
In my Russian-American social circle, the parents (age ~50ish) are sort of anti-SJ in the way I described in another comment, while the kids (teens and 20s) are much more pro-SJ.
Interesting that a couple of people seemed to agree with you. I didn’t do any special digging or dissembling to identify this point, it was just one of my general issues with (some) SJ.
LikeLike
No, I did write SJ #6.
LikeLike
Oh, you’re right, I misread.
LikeLike
LOL I got 11/17 and 7/17. Not so good!
LikeLiked by 2 people
18 / 34 is still better than the coin’s 17/34.
LikeLike
So, as a couple people have suggested (and some of us have already done), shall we each do a write-up on how we constructed our fake arguments for the other side?
My initial writing prompt, I confess, was, “Oh boy, a chance to vent my ingroup frustrations without having to feel like I’m betraying my friends or giving ammo to the assholes! I don’t even have to craft a false persona, since apparently everyone else but me believes that ‘social justice’ is about who you follow on Tumblr rather than what your policy positions are!”
But of course, being one of those overly elaborate and intense writers, I wound up crafting a persona anyway, complete with backstory and favorite foods and all those character details. I chuckled at the commentator who called my entry “low-information,” given that at one point in the writing process I forced myself to cut a bunch of subplots just because I felt it would be shoehorning in superfluous world-building, which I already know is one of my bad habits as a writer and I’m trying to cut down on it. I guess I went too far in the other direction?
I do agree with that commentator who said that my specific examples were too recent. I do have way longer-simmering grievances than those, it’s not just a “recent memory” thing. I should have gone with that incident a couple years ago where Tumblr lionized someone who claimed to have witnessed an attempted child abduction at a brony convention and not reported it to the staff or the cops or anyone else (the story had a bunch of holes in it too, but even if you believe her, sheesh), solely because she ranted about how disgusting bronies were. I still did okay judging by the numbers, but namedropping that fiasco probably would have scored me way higher.
I probably also should have worked in phrases like “virtue signaling” at some point, but I was worried about coming across as just dropping thought-terminating buzzwords rather than making arguments (that may have been typical-minding of me, though).
Uh, that’s all I can think of re: my writing process. Any further questions?
LikeLiked by 3 people
I don’t even have to craft a false persona, since apparently everyone else but me believes that ‘social justice’ is about who you follow on Tumblr rather than what your policy positions are!”
“Policy positions” seems a bit too narrow. E.g. when I’ve seen, say, lists of BLM’s demands, my reaction has been “Huh, most of these are good demands”; but I still think their world-model and reasoning are wrong. Getting to the same positions by different means is a fragile sort of agreement. (Unless of course one of you is confabulating rather than reasoning forward, but that’s not a great sign either.)
LikeLike
It will be fun to read everybody’s writeup! I went ahead and posted mine to the essay’s comment section, since it was long-ish, so people that want to read it can go to https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/itt-social-justice-10/comment-page-1/#comment-22798
LikeLiked by 3 people
For pro-sj, I got 13 right, 2 wrong, and didn’t vote on 2.
For anti-sj, I got 8 right, 5 wrong, and didn’t vote on 5.
Totals: 21 right, 7 wrong, 7 unvoted.
#3 was the pro-social justice essay I was most sure of, #12 was the anti-social justice essay I was most sure of.
Background info about where I’m coming from: I am broadly pro-sj, and I was a part of Extreme SJW Tumblr for ~a year.
– Kit
LikeLiked by 1 person
It occurs to me that when we judge ourselves as voters, we might want to be more concerned about mistakenly judging a sincere essay as insincere than mistakenly letting an insincere essay pass.
The sincere essay actually IS SJ or ASJ, so if I vote fake, I’m definitely wrong, but the if I let an insincere essay through, it might just be something that deserves to pass the ITT., I don’t want to open my filter enough to just vote everything sincere, but sufficiently good fakes and all sincere essays should both pass an accurate filter, right?
LikeLiked by 7 people
My guesses, from last post:
Pro : APAPA APPAP PPAAA PA (8P/9A)
Anti: PPAAA AAPPA PAAAP AP (7P/10A)
True answers:
Pro : AAPPA AAPPA PAPAP PP
Anti: APPAA PAAPP PAAPP AP
PPAAA AAPPA PAAAP AP
Masked, this comes out to:
Pro : TFftT TFtfF tFfTf tf (8/17 correct; 4/8 fake and 4/9 real)
Anti: fTFtt FtfTF TttFT tT (11/17 correct; 5/9 fake and 6/8 real)
for a total of 19/34, or 56% correct. Or in other words, I am not very good at this game. 😦
LikeLiked by 1 person
My final tally is 11/17 in each of the two categories.
As I mentioned earlier, this might have been even more interesting if it had a more ideologically diverse group, both writing the essays and voting on them; as it is, it was predominantly rationalist-adjacent, and the writers knew the voters would be of that sort too, so even the fake ones were geared in that direction. Thus, we got rationalist positions with SJ or anti-SJ flavors added, like the flavoring packets in a food mix (New Bachelor Chow: Now With Flavor! — Futurama). The Gamergate question got the most interesting responses, since it had to take a position on an issue with intense tribal loyalties involved, but even there, several took positions in the lines of “both sides suck” or “I don’t know or care much about it”.
If there had been wider recruiting for this, it could have had the likes of Tumblr intersectional feminists (Kumquatgender, pronouns Ku/Kum/Kus) and Reddit alt-righters (You’re all a bunch of cucks!), and then both the real and fake essays would have a degree of extremeness not found in rationalist circles.
LikeLiked by 4 people
I think we had a fair amount of ideological diversity, particularly on the anti side– we had an Objectivist, a neoreactionary, a HBDer, and a… whatever Meghan is.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Going by her answers to the first two questions (“obey customs”, “beware of taking ideas seriously”), Meghan sounds to me basically like a conservative (with a bit of a libertarian lean).
LikeLike
Conservative?
There was no mention of valuing the sacred and a primary suspicion of authority.
There was rejection of entryism on fairness grounds and justification of Chesteron’s fence on positivist/empirical grounds, so that reads as leftist to me.
And then when you have flat denial of coherent philosophy, my final guess would be anarchist. Or possibly Walt Whitman.
I also think that “anarchist” fits with the third answer.
LikeLike
I’d be curious to see if the more extreme folks were worse at detecting fakes, too.
Common wisdom says they should be, but I’ve always wondered, are the much-vaunted Reasonable people really that much better at applying epistemic humility and charity, or do we just think we are?
LikeLiked by 1 person
The anti-SJ #9 link currently actually goes to anti-SJ #8; would you mind fixing that? Thank you!
LikeLike
Dammit, I did worse than chance!
I guessed correctly on only 16/34.
I judged 11 fake essays as sincere: SJ5, SJ7, SJ10, SJ12, ASJ2, ASJ3, ASJ9, ASJ10, ASJ14, ASJ15, ASJ17
And I even judged 7 sincere essays as fake: SJ9, SJ13, SJ15, SJ17, ASJ1, ASJ5, ASJ8
Here’s why I judged each of those 7 as fake:
SJ9: I was suspicious about the concession that some groups of people might be particularly prone to making bad decisions.
SJ13: I thought it sounded like an Anti-SJ trying to make the pro-SJ position sound reasonable.
SJ15: The politeness of the answer to #1 contradicted the rudeness of the answer to #3.
SJ17: I thought the historical examples were unusual.
ASJ1: I doubted anyone whose highest value is truth would say the Republicans are more committed to truth.
ASJ5: I knew it could be neoreactionary, but I figured most Anti-SJs aren’t neoreactionaries so I voted Pro-SJ.
ASJ8: I thought an anti-SJ wouldn’t use the term “patriarchal”.
Guess I can’t tell the difference between an SJ and an Anti-SJ.
LikeLike
As an anti-SJ, I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the word. One the one hand, it is absolutely correct that traditional gender norms exist and that they tend to enforce a gendered hyperagent/hypoagent dichotomy. This does/did tend to place the women in a position of coverture, although I strongly disagree that this necessarily makes women (much) worse off (as there are many benefits to hypoagency and downsides to hyperagency), especially for specific individuals.
However, calling both traditional Western culture and modern Western culture patriarchal implies that the same solutions are (still) necessary. In fact, this claim is often made implicitly by SJ people. However, the patriarchal laws that existed have been mostly removed (and the ones that remain are generally most harmful to men). In modern society, most gender normative behavior is not enforced by law and in many cases not even by strong condemnation, but rather by fairly subtle ideas about how one maximizes their happiness in the context of their gender, ideas about inherent differences between the sexes, etc.
So I see it as a major failure of mainstream SJ that the modern remnants of patriarchy are usually simply regarded as a weakened version of the old patriarchy, instead of being substantially different. Some parts of patriarchy have been strongly dismantled, while other parts are nearly as strong as they ever were (and some of these get support from a lot of feminists).
But I still use the term patriarchal in a modern context sometimes, because sometimes I just want to make a different point, which is better served by adopting the SJ terminology to a certain extent.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yeah, I basically agree with you.
LikeLike
This whole thing was really fun, and I thank Ozy for hosting it. Unfortunately I’ve been really distracted during the past week and didn’t even get around to reading the last several anti-SJ entries until after this conclusion was posted. All in all, I missed voting on quite a few of the anti-SJ entries, although I’m sure I voted on all the pro-SJ ones.
I’m surprised that apparently neither Veronica nor Osberend participated, since there were a couple of entries I tentatively credited to them (I don’t think I mentioned Osberend’s name in any comment but did say “this fits a particular anti-SJ person who hangs out around here”). Still, I have a strongly-held model of the personalities and beliefs of few enough commenters here that my attempts to guess authors of entries in this contest were bound to be mostly useless.
I think I would have had much more fun still if I had signed up for the contest myself. As I stated at the time as a comment under the announcement post, participating wouldn’t have felt honest for me since I don’t really feel comfortable identifying either as pro-SJ or as anti-SJ. I probably would have written sincere answers under both sides, each including “the truth but not the whole truth” (maybe even by writing my full and thorough opinion on each question and then chopping it into pieces, sorting them into “pro-SJ” and “anti-SJ” piles, and reassembling into two smaller answers — I’m only sort of joking here). Interestingly, it turns out that many participants did almost that: a few only mildly leaned one way or the other, and even some who leaned strongly in one direction carefully picked out some ideas from the other side which they agreed with and went with those. I guess it’s easier to write plausible essays which are sincere but leave out other opinions supporting an opposing side rather than which defend ideas one has disdain for.
Still, by not participating, I felt more comfortable sitting back and frequently commenting on the entries, and I found the whole thing very enjoyable.
LikeLiked by 3 people
This ITT didn’t have a “most human human” prize, so there wasn’t really any motivation to be convincing as such in the honest section. Given that, how we wanted to write our truthful essays was more or less up to us. And I was genuinely nervous about the (admittedly very low) risk of getting swept up in a culture-war twitter storm and being thrown around as a symbol by people that don’t understand the context in which I’m writing.
At least in my case, that meant that the essay came out a lot more conciliatory than it might have otherwise, if I was just trying to demonstrate my bona fides most credibly. For my purposes, the value of ASJ4 came primarily *after* the results were announced, while people on both sides are reading it as a sincere statement of belief by somebody that’s slapped a big “ASJ” on their forehead. Since I’d rather not carry around a permanent mark of being a fighter in the culture wars, that means I’m trying to present myself as nonthreatening (dissent more than opposition), concerned with values shared by both sides, and basically reasonable in the face of disagreement.
All these things are *true*, of course. But the I was incentivized to highlight these things, making it easier to read me as closer to the center. If the reward structure were different, I might have been a bit more pointed.
LikeLike
I really liked the personality presented in your ASJ entry and I’m a little disappointed by you saying it’s not perfectly genuine. Still, nice 🙂
LikeLike
I remember that you and a few others said some really kind things in the comments. Those compliments made me very happy! It may be a bit selfish to say, but I hope I didn’t just lower your opinion of me.
I took the ‘honest’ constraint seriously, so there’s nothing false or even misleading; I tried to include the core ideological and emotional truths as best I could. But yeah, there was definitely a performative element. At least it was no *less* genuine than, like, the fairly dry tone I tend to use on the tumblr when I’m talking about rocks or economics or whatever. I suspect that any kind of writing for a large audience has an element of self-portraiture to it, and that means you end up being at least a little conscious of your text as a thing mediated by interpretation, and the goals you have for that process.
Actually, I think I may not have been performative *enough*, since I was trying to convey some fairly tricky mental states and people seem to have been mostly just confused. So a more sophisticated craftsmanship might have gotten me a bit closer to ‘genuine’, paradoxical as it may seem.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@Toggle
Possibly the difference is just that I modulate my tone/emphasis for my context based on what instinctively feels more effective for that context, whereas you have a really clear idea of what you’re highlighting and why.
LikeLike
I think I ended up Judge King? Do I have that right? Did anybody beat 26/34?
I award myself every internet point!
LikeLiked by 4 people
Pingback: Intellectual Turing Test: A Reflection – The Reconstructionist
I posted my write-up thoughts at the links below.
Ozy, thanks again, and if you’re up for it, I’d love a thread in a little bit about what you learned from or think about the ITT, either about ITTs or the underlying topic, and would love to talk about that.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Pingback: Intellectual Turing Test Results: Silver Medal | Alas, a Blog
It seems to me that, based on this admittedly tiny sample size, pro-sj people are better at faking anti-sj than vice versa.
Only 3/8 of the anti-SJ writers were able to pass as pro-SJ for at least 50% of readers, while 8/9 pro-SJ writers were able to pass as anti-SJ for at least 50% of readers.
Put another way, the average score of anti-SJs trying to pass as pro-SJ was 48.6%, or 45.5% if we drop the lowest and highest scores. The average score of pro-SJs trying to pass as anti-SJ was 61.6%, or 65% if we drop lowest and highest.
Am I missing something?
LikeLike
It has been argued that these are not mirrored, as anti-SJ has a far greater variety.
Imagine doing a challenge of communist vs anti-communist. Impersonating the communist would require a fairly specific viewpoint and most communists and anti-communists would be pretty familiar with the pro-commie arguments, as communism is a topic that they rally around. So faking it is fairly hard, as relatively minor mistakes could trip people up.
In contrast, the anti-communists can be social-democrat, anarchist, monarchist, etc. A social-democrat who feels strongly about anti-communism might not actually know much about monarchism. So a relatively sloppy monarchist argument might still seem real to most anti-communists.
So I think that the results are fairly logical and shouldn’t be used to infer too much.
—
I would also argue that it is relatively easy for rationalist SJs to write an anti-SJ piece, as they appear to be outliers in the SJ movement, so they could often simply criticize mainstream SJ(W) honestly and then be fairly believable, if they tweak that a little (leave out pro-SJ jargon and/or use anti-SJ jargon). Various writers have said that they used this method.
I’d really like to see a similar experiment with people in the vein of David Futrelle and Milo. I’d expect them to be much worse at faking the opposition (and perhaps also at writing a believable argument for their own side).
LikeLiked by 1 person
This seems like you’re saying it’s harder to imitate SJs because all SJs share one belief system.
If that were true, I’d think it would make it easier; it’s very easy to imitate a in-the-party-apparatus Democrat, for instance, because they literally are all working from the same talking points.
But I don’t think that’s true; there’s a lot more variety in pro-SJers than you apparently realize. TERFs are pro-SJ, and so are trans feminists, and so are sex workers’ rights advocates, but they’re not even close to interchangable. An anarchist breaking store windows in Portland don’t think at all the same as the Oberlin College flute professor, but both probably consider themselves pro-social-justice. I think Ozy is pro-SJ, and so is the incoherent person on Tumblr condemning people as monsters for liking Joss Whedon’s shows. Etc, etc.
Pro-SJ folks have recognizable terms of art and language quirks, which need to be used in the correct fashion, but so do you folks.
I’m sure that many SJ folks did try to think of their own critiques of the worse aspects of people on their own side, and use that as the basis for their critiques. That was the basis for much of my gamergate answer, for example.
But I’d be surprised if there weren’t anti-SJ folks who did the same. To not have that strategy available (at least for question 3), one would have to think there was nothing at all to criticize about gamergate.
LikeLike
I think that it’s safe to say that more SJ and anti-SJ people would be familiar with TERF arguments than NRx arguments. So a bad TERF imitation would be easier to detect for the readers here than a bad NRx argument.
Ultimately, anti-SJ is not actually a position in itself, it generally is the result of someone having beliefs that conflict with SJ so much that they become anti. But that conflict can be on very different aspects of SJ. An NRx’er and me would both consider themselves anti-SJ, but we disagree with each other way more than I would disagree with the average SJ person. Their criticism with SJ would be with the end goals of SJ, my criticism is with the methods. I also have way less knowledge of NRx, because I see it as a powerless group that doesn’t really threaten society/me, so resisting is a waste of time. A NRx’er might plausibly feel the same about people like me.
I also want to point out that it doesn’t actually matter if SJ as a whole is more diverse, it matters whether the submissions were diverse. We didn’t actually get very much diversity in the pro-SJ submissions (which is why they bored me, to be honest). No TERF submissions, no SJW, mostly just rationalist SJ (or whatever you want to call it). These should be fairly similar to the beliefs of most SJ visitors to the site and very familiar to the anti-SJ visitors, who see those same opinions expressed here.
The anti-SJ submissions were actually way more diverse, with an actual NRx submission, for example.
Sure.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It’s unproven, but Godfrey Elfwick claims to have done this IRL:
LikeLike
Pingback: What the Haters Hate – Put A Number On It!