timorl @timorl@qoto.org

@pganssle
I vaguely remember seeing something like this ages ago, a page calculating or at least presenting data about micromorts. I doubt it would be as comprehensive as you would hope, but I wasn't able to find it again anyway, so that's a moot point.

@Vectorfield @freemo

1.1. These are not language games, these are different words with different meanings. I use "systematic" mostly in the same meaning as in the phrase "systematic error". So my claim here is not about systemic racism at all, it's much less controversial once you understand what I'm saying. I won't be rewriting my explanation, but if you reread the one in my previous post keeping in mind that I'm not talking about systemic racism it should be obvious.

1.2. I do somewhat believe that systemic racism in the US is a problem, although not with much credence. As I mentioned before I have never even been there, which limits my knowledge. Anyway, I don't have a comprehensive list of the data that convinced me of that, but a quick internet search returned https://www.thoughtco.com/systemic-racism-3026565 , which seems to provide a reasonable overview after you click on some of the links inside of the article (the article itself is an overview, so it doesn't have citations, but the articles linked within do). And I really want to stress that I don't know exactly how much various claims about systemic racism are true – some are clearly much better documented than others, and I am certainly not endorsing the whole package as true, due to my limited knowledge. If you want we can play by looking for evidence for or against specific claims of systemic racism, but since it's a very broad topic by nature finding a single citation that will support its entirety is not feasible.

2. Why not? I never excluded them, some of them are known to introduce biases others are known not to, and yet others are uncertain. For example, as far as colours go there is the whole field of priming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)), which, while hit hard by the replication crisis, still provides some insight in how these might influence reasoning. Anyway the question is not whether these factors influence beliefs and experiences, but rather to what extent. There is quite a bit of research on that, e.g. a quick internet search returned https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/027277579290003L, which seems to me to be a pretty standard article in the field. Note that despite the title it looks at many factors other than ethnicity and religion and performs statistical analysis on these factors. That also is usual in these branches of science.

3. The article I linked in 2. is an example of empirical data, but it's also unnecesssary. For example I don't think you would argue against a person who grew up in Poland being vastly more likely to be Christian, than a person who grew up in China, so I am not sure what you are trying to argue here. I don't think "people's beliefs are influenced by their experiences" is a controversial claim?

4. Again, these are completely different words with different meanings, you really shouldn't be conflating them. In particular incentives are properties of the system, moreso than of people, so obviously they influence both wokes and non-wokes. There are some differences in the incentives because of group membership resulting in slightly different environments, but the wokes are well aware that they are also influenced by the incentives they criticise. Hence all the self-flaggelation which is so strong, that it sometimes ends up comical.

Being subject to incentives is also not a thing that should imply a person is good or bad, since it's a property of the system they live in, not of them. If anything, it's an explanation why sometimes good people do bad things, despite really being good people. The more combatative parts of the SJW movement scream at people who disagree with them not because these people are subject to incentives to do bad things, but because they refuse to recognize that this is the case. I personally don't think this is a useful approach (obviously, as I am not screaming at you :D), but it's also not at the core of the ideology. Many other SJWs prefer explaining these things calmly and discussing rather than screaming.

5. I think we are in agreement about the meta-claim here – there is some merit to most ideas, but that doesn't mean these ideas are actually good.

On the object level I still think the ideas expressed in the quotes you provided are good, you are just misinterpreting them. I think I explained this in the previous post and you seem to be repeating yourself from theone before, so I'm not sure if me repeating myself will do much good, but lets try anyway: "Being good..." – not about human agency, read the second paragraph of point 4. above to see my interpretation. "Whites have..." is a claim resulting from the fact that communicating experiences is really hard, not that reasoning is completely impossible.

SJWism is focusing on the bad incentives, because these are the ones that need fixing. We can endlessly talk about all the good that humans and humanity does (seriously, I can, I greatly appreciate the beauty of what we achieved over history), but this won't help much if we are trying to fix the bad parts. And it's definitely not just applying it to one side, see the comments on self-flaggelation above. Maybe this needs some illustration: https://leagueofthesouth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Whites-apologizing-for-slavery-July-2015.jpg . When SJWs go to such lengths criticizing themselves for the things they criticize others, that they end up doing comically stupid stuff, then criticizing the movement for not being critical of itself is really silly.

6. Oh, now you just haven't actually read what I (and apparently even the author of the piece you linked) have written. Neither of us denies the underlying truth of "2+2=4", we just recognize this statement is part of a framework that has a lot of historical baggage. This is not just sophism, being able to recognize that the frameworks we use are frameworks and not universal truths is **absolutely crucial** to progress, also scientific. Galileo would not be able to revolutionize physics if he didn't recognize Aristotelian movement as just a model. Otherwise you might end up saying things like https://libquotes.com/albert-a-michelson/quote/lbx2i7j .

7. You seem to be unaware of any kinds of reasoning under uncertainty. If you want a relatively non-ideological, but quite technical introduction to the topic I heartily recommend "Probability Theory:The Logic of Science" by E. T. Jaynes, if you want something more ideological (although I suspect you would really enjoy that specific ideology) I recommend https://rationalitybook.com/, you can download the full book for free if you put 0$ as the price.

Anyway, the point is that knowledge is not binary. I don't either believe something is true or false, but I have levels of credence I assign to various statements. I am as sure of "2+2=4" as I can be, very sure about where I am right now, quite sure where I will be in an hour, mostly convinced that the theory of relativity is close to correct, strongly suspect that my epistemology is close to correct, weakly suspect that the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics is close to correct etc. When I say that my knowledge about anything (including morality) is biased I am not throwing my hands up in the air in woe and declaring that I cannot know anything, just that there are biases there the strength and direction of which is too complicated to eliminate them completely. Thus, these biases have to lower (but not eliminate!) my credence in my beliefs affected by them. If I learn more about the biases or get any other evidence about a specific subject I can adjust my credence up or down. The formal theory about how that should work is in the books I recommend above (spoiler: it's probability), but obviously in practice one has to use approximations. Even if objective knowledge is unattainable, truth can still be approximated to the best of our ability.

Sure I want to continue, what makes you think I wouldn't? Although I am quite sad you think this is not productive, if it's any consolation I am pretty sure it's productive for me.

@Vectorfield @freemo I tried mentioning explicitly how much credence I have in each claim made in the previous post. So for many of them, yes, I do believe them, for others I at least find them plausible. None are obviously wrong. And the article you link is actually reasonably good, for pop mathematics, but I'll get deeper into that in the mathematics section.

The first claim is not about racism, at least my rephrasing of it isn't. (Both the rephrasings don't quite correspond to how the original argument was divided into two, I felt the division I chose made the actual statements being made clearer. Sorry for not stating this explicitly.) As I mentioned, I am less certain about the concrete racism claims, due to my limited knowledge of the US. Concerning the different usage of the word racism, referring to systemic racism rather than overt racism, I also don't like the name, but I have yet to see someone propose a better one for the concept. After all the concept refers to different experiences people of different races encounter within the system, ending up in some races worse off. If you have a better name than "systemic racism" for the concept I would gladly hear it. Whether this is actually the case in the US is an empirical question, for which I think SJWs have provided some evidence, but as already mentioned I am not completely sure about this.

Now I see we tripped over a small language barrier: "systematic" is not the same as "systemic". In this context it just means that people will be exposed to experiences drawn from different distributions, and these distributions depend on various properties of their backgrounds. The traits of these backgrounds are also not distributed evenly, so the distributions will be different in systematic ways – to give an uncontrovensial example people in Poland will have different experiences than people in China, and these differences are not purely random. They will be exposed to different languages, religions, teaching styles etc. This is also the case within societies – people born into poor families will have different experiences than people born into rich families, and, I expect, people born black will have different experiences than people born white. All these differences are not purely random, but systematic. I don't think any of the above is controversial. Then there is the fact that learning from different experiences leads to different beliefs, which is a claim for which I could even get citations (ranging from recent ML work, through earlier work on rational agents, and probably also from neuroscience and social sciences if I tried, although I am not an expert in any of the latter), so I don't think you would consider that debatable.

The next part of this paragraph is you completely dismissing a lot of data and research. The field is not trivially quantifiable, but there is a lot research being done on various groups of people, subcultures, ethnicities etc. And a lot of the differences in the beliefs of these people are actually known. Any social sciencist would be laughed out of the room if they suggested e.g. using only white people for a study that's supposed to be about society in general – such an approach would invite tons of biases in the data, almost irrespectively of what the study would be about. Many of these biases have been quantified in various studies (as much as they are able to; I am well aware of the problems with statistical quality of many publications). If you were trying to imply these influences are completely not quantifiable you are just plain wrong, if you are complaining that there is no comprehensive theory of how the differences arise then, well, afaik there is no field of knowledge that _started_ with a theory, they (almost?) always start with a lot of research and only formulate a theory after lots of work. Finally, these are claims about statistical properties of the distrubutions of beliefs confitional on backgrouds. So, at least at it's core, wokeism does not imply that thinking in a specific way is necessary to belong to a group.

As for individualism vs collectivism this is an enormous separate ideological topic. I tend to lean somewhat on the side of individualism, but I also have the impression that the US is wa~y too slanted that way and more collectivism would do it good. A big part of the SJW movement is too collectivist for my taste, which is definitely to an extent the result of the ideology focusing on the biases that stem from group membership, but not enough to scare me. And I disagree collectivism is anti-human – humans are, after all, _very_ social animals.

I think you are somehow misunderstanding the word "incentives". Maybe you are confusing it with "intentions"? Incentives are pressures extracted by a system on people's decision making, e.g. capitalism provides incentives for providing people with what they want by transferring money to the people that do that, law often tries to provide incentives to avoid doing things agains the public good in the form of punishments or fines, schools provide incentives for learning in the form of getting good grades etc.(not all of the above work well, just giving examples). This framework does not speak about people's intentions at all. It rather explains that, if the system provides wrong incentives, then even people with good intentions will follow these a portion of the time, and make bad actions.If anything, this is a very anti-cynical view (or at least the version of it I subscribe to) – people are generally good, but the systems in which they operate make them do things which end up having bad consequences, despite no one (or almost no one) having any ill will in the process. It's the good intentions and hard work that actually change society and the incentives within for the better – I'm pretty sure a majority of wokism agrees with that, that's why they are actually trying to change things. They also state that there are many bad incentives remaining, and working to fix them is an important goal.

DiAngelo: I think you are misinterpreting him quite a bit. "Being good or bad is not relevant" is not a statement about the futility of morality, but rather of the above – incentives, rather than inner motivations, will make people take actions often enough, that they are much more important than whether these people are moral. If it implied it is _futile_ to try to change that, then SJWism wouldn't be a political movement at all. "Whites have blind spots on racism" highlights the different-experiences aspect stemming from racial backgrounds, and communicating experiences is _hard_. Yes, human reasoning capacity can compensate for that somewhat (again, if it couldn't then the whole SJW project wouldn't be a political movement), but you have to spend an enormous amount of resources to actually do that and there are few incentives for you to do so. Even when you do, it's very hard to be sure you are still not missing something, because you have to work with people who don't even know what knowledge you might be missing.

Yeah, I am quite a fan of trying to learn from whatever I read, and I am very anti-cynical, so by default I expect that things people invest lots of time into contain at least something useful. In this spirit I often recommend people read "SCUM manifesto", which maybe isn't as bad as "Mein Kampf", but still written by a stark raving mad person. I recommend it because it contains some insights about society that I think are relatively correct and not neccessarily explained clearly in less crazy sources. It's also interesting, reading something that looks like cutting satire, only to notice halfway through that the author is actually serious. But I digress. I am quite sure I am _not_ doing this in this case, I not only value insights provided by the perspectives we are discussing, but also more or less agree with the values much of the movement represents. And i honestly think you are misinterpreting the quotes to mean something dofferent than the authors intended. Also note that all this is very much opposed to thinking that "people on the other side are inherently bad".

Oh goodness, mathematics. I don't know how good your background in that is, so I'm not sure how far into details I should go. The article you linked is actually a reasonably good resource on that for laypeople, it mentions some of the crucial concepts at least. Anyway, for the short version to avoid growing this thread even more – I agree that any formalization of mathematics that does not imply some form of the statement "2 + 2 = 4" is mostly useless (note that the article also confirms that, already in the title). There are, however, many choices made in formalizing mathematics that are not obvious, and definitely not universal. For approaches which take different decisions you can look up finitism (although the Wikipedia article is lacking) and hyperrreals/nonstandard analysis. The former can be seen as a better formalization for computer science applications, while the latter for analysis and possibly physics. Crucially, I believe that the most common, ZFC-based, formalization is strictly worse than either of these. Anyway, my main point is not even that these are better, but that people are unaware they exist, and worse, believe they _cannot_ exist, because they are taught that mathematics is universal. This is the exact point the article you linked is making.

S, O, & DA 2: well,, yes, my point is that just believing that morality is important brings nothing to the discussion. The Nazis believed morality was important and that Jews were doing immoral things so they opposed them, slavery abolitionists believed morality is important and that slave owners were doing immoral things so they opposed them. The difference here is that one of the above was right, and that is what the discussion should be about – how much a specific ideology is correct. The fact that the ideology believes morality is important and must be acted upon is a bit of a non-squitur in this context. I don't think we have an actual disagreement here, I just don't think that specific quote was relevant.

S, O, DA 3: I have no idea why you suddenly started talking about moral relativism here, it doesn't seem to relate to the quote nor to my response to it. If you ask, I subscribe to preference utilitarianism and my position on moral realism is too long to fit in this paragraph. I also read too much philosophy on that to be too sure about anything in this area – morality is clearly a hard problem. If this is about moral knowledge not being neutral and objective then well, this is such an complicated concept that I am sure my knowledge of it is neither neutral nor objective. This doesn't mean I am not looking for truth in this, as well as in other areas. If anything, the awareness of much of my knowledge being biased by my experience helps me seek the truth, by making it easier to change my mind when I'm wrong. Being wrong is also a scale, so the fact that knowledge is subjective and biased doesn't mean it's completely detached from reality – one can still be more or less wrong while being biased. And to answer the direct question – I am quite sure that being overtly racist is clearly immoral and somewhat suspect that not opposing systemic racism is mildly immoral (I'm not sure which "racism" you have been talking abut here; as I said above I also don't like that the term is overloaded).

I am sad to hear that you think this discussion isn't productive, I think I am learning from it. I also don't think I am that emotionally invested in critical theory, I think it provides a very useful perspective on common biases and the social justice movement it spawned seems to be doing more good than harm, but it's not the core of my being. (With the exception of the mathematics part, I am quite invested in that, bloody tertium non datur and other nonconstructive bullshit. ;P) If you want to see me being actually invested in something we can talk about veganism or Agda or type theory or bayesianism or recursive Harry Potter fanfiction or, well, there probably are someother options, but SJWism is not one of them.

@Vectorfield @freemo Oh, also, in case I forget later -- thanks for this discussion, I am very grateful you are indulging me! I am also quite happy that it turns out the knowledge I have about SJWism, which in my case was mostly absorbed through popculture, actually agrees with what they write about themselves in books. Without you showing me these quotes I would probably have been too lazy to look them up myself. <_<"

@Vectorfield @freemo I don't think the introduction you give to the quotes gives them justice, because I clearly don't think the things it would imply, while in general either agreeing with the quotes or sometimes needing more context. Specifics follow:

Delgado and Stefancic: I see two factual statements made here, one which I think is relatively obvious and another which has a good chance of being true (I think it is, but I'm not certain). The first can be rephrased/generalized as: people from different backgrounds will have systematically different beliefs, due to having systematically different experiences. This statement would be true even if humans were perfect Bayesian reasoners, never mind the actual mess our brain is. The second is that there are incentives within society to keep various structures of power in place, in particular in the US these are in a big part race-based. The general part of this statement seems very plausible to me, that's what I would expect of any society. The concrete US example I am less sure about, but mostly due to my limited knowledge about the US (I've never been there, for once). Based on what I know it doesn't seem implausible, and many people who live in the US apparently think this is the case. The text of the quote follows directly from these two statements, so I am inclined to agree with it.

DiAngelo: This one is phrased in the performative, self-flagellating style I really don't enjoy, but if you strip that away the statements themselves are not that objectionable to me. Much of it is just the first statement from the previous paragraph -- people experiencing events sampled from a significantly different distribution (i.e. white people very rarely being targets of racist behaviours) will have vastly different beliefs ("blind spots" in the quote). The "invested" part just repeats the second statement from the paragraph above, although it strenghtens it in a way that makes me slightly less inclined to agree with it. The first sentence perhaps requires more comment -- I am reading it as "one can be a good person and still have these biases", which is a very good point to make. It can help people who consider themselves good come to terms with the fact that they might also need to consider themselves racist (in the sense the word is used here) and try to improve that.

Sensoy, Ozlem, & DiAngelo: Oh I _love_ this one. The fact that school curriculums are often created without acknowledging all the subjectivity that goes into them is an atrocity. And I don't just mean the obvious cases like history or reading lists or things like that. I am personally annoyed that the school of mathematics taught in schools is treated as given and unchallengable, with no mention of the alternatives at any point. Even at university I had to go massively off track to actually encounter them, and that happened _after_ I got my degree. I would gladly talk about this more, but this is not the thread for that, as it's only marginally relevant.

S, O, & DA 2: Well, this just seems like the claim that morality is important. If you believe murder or theft is bad you will not accept that people can stay neutral in these matters, same for the beliefs about systemic inequality.

S, O, & DA 3: It is worth noting that here, and in the first paragraph you quote from this book, the authors are talking about "knowledge", rather than "truth". The distinction is very important, because it shows the ideology does not have to be anti-realist (even if some subcurrents, as we established, are). I am not sure what exact meaning of "knowledge" they are using here, since this is a contentious term in philosophy, but for most I don't agree with the statement that "no knowledge is neutral or objective" -- I believe sufficiently small pieces of information can be neutral & objective. It is worth noting that they don't really even _make_ the above claim -- they say critical theory challenges the opposite claim, not asserts it is wrong, that distinction is also somewhat important. And their definition of knowledge might exclude the small pieces of information that I would consider neutral, I know some relatively popular definitions do.

The following quotes repeat/rephrase various of the above claims and show these are related to the historic and contemporary SJW movement, which I don't disagree with, so I don't think I have to comment on them.

@Vectorfield @freemo Then I think our main disagreement is how much wokism is hostile towards facts. I think there is a clear intellectual subcurrent within the movement that is, but it's also unfair to describe the whole thing as hostile to reason. At its core, wokism is pointing out a widespread bias in patterns of thinking and its political implications. From this perspective it's even part of the greater project to correct our biases, although it's more of a political endeavour, rather than an intellectual one. It clearly could be a much better movement, mostly if the anti-realist subcurrent was weaker, but I believe that in the end it is making the world a better place in more ways than it is damaging it.

@Vectorfield @freemo I think you are still dismissing the main point – a lot of what is considered true in a society _is_ based on the values of the society rather than actual base reality, even in civilisations following the traditions of the Enlightenment.

I also don't think characterizing all the problems you mentioned as stemming from wokism is accurate. Academia doesn't seem to be doing much worse in the wake of SJWs, there are still good publications and shit ones, both in the directly wokish social sciences, as well as much less related fields. Even among the quotes you provided I can see some which might be parts of valid criticism, although it's hard to tell without context. (Others are obviously bullshit, but as I said there are always shit papers.) Most of the problems I have seen in academia are the result of the whole publish-or-perish culture, for which I like to blame Elsevier, 'cause I hate them, but I'm aware this is a systemic problem, with no trivial solution. I sincerely doubt removing wokishness would improve the workings of science in any measurable way.

I also think the main drivers of the change in the media are not related to wokishness, although in this case removing it might improve the situation slightly. It still wouldn't be a long term solution. I strongly suspect the changes for the worse were mostly resulting from the pressure to capture audiences, and thus lower the quality of what they produce, followed by various second-order effects driving reasonable people out of the profession. I am pretty sure this proccess started way before SJWs even existed, although it might have sped up around the same time they came into being, due to the internet becoming more popular (common cause for both).

Finally the broader society thing is closest to the truth, but this is also where you ignore the main message of SJWism. If the interactions in society were really based on a common ground being reached through reasoned conversation, then there would be no problem. The main point of SJWism is that these interactions claimed to be based on civil discussions, but are inherently biased in ways dictated by the culture. From this point of view, a very radical position would be that the breakdown of these discussions is a good thing. Most SJWism I saw does _not_, however, take that position (although the pop radical version certainly sometimes does). They mostly want to help people identify these biases as problems, and offer some partial solutions. I do agree that even this approach damages some institutions, some of which are not even that broken in the first place, but I think without other factors this would be healthy for the system as a whole. This post is getting long and it's late here, so I'm not gonna go into these other factors, sorry, ask me again if you want to know what I think.

I also agree that practice cannot be disconnected from theory in this case, but I also appreciate some of the practical results of wokism, so I guess we differ here.

@Vectorfield A lot of what you have written here is true [sic], but I feel it's also missing the point. One does not have to be anti-realist to see that culture massively influences what is considered true, and that its power over people comes in a big part of it being able to do so. You give the example of the Earth and the Sun, but you had to _very carefully_ word it to actually be correct. If you wrote "the Earth goes around the Sun, not the other way around", which would be considered true by a majority of members of our culture, it would have been disputable.

The insight that you seem to be dismissing (or maybe missing entirely) is that a vast majority of statements made by people are not technical enough to be strictly true. In the wiggle-room that creates cultures can express their power in various ways. SJWism claims that in political contexts the power that is expressed often leads to hurting minorities, a claim for which I would say they make quite a good case. And there is nothing anti-realist in that.

Of course there are idiots who misinterpret the above as "there is no truth" and become anti-realist, but the intellectual core of SJWism does not seem to be making that mistake.

I don't think that looking at the epistemology of the movement does a good job of explaining cancel mobs. If you want to do that taking a closer look at tribalism and outrage culture does a much better job, and also generalizes much better to non-SJWish cancellations. @freemo

I just finished reading the Rust book and I felt inspired to make this picture summarizing what I learned.

@robryk
It had to be matching, you figured out it was a match. ;p
@trinsec

@freemo I remember you also opposing lockdowns and, for some unfathomable reason, mask mandates. By process of elimination this would leave only "let the weak die" as a way of handling the pandemic, but that probably means I'm missing something. So how would you handle it?