timorl @timorl@qoto.org

@mark@metalhead.club That would definitely be an option if I just wanted a Linux phone, but I have some ideological reasons for preferring PinePhone.

@secretlySamantha@tech.lgbt
There is @jaczad, who is a professional and activist in this field. I don't think he does such analyses commercially, but maybe he can recommend someone.

Nevermore?

@pganssle

@Vectorfield @freemo Systemic means encompassing the entire system (or most of it). "Systemic racism" is called that, because the claim is that it permates the entire way the society is organized in the US. Systematic I use in the same sense as in the phrase "systematic error", i.e. biased (in the statistical sense) in a non-random way. These are very different meanings and I am quite sad that the surface similarity between these words confused our discussion so much.

# Backgrounds and experiences

As far as I can tell class politics wasn't strong in the US for a long time, so I don't think it declined much, just didn't become stronger. In fact almost all of the critiques of capitalism I hear from USAians come from people who are also advocating quite hard for various woke claims. I see the point, though, that perhaps the Democratic Party, and definitely many USAian corporations promote SJWism with the economic class parts carefully omitted. If you were criticizing only that form of SJWism, then I might agree this is on balance harmful (not completely sure, mostly because I am unsure about the extent of systemic racism).

Note that the quotes you provided criticize specific organizations for specific actions, not the ideology of wokism. I haven't watched the YT videos (on principle, videos have a terrible information/time spent ratio), but the article seems to be doing what you accuse wokism of doing, but with social (not even economic!) class rather than race – only focuses on this one characteristic, and claims that politics should be centered around it. I don't think that is particularly helpful, even if some of the criticisms in the article are valid.

I only used the word "might" to be technically correct even if you included utopias or at least extremely egalitarian societies. In any contemporary society there definitely are problems which would be extremely hard to fix if you refused to look at groups of people sharing some characteristic (and yes, that includes social & economic class, geographical location, religion, etc.). And I think we are even in agreement about this issue since you write "which in the process, might lead to the temporary focus on certain group categories" – that is exactly my point.

Now, of course, the critical question is whether systemic racism really is one of such problems in society – would you agree that **if** it was, then focusing on race as a group category would be appropriate?

# Systemic racism

(Note it's system**ic**, not system**atic**. I don't want this to be a criticism, I'm just trying to make it easier for you to distinguish these words in the future.)

As mentioned before systemic racism is a big topic, so I don't even know what kind of evidence you would find relevant. I doubt proving a single claim of it would be convincing, and you refused to read through long lists of claims with evidence (I'm not criticizing here, knowing the worth of your time and investing it wisely is very reasonable).

# Empirical data

Ok, so example: https://sci-hub.st/10.2307/350932 A paper from 1978, even then there was proper math being done on these issues, and it's being improved all the time. If you just want to take a quick look to see some percentages, look at Table 1. This one is about influence of parents' beliefs on the children, if you want something more modern (2016) and more related to race see https://sci-hub.st/10.1073/pnas.1516047113 . Both of these give you statistics which you can use for predictions about beliefs. There are more advanced methods of statistical analysis, which allow you to disentangle the influence of variables on outputs, the second study uses some very simple variants of them to examine the effects of some beliefs on others

I don't understand what you mean by these percentage values. What does it even mean for something to happen X% for of a reason? In a Bayesian framework reasons (i.e. relevant evidence) are used for applications of Bayes' theorem to the hypothesis, it doesn't make any sense to express them in percentages that sum to 100%, and I don't know of any other framework which does that. What framework are you using here? Although I suspect you won't be able to clarify this in one response. :/

There are clearly predictions being made about the future shape of society, so implying they are impossible is very strange. The most obvious example are financial markets, which can often be interpreted as predicting some changes in society, e.g. rising values of companies working with renewable electricity can be interpreted as a prediction that society will be moving to relying more on these. More directly there are prediction markets, both literal as well as reputation-based. For the second option, one of the bigger ones is metaculus.com . You can take a look there and check that there are predictions about society there, and that they are quite often correct.

Social science itself is not quite advanced enough to give as good predictions about society as meteorology gives about weather, here I agree. Bah, it's not even advanced enough to even try as far as I know. For now they are building up the basic knowledge within their discipline. That is still enought to make predictions about people's beliefs based on various characteristics, see studies linked above.

I am quite surprized to find that you, who argued against unknowability of truth, now postulate that human society is unforseeable. That seems extremely defeatist to me. I hope the above arguments convinced you that it is possible.

I value not uncertainty itself, I only accept it as a fact about our cognition. For that reason I value the possibility of expressing it quantitatively within an epistemic framework.

# Intentions and incentives

The definition seems alright. I was almost exclusively talking about extrinsic incentives, although they usually also influence intrinsic ones (you have extrinsic incentives to believe certain things, and the resulting beliefs create intrinsic incentives – I think you know that, you already spoke of incentives to believe things).

Oh, this is a criticism I agree with (a version of it also appeared in the first section). There are definitely incentives for people in power to promote wokeness, especially a version that excludes economic class. This is the whole premise of corporate fake-wokeness, which possibly annoys the woke even more than the non-woke.

Moreover, this analysis is exactly the kind of analysis the woke (or rather Critical Theory) do, and the reasons I agree with it are almost exactly the same. If this is a convincing argument to you, then maybe the epistemologic claims of Critical Theory are of some value after all, hmm?

I don't agree with the later part though – the proportion of SJWs working in wokeness-related jobs is miniscule compared to the whole movement, an overwhalming majority are working normal jobs. As for people being privilaged by calls for diversity within high-paying jobs – that's the point! (Of course it only makes sense if you actually agree that the people being privilaged would be treated unfairly otherwise. Again the question, is systemic racism a thing?) These don't target the woke, but the categories the woke consider underprivilaged, without regard for whether a specific member of the category is woke themself. This means that there isn't much extrinsic incentive for a black transwoman to become woke – her doing that only has miniscule effects on the strength of the movement, and she would get (almost?) all the benefits without joining.

As far as I can tell wokes are recognizing anti-Asian racism, although it seems to be much less systemic. In particular most of the systemic problems reach back to slavery and later segregation, which was mostly happening on the white vs black division. Some of it is purely pro-white, so by necessity also anti-Asian, and I believe SJWs agree this is also a problem.

The fact that these crimes are more likely to be commited by black people also makes sense within the woke narrative – in general black people are more likely to commit violent crimes, because of socioeconomic factors (i.e. more likely to be poor, live in unstable communities etc.). From this perspective, eliminating systemic racism against black people would reduce also anti-Asian crimes, by improving the socio-economic status of black people, and thus making them commit less crime.

Oh, and renaming "systemic racism" to "white supremacy" (or rather collating the two terms) is definitely an idiotic thing that happens in some parts of the movement. Even "systemic racism" is not a great name for the problem (although I don't know any better one), but calling it "white supremacy" is demented. So yeah, that is another criticism I agree with.

# Merits of bad ideas (or rather whether wokism is a bad idea?)

I don't think my understanding is that unsusual, I got it mostly from talking with people, so they passed it on to me.

It's not true that what you do as an individual doesn't matter! It is true, however, that what you _believe_ as an individual matters much less than you would like, because extrinsic incentives keep influencing all your actions, while your beliefs only influence the ones you notice are related to them.

The people who don't join the movement are not automatically racist, although the movement claims that they will commit racist acts due to extrinsic incentives. If they refuse to acknowledge that after it has been explained, then more combatative SJWs will assume they are racist, as other explanations will seem unlikely to them. I want to expressly stress that I don't believe that, and wholly support criticizing the parts of the woke movement that assume ill will in these situations. I would usually assume that a person who doesn't want to join the movement after systemic racism was explained to them was not convinced by the presented evidence – that is also what I assume in your case.

Oh goodness, the woke _love_ checking their own privilage, we have been through this. Of all the criticisms you make, this one is the least based on reality. Great Scott, even one of the original quotes you provided was doing that – DiAngelo wrote "I have blind spots on racism.", right? Seriously, I respect you, but this specific criticism is actually idiotic.

(Fun anectode, feel free to skip if you think it will just waste your time, since it's only mildly related. When the pandemic started and gyms got closed where I live, I read a complaint about this on a mailing list. The person (lets call them A) said that the gyms should open. A received multiple responses about this being irresponsible, to which A responded by lamenting that the other participants should take into account the mental wellbeing of some people (in particular A) not just the pandemic. Something really bothered me by that argument, because it was the general shape of some arguments I read in wokish places, but something felt wrong. A friend had to point out to me that this was the same argument as the woke would use, but the unusual thing was that it was being used for the gain of the person making that argument (A in this case). This was so jarring to me, because in general wokish speech I almost never encountered arguments being used for the immediate benefit of the speaker. That's how rare it is. Obviously this does not invalidate your points about some incentives making people in power adopt the rethoric – in their hands it doesn't give immediate benefit, but it goes through a more complex route.)

The woke don't have to be absolutely certain about their claims, and I definitely am not. I would say I only assign ~70% probability to the proposition that systemic racism is one of the main forces fueling inequality in the US. That is far from certain. At the same time it's high enough to think that trying to do something about it is worthwhile.

# Mathematics

UGH! I think I wrote too many negations in that sentence trying to make it precise, and you misunderstood it. Two and two is four, I am **not** disputing that.

This is the one part of the discussion I am actually emotionally invested in, for reasons completely unrelated to SJWism. Fortunately, possibly due to the emotional investment, I came up with a way of explaining what I mean that should be useful. I assume from your username that you have _some_ background in mathematics, and if this the case the explanation below should be interesting to you. **Please** try forgetting for a moment that this can be related in any way to SJWism (this relation is completely unnecessary) and try reading the text below carefully even if you skim other parts of my response.

Imagine we are in ancient Rome and we are talking about the fact that "II en II est IV". This corresponds to the same underying truth as "2 + 2 = 4", it is just written in another language and using other symbols for the numbers. I will argue that it not only is (part of) a cultural construct, but also that the way in which it is a cultural construct has relevance to mathematical progress. The way the numbers are written is crucial here – they are technically using a positional system, but not the power-based one we use. Why? Because ancient Romans did not have the concept of "0" as a number (there was obviously the concept of nothing, or a lack of something, but that was not treated as a number), so they couldn''t incorporate it into their numeral system. In particular most Romans would not have thought of all this as a framework, after all "II en II est IV" is obviously correct, only an idiot or madman would argue with that. Actual outside influence was needed to add "0" to their framework, and even then it was met with resistance. So even though "II en II est IV" is correct (exactly as correct as "2 + 2 = 4") thinking of it as a cultural construct is crucial in noticing major obstacles to developing mathematics further. Especially now, when globalisation homogenized our mathematical culture, it is crucial to remember that all of mathematics is a social construct (even though big parts of it correspond to actual truths about the world!), because we won't necessarily be able to receive help from an outside culture in creating further breakthroughs (as the Arabs brought "0" from India to Europe).

There are also cultural assumptions in how we write "2 + 2 = 4" today. A culture more focused on minimalism would maybe write it as "10 + 10 = 100", a culture more focused on computation might write in RPN "2 2 + 4 =", one more focused on formalism "SS0 + SS0 = SSSS0" (although that's stupid enough to be unlikely), one focused on provability could be always writing it as a function into a type from assumptions about numbers. I think it's unlikely we are missing some discovery of the magnitude of a "0", that could be made if we carefully examined how we write "2 + 2 = 4", but how we write other things certainly has such implications. The way most mathematics talks about converging series, with epsilons and deltas, is one such artifact – I already mentioned nonstandard anlysis, which is the result of looking critically at this construct. I won't be able to point you to a specific example where our mathematical culture is making a stupid assumption in notation that no one notices, because if I knew such a thing I would be too busy publishing it. I still strongly suspect that such assumptions exist, they existed in all previous versions of mathematics humanity was working with, so it's unlikely they were completely eliminated in the version we learned today.

# On objective knowledge

Sure, I can answer these. The common part of the answer for the first two is that I have some amount of evidence for each statement over alternatives.

## How I know I subscribe to utilitarianism

In this case this is a belief about my beliefs, these are one of the things I can be most sure of, because the evidence for me is the most direct – in the form of my thoughts. When I ask myself "What moral philosophy do you subscribe to?" I answer "utilitarianism". When I encounter a moral problem that I have to analyse to find the ethical course of action, the justifications I consider are utilitarian in nature – what the consequences of the actions are, and whether the world created by these consequences has a higher utilitarian value than the worlds resulting from other actions. When someone argues with me stating that an action would break a moral rule, I don't consider this a strong argument, which is evidence against me subscribing to deontology. When someone presents the case for contractualism I wince and point out the massive problems this approach has, so I'm most likely not subscribing to contractualism. When I think how I acquired my moral beliefs I think back to reading Peter Singer's "Practical Ethics", a book about utilitarianism.

Not writing about realism, since I never claimed to subscribe to realism (I only mentioned moral realism, which is a much different thing, and even about that I said my position is complex), but essentially all the philosophies I subscribe to have the same kinds of evidence as in the case of utilitarianism – mostly thoughts,, thought patterns memories and reactions to other philosophies.

## How am I sure my knowledge of morality is not objective

In this case the evidence is mostly external. Throughout history many people had thoughts about morality, and there was no single majority view. This means that _most_ (probably all) these people were wrong – since they believed different things they cannot all be right. This means that the initial probability of my moral views being correct is already pretty small. If they are not correct they have to not be objective, since they are not directly related to reality (I think we agree that knowledge has to be true to be objective?). Then I can look at what the beliefs of these people were, and whether there are reasons to believe the shape of these beliefs was influenced by the societies these people lived in. This seems to often be the case, most people got their moral beliefs from their parents or communities and did not examine them much. Even the philosophers who did examine their moral beliefs were often quite obviously biased (Plato endorsing philosopher kings in The Republic is an especially egregious example).

Obviously I have some evidence (mostly in the form of arguments) for my moral philosophy being closer to correct than others, otherwise I would not believe it, but I assign a pretty low probability to it being _the_ correct one, I expect the right one has not been discovered yet.

## How do I know what racism is

Uh, this question is quite different from the previous ones. It's not quite about a belief, but rather about the definition of a word. I usually like to have words defined by examples, with an implied meaning that people using them have to infer – this is how most people use words after all. So I guess my answer is that people have shown me lots of examples of a set of behaviours and beliefs, called them "racism", and I learned that definition? I'm really not sure what you were trying to ask about here.

# Closing remarks

Since you already precommited to having only one more response I think it would be unfair for me to respond to your next toot and have the last word (although I will obviously read it with interest!). So I will include some closing remarks here, think of them what you will.

I think many of your criticisms of SJWism are based on actual problems within the movement – too much tribalism and aggression, parts of the movement misinterpreting the nonobjectivity of knowledge as anti-realism, the corporate and probably political fake-wokism etc.

At the same time I think you went way too far with the criticism of the underlying epistemic framework SJWism is based on (Critical Theory, postmodernism etc.) – while these also have their faults, you are criticizing them from a layman position, with only minimal knowledge of epistemology, and thus are missing the mark on most of the criticisms. I quite strongly believe that the perspectives these framewoks provide are very valuable. Even if I got convinced that SJW is actually a force for evil in the world, that wouldn't change my mind about the frameworks significantly.

As for whether SJWs are actually a force for good or evil – I suspect they are a mild positive. But this position rests mostly on the claim that systemic racism is a significant problem in the US, a claim I am not very sure about. Due to that I definitely understand you might think differently.

Thank you once more for the discussion, I really appreciate the time you put in.

@bjoessi Thanks for the suggstion, Mobian does look at least interesting.

This might be just reliable enough. After reading through the wiki it gives me the same vibes I got from how my father has been using desktop Linux in the 90s.

Lack of navigation hurts a bit, but I guess I can get by the old-fashioned way with "just" a map in my pocket.

I know one can use the Matrix web client, but that is not ideal. On the wiki I found links to Fractal, but that one does not support E2EE yet, making it mostly useless for me. Do you know of any others?

I guess reading Mastodon through the web interface also isn't the worst thing.

Lack of Signal might be most annoying, my family wants to use it, and I don't really want to oppose it much, since it definitely isn't the worst choice. Well, I'll see what can be done.

#RMS wrote a statement: https://www.fsf.org/news/rms-addresses-the-free-software-community . First thing about this whole debacle that makes me somewhat optimistic for the future.

My current phone is literally falling apart, so I need a new one. I m pretty confident I want a #pinephone at some point in my life, but I'm not sure it is ready to be used as a main & only phone.

I bet there are people in the Fediverse who can help me with information! I want to know how much hassle, on a scale from Ubuntu to LFS and beyond, it is to setup the following functionlities:

1. Phone calls, making and receiving (has to be reliable).
2. SMS, sending and receiving (has to be reliable).
3. A #matrix client, with graphics (I have a weechat session on my server, but looking at pictures using only it would be a pain).
4. A (the?) #signal client.
5. Some #openstreetmap -based navigation (OSMAnd?).
6. And, of course, a #fediverse client (currently using Fediab).

Any other suggestions, information, and criticisms about the #pinephone are very welcome.

Boosts obviously appreciated.

@Shamar

That makes sense, I was worried there for a moment that I was vastly overestimating how complicated gcc is.

I know that Free Software is inherently political, I only wanted to skip over the personal politics surrounding RMS right now, and couldn't think of a better word for that.

I haven't heard this argument about the political implications of simplicity, I usually value it for its directly practical results of avoiding bugs. The argument sounds correct and quite interesting.

Oh, I'm pretty sure I'm not confusing these two. In my experience the languages which are best for writing simple programs are, among other properties, quite strongly typed. These languages are arguably more complex than weakly typed ones, and their compilers are _definitely_ more complex, type checking is a provably (heh) hard problem. So I understand the simplicity/easiness distinction, although I guess I might have a slightly different view on which languages are best for writing programs with a simple design.

@freemo Yeah that's a pain. Don't spend too much effort on this, I doubt it will actually affect a significant number of people one way or another, since it's both browser-dependent _and_ requires the usage of huge amounts of Markdown.

@freemo Inspecting the elements returns slightly differing text, but I'm not sure the difference is in HTML, I have never seen these things before.

Anyway the point has:
```
<li>
::marker
::before
$CONTENTS
```
in the column view, and in the full view there is no `::before`.

@freemo Considering the fact that is also renders these as bullet points in Fedilab, it might be that the HTML that got created out of Markdown is slightly faulty. Then it could be rendered differently depending on which heuristics a specific renderer uses to guess what the intention was. This can depend both on browser (Fedilab and Firefox in my case) as well as on the surrounding structure of the page that is being displayed.

And this might only marginally be the fault of the Markdown to HTML converter, it's possible what I wrote in Markdown cannot be exactly converted to correct HTML without losing information.

@freemo (Removing the other mention to avoid accidentally wasting my response budget <_<")

Ohh, it's a cool bug actually! It's this post: https://qoto.org/@timorl/106028729447776091 . It renders correctly when you open the above link in a separate tab, but it's screwed up in the column view, the enumerated points are rendered as stars.

Oh, and the enumerations themselves are screwed up because they contain multiple paragraphs, but that is mostly my fault.

I also checked Fedilab, they are bullet points there, so another possibility. :>

@Shamar I was mostly interested in the simplicity aspect, I think most compilers I know would not satisfy the "one month" requirement. Politics aside, do you think gcc can be understood within a month?

Strong agree on better programming languages being needed, but the ones I consider good for creating programs that follow the simplicity ideology are not that simple themselves, and definitely don't have simple compilers. I expect there might be some very hard to resolve conflict between these requirements.

@Vectorfield @freemo

Oh, I didn't notice how QOTO formatting screwed up my last post, sorry you had to fight your way through that. @freemo might want to take a look at it?

# Backgrounds affect experience

So it seems we really don't have a major disagrement here after all.

Of course the impact of various variables differs, and checking in what ways is an interesting question. I think SJWs make a reasonable case for race, sexual identity etc. having impact that is big and mostly slanted against minorities in these categories, but, again, my knowledge about the US is limited. Also, the parts of the movement I interact with the most usually talk quite a bit more about economical class, and I tend to agree with them that it will have bigger impact over many dimensions.

Yes, inner differences within a group might be bigger than between the groups, and it's often the case over many dimensions (although there are some dimensions that will be extremely correlated with group belonging, like e.g. knowledge of the Polish language for Polish people vs Chinese people). The issue is, if you just treat people as individuals you might miss actual problems caused by society. To give a silly example imagine all doors are by custom 190cm tall. You will have a group of people (~4% of the population?) who will be more likely to believe back pain is normal, that you should alwas be vigilant when walking from room to room, that wearing thick hats indoors is a good idea etc. Not all tall people will believe these things and many non-tall people will also believe them, but when you want to actually solve the problem you probably should talk about tall people as a group with these specific beliefs. And of course this is a silly example, you can trivially demonstrate what the problem is about to anyone -- if the problems are more subtle, recognizing the affected group becomes more important.

The question of course becomes, whether these groups are actually affected by problems.

# Systemic racism

Yeah, I was a bit surprized that you said that you want proof for systemic racism while at the same time indicating that you are somewhat tired of the discussion. This is a big question, because the claims of systemic racism cover a big part of US society, so obviously the answer will be quite long, if it is supposed to be comprehensive. I agree it would be very time consuming, and most likely impossible within the post number constraints you have given below.

I don't think this is the most interesting question in the discussion, but unfortunately it is very relevant to evaluating whether wokism is a force for good in the US. If the claims are completely false, then it's clearly not worth it, if they are completely true then it almost certainly is. I suspect they aree true in a big enough portion that it ends up being a net positive, but apparently we won't be able to establish that in this discussion.

# Empirical data

Well, of course the other factors affect thinking! I don't think anyone claims otherwise. But see the final part of the first section -- if you want to improve problems affecting a group of people, you have to focus on the group to find better solutions. *If* systemic racism is a thing, then focusing on the effects of race on various things might help proving it exists and solving it. Of course we again end up at the question how correct the claims about systemic racism are.

(I don't think it's particularly relevant, but if you want access to the article then here: https://sci-hub.st/10.1016/0272-7757(92)90003-l . I heartily recommend sci-hub as a great resource for any papers you lack access to.)

The results in social sciences are quantifiable, although only on the level of statistical analysis with relatively weak (compared to e.g. modern physics) models.

Yes, you cannot explain exactly how various factors influence even our decisions. But you also cannot explain how a specific rain droplet two days from now ends up falling in a specific place. This doesn't make weather forecasts impossible, same as the complexity of the human psyche does not mean we cannot extract statistical predictions about societies.

Since that's the second (I think?) time you speculate about my motivations for participating in this discussion, let me explain. I have a different belief about the world than you do, and you clearly are smart enough that I expect to learn from the discussion. I enjoy such discussions, especially if I'm not very invested emotionally in the topic while also finding it interesting (epistemology! mathematics! structure of society! fascinating things). To add to that I've had a hard week at work, so this is definitely helping me relax. Thank you once more for giving me this opportunity!

# Intentions and incentives

Incentives are not the only mechanism driving people to do things, if I claimed that I would really be denying much of human agency. The point is rather that if many people are subject to an incentive to do something, then statistically they will end up doing it more than if they weren't. This also works for a single person and many decisions they make over time -- statistically many of the decisions will end up being mostly influenced by incentives. That's why most of the systems we use to run society are build to provide consistent incentives, they are a really powerful tool. Because of this power it's extremely valuable to be able to recognize which direction they are pointing to.

Most of the incentives between woke and non-woke people are shared, since they live mostly in the same society. Where do you think the differences in incentives you are describing would be coming from? Because I don't really see a strong source for these differences.

I don't think most people participating e.g. in cancel mobs can be described as following the incentive to accumulate power. Maybe the feeling of power, but a member of such a group does not get more actual power out of this act. I agree many woke people are privilaged, but this stems from the ideology being overrepresented among already privilaged groups, rather than wokeism increasing someone's privilage. Could you provide an example how you think such an increase would happen?

# Merits of bad ideas (and whether the underlying ideology of wokism is bad)

Relevance of being good or bad -- it's not about being inherently incorrigible, it's about the fact that many of your actions will be determined by incentives stemming from the social system you live in, and however you are good or bad these incentives will influence you. There is still agency, e.g. you can have very strong beliefs about a topic which will override a portion of incentives pretty consistently, but no person has strong enough beliefs about everything. And even then, there is also the problem of actually noticing the incentives and what results they end up leading to. If you have incredibly anti-racist beliefs that are strong enough to override any incentive to do anything racist, you might still consistently do things that hurt other races if you don't see the incentives driving you to do these things and don't recognize the long term results of your actions. That's actually where the term "woke" comes from, right? The woke claim they see some of these results more clearly, they are "awake" to them (although it's mostly a term used sarcastically by oppenents of the movement). Anyway, in this framework most human agency comes in the form of being able to influence changes in society, and the incentives present in it. IMO that is quite a lot of agency.

Blind spots -- from my perspective you are trying really hard to interpret this claim as if it's idiotic. A blind spot does not mean something is unknowable, it means it's very easy to miss. If the claim about the scale of systemic racism is correct, then it wouldn't be surprizing to say "people who don't experience it first-hand will most likely miss parts of it". And having a blind spot on racism does not mean you are racist, it just means you don't completely understand the phenomenon. Of course, as I write in the paragraph above, these blind spots might translate to taking racist actions without racist intentions, but that also would not make you racist. If you ignore people trying to point out that your actions are hurting some group, then you might still not be racist, but that's about the point when SJWs get mad.

Attacking SJWs for not being aware of their prejudices is a _really_ strange criticism. That's why I linked the silly picture in the previous post, if anything they are so aware of their prejudices that they often overcorrect and end up looking stupid.

# Mathematics

You seem to get very angry when someone even speaks about a certain claim not being completely objective, so much that you immediately stop reading. So let me write in very big letters, so that maybe you catch it even through the anger: **NEITHER I, NOR THE AUTHOR OF THE ARTICLE YOU LINKED CLAIM THAT THE TRUTH UNDERLYING THE EQUATION 2+2=4 IS NOT CORRECT** Keeping that in mind, you can try re-reading either my claims or the article, to understand what we are really trying to say. And spoiler: we aren't trying to say mathematics is racist or anything even close to it.

# On objective knowledge

As established above you don't really want me to answer all these questions in detail, as it would take way more time than you want to spend on this conversation. Fortunately, there is a common meta-answer to all of them, and I was trying to provide it in the previous post. The epistemology I subscribe to is Bayesian reasoning with Kolmogorov complexity-based Occamian priors build up using methodological solipsism. I am in the (very slow) process of writing a blog post summarizing what this means and why I believe it, but this will take a while. The long version of this answer is in the books I linked before, especially the second one -- that's why I linked them! Another reason I linked them is that I suspect you won't recognize most of the jargon used in the description I have given above, it's extremely technical and you don't seem to be particularly familiar with these parts of philosophy.

Maybe there are these bacis principles of reason that are universally applicable, but humanity has not discovered them yet. Epistemology is still a hard problem. I think the one I subscribe to is as close as we have gotten, but it clearly still has problems.

As for logic, well, Bayesian reasoning is the only extension of logic to reasoning under uncertainty (this is an actual mathematical theorem, with only minor additional assumptions), so my approach definitely stems from the same general school of thought as yours. Crucially, it also allows a person to be uncertain, that's why it's better when you are trying to take biases into account, and not end up epistemologically impotent (which is what you seem to be implying, with the deluge of questions, I should be, if I acklowledge my knowledge is biased).

Thank you for these two replies you still intend to give, I'll attempt to use them wisely. Sorry for taking your time in ways you feel are unproductive, and I want to once again stress how much I appreciate that you are indulging me -- thank you!

@Shamar
Do you have any compilers you like? They seem to be kind of big and complicated by necessity, and I am wondering whether there are some simple ones that are still useful.

@Shamar
Do you grant exceptions to enormous projects, or is considering them broken a feature? :>