NelsonRushton
Doctorate in mathematics from the University of Georgia, specializing in probability theory. Masters in AI from the University of Georgia. 15 years as a computer science professor at Texas Tech. Now I work as a logician for an AI startup. Married with one son. He's an awesome little dude.
I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit -- and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I think there is noise in the signal.
User ID: 2940
NelsonRushton
2yr ago
Is this consistent with your above statement, "They do"?
@NelsonRushton: Whatever argument that is, it will have to prove that majorities don't decide morality
@anon_: They do. And the majority now has decided that slavery was pretty awful.
NelsonRushton
2yr ago
Would you also affirm the following?
- race based slavery is immoral regardless [causally]of what a majority of people believe.
NelsonRushton
2yr ago
You think there are a lot of lost tribes out there that tried all 3 and never invented writing or something? This whole theory is puzzling. No one had gunpowder, phones, and crocks at the same time either.
In real life these values are on a continuum. My hypothesis (not thesis) is that the closer a society gets to accepting all three at once, the weaker it gets. It's not that they failed to invent writing; it's that they got conquered and absorbed, and their culture was taken out of the meme pool.
I don't know what you mean by "crock". The question here, though, is what is in need of an explanation. It's obvious why no previous society ever had the internet and remote control drones at the same time. It is not obvious why no society ever had (1) sex outside of marriage is morally acceptable, (2) homosexuality is morally acceptable, and (3) male and female sex roles ought to be respected equally. I would expect that if the combination were not toxic, a society would have embraced them. Many societies embraced (1) and (2), and I submit every society ought to embrace (3); so, an explanation is required as to why it never happened.
NelsonRushton
2yr ago
Let proposition A be that combustion consumes oxygen, as opposed to releasing phlogiston. Do you believe (1) (Proposition A is true because a majority of people in 2023 believe it is true), or (2) (proposition A is true, regardless of what a majority of people believe, because combustion actually consumes oxygen as opposed to liberating phlogiston)?
NelsonRushton
2yr ago
Do you believe in the symmetry of C/D? Or do you believe 300 years ago fire really was phlogiston?
I believe that combustion consumes oxygen as opposed to liberating phlogiston. I assume you do too. The next question is why this is true. Do you believe that this is true because (1) a majority of people in 2023 believe it is true, or because (2) regardless of what a majority of people believe, combustion actually consumes oxygen as opposed to liberating phlogiston?
NelsonRushton
2yr ago
Well there you have it. Jesus dude, could you construct a more convoluted argument? Literally throwing darts at a non-existent enemy.
The conjunction of (1), (2), and (3) is not a straw man; it is exactly where Western civilization is headed. Yet it is uncharted ground. My thesis is that that ought to give us pause that no society has ever tried this combination and survived long enough to record the fact.
NelsonRushton
2yr ago
What's silly is the idea that my judgment today of has to be based on what people thought in a different century... They [majorities] do [decide morality]. And the majority now has decided that slavery was pretty awful.
Let me see if I understand correctly. Do you affirm the following?
- Proposition A: Slavery was immoral in 1700, because a majority of people in 2023 believe it was, regardless of what a majority of people in 1700 thought.
If so, why is that true but not this:
- Proposition B: Slavery is morally permissible in 2023, because a majority of people in 1700 believed it is, regardless of what a majority of people in 2023 think.
For example, is it because 2023 comes after 1700? Or because we are having the conversation in 2023? Or for some other reason?
NelsonRushton
2yr ago
@NelsonRushton: By your argument, that I quoted above, slavery was moral until 300 years ago
@anon_: This is a fairly common, silly argument.
The argument you are calling silly is your previously stated argument on the topic of CSAM (supermajority, etc. etc.).
What I asked for is your argument that the abolition of slavery was a moral improvement. I'm now asking for the second time. Whatever argument that is, it will have to prove that majorities don't decide morality, which will contradict your argument for the prohibition CSAM.
NelsonRushton
2yr ago
In light of that, what argument would you make against prohibiting (1), (2), and (3) in media depictions, that does not contradict your original argument on CSAM?
- A large supermajority believes that sexual urges towards 5 year olds is fundamentally morally abhorrent
- No such contingent is even remotely there on (1), (2) or (3). In fact, none of those can even claim a bare majority against them
As I reported before, a supermajority of married women disapproved of premarital sex in the 1960's. Moreover a supermajority of adults in the US (75% of those who expressed an opinion) believed premarital sex was wrong as late as 1969 [source]. By your argument, that I quoted above, slavery was moral until 300 years ago; premarital sex was wrong until 60 years ago, and gay marriage was wrong until 10 years ago. I assume you believe, however, that the abolition of slavery (e.g.), which changed the supermajority consensus, was a good thing. If so, then there must be some consideration aside from the majority opinion that informs morality. My question is, in your view, what is it, and how does it apply to CSAM in a way that it does not apply to, say, the normalization of premarital sex in media?
NelsonRushton
2yr ago
I don't know of any society has embraced them together.
I don't think is an accurate characterization of my view. And I certainly don't endorse your conclusion as to either writing or as to pornography in general.
I wasn't characterizing your view, but what follows from your argument if it is valid. It seems to me that the argument you put forward to support your view is an equally strong argument for a view you oppose.
As a matter of fact, I think that normalizing premarital sex is a grave social problem. As far as I know, no society has ever embraced the following three norms simultaneously and survived: (1) sex outside of marriage is morally acceptable, (2) homosexuality is morally acceptable, (3) male and female sex roles ought to be respected equally. For example, the Romans accepted (1) and (2) but not (3). I advocate for (2) and (3) but not (1). I think the basic reason (1), (2), and (3) are not compatible is that young men would become addicted to having sex with each other and, not necessarily lose interest in women, but not be very motivated to navigate the challenges of obtaining and sustaining opposite-sex relationships. Sound familiar?
Our own society is moving toward accepting (1), (2) and (3) together, but this is a recent development, and at the same time our society is dying before our eyes, so I do not count the current, unstable situation as a data point because it is a dramatic departure from our recent history as a culture. To give you an idea how fast these norms are changing, leading Democrats (e.g. both Clintons, Biden, Obama) opposed gay marriage until around 2012 -- and in the early 1960's, 86% of married women said when polled that it was not OK for a woman to have sex with her fiancé before marriage [Charles Murray (2012): Coming Apart, p. 154].
I doubt that a society can survive that accepts (1), (2), and (3) -- though if one has ever existed it would prove me wrong (maybe someone knows an example?). So that experiment hasn't been run with success to my knowledge. On the other hand, the experiment of socially accepting child sex has been run many times (in modern Afghanistan, ancient Rome, the Sambia tribe, et. al.) and those societies continued to exist for generations. I'm definitely not advocating that, but I am saying the empirical evidence for the maladaptivity of (1), (2), and (3) is stronger.
In light of that, what argument would you make against prohibiting (1), (2), and (3) in media depictions, that does not contradict your original argument on CSAM?
NelsonRushton
2yr ago
Interesting post. The conclusion of the argument is that the state has a legitimate duty to forcibly ban media that corrupt morals, when the harm is sufficiently clear and severe, and/or supported by existing legal precedent. This might also apply to other kinds of media that are now legal and common, and plausibly to all porn. At a minimum, it suggests that written material or drawings that depict things that would be illegal to film with real actors should also be illegal to write or draw. The key questions are not the abstract principles (which I think are obvious), but the criteria for drawing the lines, the burdens of proof in play, and the question of which agencies are empowered to make the decisions.
Thoughts?
Great post. It's refreshing to read something with some thumos [Greek: spirit] on The Motte. I agree with the critical mass of this, but I am going to focus on the things I don't agree with:
- I believe that the job of passing down culture falls equally on men and women, but they play different roles by passing down different elements of culture. It is the responsibility of men to live out and pass down the virtues that ensure life goes on. It is the responsibility of women is to live out and pass down the virtues that make life worth living.
- You wrote, " When people sneer that a corrupt police force is just a gang in blue, they are more correct than they understand." I believe they are profoundly mistaken. No two things are exactly the same, but the degree of difference between different things, and whether or not that difference is categorical or not, depends on one sees the world. The difference between cops and robbers is the difference between fighting to indulge one's carnal desires, and fighting in the line of duty -- and a healthy society regards that difference as night and day.
I think both are important (and actually complements).
Agreed. Even Abraham argued with the revealed word of God, interpreting it in the light of reason [Genesis 18]. But when God's command was clear, nothing mattered more [Genesis 22].
After some thought I wrote down a clearer explication of what I meant by "Enlightenment epistemology", and what I see as the problem with it. Here goes...
The motto of the Enlightenment, as famously put by Kant, is Habe Mut, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! (Have the courage to use your own understanding) [Kant (1784): What is enlightenment]. To elaborate a bit, this means
- Exclusively honoring of the rules of evidence used in the physical sciences -- as opposed to other modes of persuasion including intuition, pathos, authority, and tradition, especially religious tradition.
- For Kant, and for contemporary thinkers like Steven Pinker, this is not a balancing act, but wholesale abolition of the alternatives to make way for what they call "Reason". Kant writes that "Laziness and cowardice" are the only reasons men do not free themselves from the yoke of authority and tradition [ibid]. Pinker lists intuition, tradition, authority, and sacred texts as "Ways of going wrong" [source]. According to this view, which I call Enlightenmentism, there is no rightful place for any other mode of rhetoric, besides that used in the sciences, in the discussion of public policy and moral norms.
What's not to like?
- The problem is not that scientific knowledge and scientific evidence are "bad". On the contrary, the body of knowledge we have acquired by those methods are a blessing to humanity, and I think we could not have acquired it any other way. Moreover, the rules of evidence in the physical sciences, before wokeness started taking academia by the throat at least, were what I think they ought to be. When scientific evidence decidedly favors one answer to a question of fact, that evidence should be what settles the question.
- The problem is that this sort of reasoning, by itself, doesn't get you very far outside the subject matter of the academic sciences (chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics, psychology, etc.). In particular, by itself, it gets you nowhere in ethics or policymaking. People who believe that it does, or even that it ought to, are profoundly deluded about how they themselves reach conclusions in these domains.
- Contrary to the claims of thinkers such as Jeremy Benthem, John Stuart Mill, Steven Pinker, and Sam Harris, humanism (viz., the position that the ultimate moral purpose is to reduce the suffering and enhance the flourishing of human beings, perhaps along with other sentient creatures) does not close the "is-ought" gap in any useful way. Again, people who believe it does are profoundly deluded about how they themselves reach conclusions in these domains, and why their conclusions differ from those of other people. (I have argued this at some length in another post).
- The problem with subverting the actual source of our moral norms and replacing it with a feeble rationalization is this: each generation naturally (and rightly) pushes back against their inherited traditions, and pokes to see what is underneath them. If the actual source of those traditions has been forgotten, and they are presented instead as being founded on hollow arguments, then the pushback will blow the house down. Sons will live out the virtues of their fathers less with each passing generation, progressively supplanting those virtues with the unrestrained will of their own flesh. That is what we are seeing in our culture today -- and the "Enlightenment" views of thinkers like Kant, Mill, Pinker, and Harris only pour fuel on the fire.
NelsonRushton
2yr ago
I agree that "Honesty" is closer than "truth" as a translation, though I don't think it catches the whole thing. Someone can be honest even when they forget something important, or forget everything (as the dead do, in Virgil's Aeneid, when they drink from the river Lethe). Aletheia connotes being able to give a clear picture of the subject you are talking about, and then actually giving it.
Note that truth is a property of sentences while honesty is a property of a person or his conduct on a given occasion -- whose presence is a virtue and whose absence is a sin. So the Greek concept of aletheia is more like "honesty" in that it is more ethically weighted, and carries that ethical weight into more contexts, than the English conception of truth. But it is stronger than honesty because it also suggests knowing what you are talking about.
NelsonRushton
2yr ago
as for 'There is no "neutral", or "objective" vision'... uh, the existence of God is asserted in the Bible to be "self-evident" in this way many, many times, and deviating from that is explicitly called out as intentional corruption (like "X good, Y bad, get revenge while the sun shines", which is how [insert a way of thinking you believe, correctly or incorrectly, is corrupt] works).
I can't tell what you are trying to say, or how it relates to what you are responding to. Can you elaborate and/or clarify?
I think there's a convincing case to be made that deifying [struck through: Science] truth in and of itself is a perversion of that love;
My position is not that we should deny truth, but that the Enlightenment overreaches on the exclusive sanctity of factual truth and objective methods for determining it. In particular, this leaves no honored way of adjudicating questions of morality or beauty, or of promulgating values and visions (that is, visions in the sense of Sowell's A Conflict of Visions).
From an Anglo perspective, haven't Enlightenment epistemology, values, culture, and nations been around long enough now that they are part of the sacred heritage passed down by our forebears?
Let me say more succinctly what I think is wrong with Enlightenment worldview: It asserts that there are right ways to reason about propositions of fact (viz., generally speaking, the methods used in science and mathematics), but also holds that this "way" is the only honored method of assessing merit of any kind. On the other hand, it yields no actual basis for actually adjudicating between different worldviews (or, what Thomas Sowell called visions), and, in particular, between different value systems. The latter is a controversial assertion, but I believe it firmly and I think the attempts to argue against it (e.g., Harris's The Moral Landscape and Pinker's Enlightenment Now) are terribly weak, as I argued in this post.
This particular aspect of Enlightenment worldview -- and the aesthetic and moral nihilism that it actually entails (even when its adherents claim otherwise) -- had its seeds in the period we call the Enlightenment, but has grown to dominate Western thought only in the second half of the twentieth century, accelerating (in my opinion) when the right abdicated conservatism and embraced Fusionism. This aspect of "Enlightenment" yields tendencies toward radical progressivism and moral and aesthetic relativism, which are antithetical to the Anglo-Christian tradition and indeed to all viable traditions. The part of the Enlightenment that applied scientific materialism and objective reason to science was an improvement consistent with, and emergent from, the Western Christian tradition. On the other hand, the aesthetic and moral nihilism that come from applying that view "outside of its lane" are a dragon eating at the roots of the tree of our civilization. Yes, they have always been around in some form, but they were poison to our ancestors, and they are poison now. By analogy, if my grandfather was an alcoholic, I can carry on the tradition of his identity values without embracing that particular tradition which was always detrimental to the whole.
What I am citing isn't an etymology (that is, word history); it is the literal meaning of the word in Greek, that long existed, and continues to exist, contemporaneously with the meanings of its constituents (a-lethia: non-forgetting, non-concealment). It is translated as "truth" only because there is not a better English word to translate it into, but a lot of important content and connotation is lost in that translation. A word can become an idiom (that is, cease to have its literal meaning) over time, especially if the constituents become obsolete, but this was not the case with aletheia in Classical Greece, and I doubt it is even the case in Modern Greek. The root lethes, is still a word in Greek to this day, meaning "forgetting" or "oblivion" (not "materially false"). The English word "True" has no root in English, of which it is the opposite, but its opposite is "false".
In its earliest and most influential uses (Homer, for example), aletheia is used differently from the modern English word "true". Here is a brief discussion of how word aletheia is used in Homer. After Homer, the biggest influence on Classical Greek use of the word is probably the poem Aletheia by Parmenides, in which it has a broad and mystical meaning -- even farther from the modern notion of truth as material factuality -- perhaps akin to the Stoical notion of logos.
I also think that even if the word becomes idiomatic over time, it loses its literal meaning only by a matter of degree, and that these things affect us more than most people think.
I withdraw the claim about Pinker generally; he writes like a scientist because he is a scientist -- though the percentage in his popular books is still no more than half (and Better Angels of our Nature is probably a data-heavy outlier), which leaves 50% sermonizing.
For The Moral Landscape, I submit that the paragraph you chose is cherry-picked from the 1%. Here is a link to the full text of The Moral Landscape. What do you think the percentage is there?
NelsonRushton
2yr ago
I am not familiar with MacIntyre; I will check him out.
I will venture a guess at the thing you cannot put your finger on. There are two aspects to the meaning of "truth" that adhere at the same time for most English speakers:
- The denotation of "truth", most strongly suggested by the use of the word, is material factuality.
- "Truth", whatever it is, is irreducibly sacred, if not the fountainhead of sanctity itself (as when Jesus said "I am the truth, the way and the life).
In your reply, you renounced #1 explicitly ("not necessarily bare material factuality") but hung on to #2. In doing this, you have departed from Enlightenment use of the word in one of two ways that you could have. I departed in the other way, retaining #1 but (temporarily, for purpose of the posst) cutting loose of #2. I did this because I reckon that most readers here would have a hard time getting their heads around cutting loose of #1. It takes a long conversation to go in that direction.
In the scheme of things, I am with you: in a longer conversation, I would never grant the use of the word "truth" to denote material factuality -- precisely because I do not think material factuality is irreducibly sacred, and because we cannot simply strip phrases like "the search for truth" and "you are speaking untruthfully" of their spiritual connotations.
By the way, the "truth" Jesus claimed to be was not material factuality, but aletheia -- literally non-concealment and non-forgetting (or, to put it positively, revelation and remembrance). This is the Greek word that is translated as "truth" in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament, etc. In Greek, aletheia is typically not a property of sentences, but a property of the way someone communicates with another person on a given occasion. The modern English equivalent would be something like, "being straight with someone". For example, when Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinski", his statement was materially factual, but he was not speaking with aletheia, because he was either concealing something or forgetting something (almost certainly concealing something).
Glad to hear you are sympathetic to the position. Unfortunately, the idea is not developed fully anywhere that I know of, but notable literature that is related to the subject includes
- "Abolition of Man", by C.S. Lewis. This is an important work, not very long , and I would start with it.
- A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell
- Maps of Meaning, by Jordan Peterson
- this video by Jordan Peterson (I have not read the book yet, and I don't care so much for the second half of the vid, but I think the first half is amazing)
- Conservatism: A Rediscovery, by Yoram Hazony (this was the book that smashed the idol of my own Enlightenment indoctrination).
- Interview with Hazony on Uncommon Knowledge about the above book.
- William F. Buckley addresses this briefly in Up From Liberalism and at length (I think) in God and Man at Yale, but I have not read those books in their entirety.
Based on the above reading, and on my thinking about it, I would formulate my position as follows. First, the Enlightenment picture of the world is that
- Fundamentally, the world consists of a bunch of little balls bouncing around in a box according to a certain set of equations, that has been here forever (or since the Big Bang), for no reason.
- All self-evident facts are clear to any rational observer (by definition of self-evident); and ideological differences arise when one or both parties make a mistake (by the rules of evidence of science) in making inferences from these facts, or else is dishonest.
- As Jefferson wrote, it is self-evident that "All men are created equal [with respect to their natural human rights], that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...
- -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
- Our knowledge of the world grows mainly by uncovering new objectively true facts, and by making better inferences from the set of facts we have, according to the rules of evidence used in science and mathematics.
- The merit of a discourse consists in its material factuality and the strength of its objective arguments, according to the rules of evidence used in the sciences.
I would appreciate feedback on whether people think I have characterized "Enlightenments" fairly and correctly. In the meantime, here are my antitheses to these respective points, stated without evidence:
- Fundamentally, the world is a theater of war between good and evil, where the line between good and evil cuts through the center of every human heart.
- People with different ideologies start with different ways of seeing the world, or what Sowell calls different visions. In my own view, differing visions consist of (A) different conceptual vocabularies, (B) different denotations even for the concepts they share (like "racism", "justifiable homicide", "equality"), (C) different valuations of the same state of affairs, and (D) different biases (aka Bayesian priors). The elements of a vision have no truth values or truth conditions. A vision is not a set truth claims backed up by arguments; it is the stage upon which truth claims can be made and arguments can take place (like a first order structure in formal logic). There is no "neutral", or "objective" vision. Enlightenmentism itself a vision -- but those under its influence cannot easily see the water they are swimming in, or imagine how it could be rationally different. I would argue, in fact, that Enlightenmentism is a religion, and a very poor religion.
- None of this was evident to Homer, Aristotle, Genghis Kahn, Augustus Caesar, Shaka Zulu, or the Beowulf Poet. As John Selden wrote, Custom quite often wears the mask of nature, and we are taken in -- to the point that the practices adopted by nations, based solely on custom, frequently come to seem like natural and universal laws of mankind. [Natural and National Law, Book 1, Chapter 6].
- We are born with a debt to our forebears that we can never repay -- and we owe it to them to carry on their culture, values, and nation, except where there is a compelling reason to change them. Your membership in the society of your forebears does not rest on your consent. We do not have anything remotely like enough empirical evidence to objectively justify the instrumental value of our inherited concepts, values, and biases; they are a sacred heritage, a torch that has been passed to us, that we are obliged not to drop. This aspect is emphasized by Hazony.
- The role of objective reason in our cognition on important matters falls somewhere around one half of one percent (Iain Mcgilchrist's figure) of the total. Our knowledge grows in a much more important way by improving our vision of the world: cautiously refining our conceptual vocabulary and the denotation of terms within it, and acquiring new ways of seeing the world that give us different values and biases. To test this hypothesis, pick up a sample of non-academic writing on politics or ethics (e.g., that of someone who claims to be an Enlightenment thinker, like Sam Harris or Steven Pinker), and highlight every word that is used to make an analytic logical inference or a rigorous statistical argument (with, e.g., a precisely specified sample population and control group). You will probably find you have highlighted less than 1% of the text. What are they doing with the other 99% of their words? They are trying to massage the way the reader sees the world: his concepts, semantics, values, and biases. What they are doing is more like preaching a sermon than making a scientific argument. I say there is nothing wrong with that, but they would be appalled at the accusation.
- Truth, in the sense of material factuality, is indeed sacred -- but it should not be worshipped as the jealous God that the Enlightenment thinkers have taken it for. Truth is sacred only because of the common quality of excellence (Greek: Arete) that it shares with moral uprightness and artistic beauty. The exclusive sanctification of material fact and objective evidence inevitably undermines itself and leads to nihilism. This is because truthfulness must be fought for, and yet, by itself, yields no reason to fight for anything. Most people know perfectly well that wokeness is intellectually vacuous and ethically malevolent; almost no one has the courage to say so publicly. What it takes to push back against that tide is not more intelligence or better arguments, but more courage -- and Enlightenmentism has no device by which to cultivate that virtue or any other virtue. As C.S. Lewis wrote, "In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment" [Abolition of Man]. I am not trying to convince anyone of any matter of fact here; I am trying to convince you to grow a pair. I am not making an argument; I am preaching a sermon. So be it. With all due respect to arguments, sermons are more important.
It’s been postulated by many that there is a vibe shift in progress against woke ideology... Firstly, do you agree with the claim?
My lived experience is also that there is more pushback against woken insanity than there used to be (say, one or two years ago), and people are less afraid of being cancelled. I don't have a strong theory of why it is happening -- but if you are taking a poll, my vote is that it is happening.
In the Milgram experiment, one of the variants Milgram ran was to let the subject see two other people say 'no' before he began his own session. If that is done, Milgram observed that the percentage of people who administer all shocks drops from 65% to 10% (see the discussion of Experiment 17 here). If I had to guess the cause of the pushback, I would guess that a few visible people who are not professional talking heads standing up -- like Riley Gaines and Elon Musk, and Donald Trump for that matter -- have played the role of the "first person to say no", who gives other people the courage to also stand up and say 'no'.
On the whole, though, I am not optimistic about this being the beginning of a return to sanity. It could be more of a dead cat bounce. We are well down the road that C.S. Lewis called the "Abolition of Man"". Incidentally, I believe that Enlightenment epistemology -- which is the aspirational epistemology of The Motte -- is the root of the problem.
NelsonRushton
2yr ago
I cannot castigate cowards for preferring to bend when they cannot tolerate breaking.
How about we don't castigate anyone or label them as cowards when they are doing what most people do, but we recognize and promulgate what we seem to agree on: you are a better man if you tell the truth at that table and endure the discomfort than if you keep silent out of fear. I think there would be a lot more Riley Gaines's and Harrison Butkers (I pick them because they are not professional talking heads) if more people gave them a call and said, "Hey, I think what you are doing is heroic and I appreciate it".
crack a taboo shibboleth in a group conversation and you'll see the light of recognition in the eyes of kindreds
Most people, of course, are not famous and wouldn't get the platform Riley Gaines or Harrison Butker has. In this situation ("cracking the shibboleth") I think it's important to important to share the norm amongst ourselves that one of those "kindreds" is being courageous when he speaks up, and if we spoke up for each other when this happens and we are at the same table (even though it is uncomfortable) it would happen a lot more often. Not everyone has to be brave about this, but we should recognize those who are; and if we are not among them, we should recognize that they are better than us in that respect.
Good question. One possibility is that the list was compiled from the top 100 (or some other number) from several different journalists: you make your list; I'll make mine, he'll make his, and we'll agglomerate them in some way. In that case, each woke writer would feel the need to put a few of WNBA players on the list -- but the WNBA is not an A-list sports league and hasn't been discussed enough to reach convergence on the GOAT's. Some of those journalists may never even have watched a full WNBA game (most feminists haven't). So, there would be less convergence on the various lists, which would show up as lots of WNBA players in the agglomerated top 100. Just a guess off the top of my head.
Phelps at #1 seems like a CYA move: almost 10% of the top athletes are from a single obscure sports league -- but that's our honest opinion, and it can't be sheer wokeness, because look who we put at #1. Also, Phelps has the all-time record in the most salient metric (total Olympic medals in head-to-head worldwide competition), so any other choice would look woke.
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