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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31224 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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How do wokes/social constructionists/etc reconcile their views with the actual state of scientific knowledge or even basic logic? It seems clear to me that if one accepts genetics and evolutionary principles, it necessarily implies that 1: humans have a nature that is determined in large part by our genetics and 2: humans and human societies undergo selection on both an individual and group level. We've known for a long time now that intelligence, mental health and a whole bunch of other traits relating to ability and personality are very heavily influenced by genetics, and it's perfectly logical this could lead to differences in outcomes on an individual as well as population level.

However this gets dismissed away with a lot of spurious reasoning (which is usually presented with a huge amount of nose-thumbing and "Scientists say..." type wording in order to scare the reader into not questioning it). As an example, the whole "races can't be easily delineated, there's no gene specific to any race, and there's more variation within races than between them" argument seems to be a poor attempt at deflection and simply doesn't hold up as a method of dismissing population-level differences. Just because races can't be easily delineated does not mean that race is a "social construct" - race might not be discrete, but it is a real physical entity with roots in biology and just because there's no clear dividing lines which can be drawn doesn't exclude the fact that if you do decide to draw these lines it's entirely possible you'd find differences which exist. None of what's said is inconsistent with the idea of innate variations in intelligence and ability that roughly correlate with observable phenotypic traits. All it takes is for the frequency of specific alleles which code for these traits to be unequally distributed, and you'll find aggregate differences. But the way it's presented exists to mislead people into thinking that the continuum-like nature of genetic differences means that these differences or even the concept of race itself as a biological entity is not something that one should even entertain.

There is also another level to this denial of evolutionary principles that extends far beyond genetics, however. Many of these people also seem to think that social norms themselves are arbitrary vagaries of specific historical circumstances, rather than being adaptive practices which were selected for through the process of survival-of-the-fittest. This view fails to account for many commonalities among civilisations, one of the clear ones being religion (one of the favourite woke whipping horses out there). Not only is religion completely ubiquitous in pre-modern society, you can generally see a shift from animist-type religions in tribal societies to the more developed and organised forms of religion mostly predominant in societies that achieve "civilisation" status. This clearly seems to suggest that religious dictates don't simply arbitrarily drop out of the sky - it indicates that some form of selection was occurring and that societies that adopted certain religions had an advantage. Even more than this, these "successful" religions that are common in civilisations share quite a few similarities in their dictates - selflessness, self-discipline, abstinence, etc.

I'm no religious nut - I'm quite atheist, but religion is a social technology that exists so that large-scale societies can remain cohesive and retain a shared moral foundation, and I would call it a good thing overall (and yes, my perspective often pisses off both religious people and atheists). However this is never properly engaged with by the orthodoxy outside of "yeah people facing hardship make up bullshit to make sense of the world, it's got no validity or use outside of that". Such stock explanations that handwave away traditional social norms (at least, those which contradict the woke moral system and outlook) as being functionless at best and damaging at worst are painfully common, despite many of these social norms being absolutely everywhere up until recently.

Among the supposedly educated any discussion of these topics through these non-approved lenses tends to invoke accusations of "social Darwinism" with the implication that applying any kind of evolutionary logic to humans and human societies is invalid because it could be used to justify Bad Things. This is all consequentialist reasoning which has no bearing on the truth of the claim itself, and lumping in all kinds of belief systems under the same category is a very clear composition fallacy which is clearly done to tar every single idea contained within its bounds with the same brush.

More than this, despite these people being very intent on portraying themselves as secular, scientific people, their viewpoints clearly are in conflict with any kind of scientific understanding and come off to me as being borderline superstitious. In order to strongly believe that insights from genetics and evolution can't be applied to human behaviour and that humans do not come programmed with specific predispositions that depend on what you've inherited, you have to believe in metaphysical, dualist ideas of the mind which are essentially detached from anything physical that could be affected by genetics. Once you adopt a view of the human mind as a physical entity the shape of which is determined by the specifications of genetic instructions, it opens up that whole Darwinian can of worms and everything that stems from it, and many wokes simply do not want to acknowledge the possibility that it could have any amount of validity. Unless they're able to maintain an absolutely unreal amount of cognitive dissonance, I'm unsure how their ideas can be anything but superstitious.

It's even worse when it comes to their idea of social norms as something that just drop out of the sky and persist and propagate over the long term regardless of the adaptiveness of these norms, since there is clearly nothing controversial about the idea that societies compete against each other, and this will tend to select for those norms that promote functioning (which is why you find common threads). But you still come across this type of knee-jerk denial nevertheless. Regardless of how well-read they may be, their reasoning remains fundamentally sloppy, and I'm unsure how they manage to square this circle.

One more comment on this woke thread. This is attempt to steelman the woke mindset, attempt to explain by analogy how "the woke" feel about whites and whiteness.

Imagine country controlled by mafia, country where mafia families own disproportionate share of wealth and power.

How would non-mafiosi feel about the mafia?

There are mafiosi born and raised in mafia. These are bad hombres, and few mafia victims are willing to contemplate whether it is really their fault.

There are "mafia adjacent" people, who hang around mafiosi and try to behave like them. These are also highly sus people.

There are mafiosi who were not born into mafia, but joined it willingly. These are the worst people around.

There are also "penitents", mafiosi who renounced the mafia and fight against the mafia system. They are not bad people, but they have to understand they will not be ever as trusted as someone who was never in mafia.

(There are also mafiosi who claim to be victims. "No one was as oppressed as us! Our family was nearly wiped out by other families! Why you cannot feel our pain?" These are justifiably viewed by real mafia victims as the most revolting kind of mafia ever.)

So it looks like our long-term users have mostly already said what needs to be said, but I'm basically going to say it again with a mod-hat.

This is essentially a long boo-outgroup post. You start with:

How do wokes/social constructionists/etc reconcile their views with the actual state of scientific knowledge or even basic logic?

and that's nothing more than an accusation that woke people don't understand basic logic. That's a hell of an accusation.

So, a few rules to note:

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Some of the things we discuss are controversial, and even stating a controversial belief can antagonize people. That's OK, you can't avoid that, but try to phrase it in the least antagonistic manner possible. If a reasonable reader would find something antagonistic, and it could have been phrased in a way that preserves the core meaning but dramatically reduces the antagonism, then it probably should have been phrased differently.

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And from the intro post:

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

(This isn't technically a link, but I'm calling this close enough.)

The tl;dr is that this isn't a place for attacking people you don't like, and if you want to write something that looks even vaguely like "why are my political opponents so dumb", you really need to phrase it better.

Seconding much of what @07mk said. First and foremost that “my outgroup is stupid, pls explain” ought to be a nonstarter, especially in this community. Adding 8,000 words about natural selection does not detract from the foundational booing.

I’ll also sign on to 07mk’s thesis that the average person of any political inclination is not constructing theory from first principles. We instead start from intuitions, then try and adopt or build out an ideology. This can be the natural human tendency to make patterns, or a rhetorical strategy, or an attempt to reason beyond those intuitions. Regardless, “based” usually comes first, with “...on facts and logic” as an afterthought.

Oh, I guess there’s an is-ought problem too. No one likes dealing with those, so the gap between “races have (in)significant intellectual differences” and “races should(n’t) be treated differently” gets skipped over as an axiom. That probably accounts for some of the contradictions.

First and foremost that “my outgroup is stupid, pls explain” ought to be a nonstarter, especially in this community. Adding 8,000 words about natural selection does not detract from the foundational booing.

Fair enough. It was a genuine attempt to source opinions (about how they reconcile certain beliefs which simply seem completely and utterly incompatible to me) from people who do not subscribe to the ideology, since attempting to understand the mindset of its adherents from people who do subscribe to it has so far been an unsuccessful endeavour that has left a very sour taste in my mouth, but I understand the optics isn't fantastic. I suspect if I'd posted it in the small-scale question thread instead of the main CW thread it wouldn't have gotten quite such a negative response (and that's initially what I wanted to do), but I didn't expect anyone to see it since that thread was so far down.

Either way, I've gotten some interesting responses (not all of which I entirely agree with, but which do merit more consideration).

As an example, the whole "races can't be easily delineated, there's no gene specific to any race, and there's more variation within races than between them" argument seems to be a poor attempt at deflection and simply doesn't hold up as a method of dismissing population-level differences.

In the case of race, it's useful to disambiguate between the social attitudes and labels that developed around the area of ancestral origin and the actual underlying genetics. How so? See, for instance, how Asians and whites are increasingly being treated as having a similar social role; if you look at how people use the term "non-white" nowadays, it often implicitly excludes Asians. And racial labels and boundaries have always fluctuated.

Recognizing that there's a social process overlaid on top of physical reality doesn't necessitate rejecting that there is an underlying physical reality.

Recognizing that there's a social process overlaid on top of physical reality doesn't necessitate rejecting that there is an underlying physical reality.

Perhaps I did not make this clear - I'm not saying it necessitates it, per se. I'm referring to instances where "There is a social process overlaid on top of physical reality" and other such rhetoric is used to dismiss discussion about the underlying physical reality (more broadly, it is often used to imply that thinking about race using racial classifications as a heuristic should not be engaged in, which makes meaningful thought or discussion about it impossible).

In any case "race is a social construct" seriously muddies the waters, and is about as insightful as stating that any continuous phenomenon that we try to classify discretely like colour, or time, or temperature, or even something like baldness, is socially constructed because the dividing lines drawn for the purposes of classification are necessarily imposed. The wording they've picked for race specifically completely fails to distinguish between the categories used to classify the phenomenon and the phenomenon itself (the misleading nature of which I think is intentional, since it allows them to motte-and-bailey between the two).

Agree with @07mk. Most people are not logical thinkers and don't care to square the circle on issues like this.

Many of these people also seem to think that social norms themselves are arbitrary vagaries of specific historical circumstances, rather than being adaptive practices which were selected for through the process of survival-of-the-fittest. This view fails to account for many commonalities among civilisations, one of the clear ones being religion (one of the favourite woke whipping horses out there). Not only is religion completely ubiquitous in pre-modern society, you can generally see a shift from animist-type religions in tribal societies to the more developed and organised forms of religion mostly predominant in societies that achieve "civilisation" status. This clearly seems to suggest that religious dictates don't simply arbitrarily drop out of the sky - it indicates that some form of selection was occurring and that societies that adopted certain religions had an advantage. Even more than this, these "successful" religions that are common in civilisations share quite a few similarities in their dictates - selflessness, self-discipline, abstinence, etc.

This paragraph confuses natural selection of ideas with natural selection of the hosts those ideas apply to. It is entirely consistent with the idea of religion as a hyper-effective brain parasite / mind virus that spreads more easily in well-connected and organized societies.

It took me awhile to realize what you are saying here. For those who are as dull as me: OP falsely thinks "religion is abundant" implies "religion is a fitness improvement" but it actually implies "religion is fit." For example, religion could actually hurt its hosts, but the idea itself spreads & doesn't kill hosts too quickly.

Indeed, the phrasing, "religion is a fitness improvement" is actually confused, because I don't think it makes sense to talk about a fit organism only a fit gene. Organisms are completely irrelevant to the overall picture of things. A gene that causes an organism to reproduce way more, and also die early and feel pain, is by all accounts bad for the organism but that gene is good for itself. Maybe this is the insight that leads to hot-take phrases like "selfish gene." Can a gene be a parasite?

Back on topic, religion/ideas/memes having evolutionary considerations does not defend the accusation of arbitrary. In this case, "arbitrary" doesn't mean random, since the constructivist will agree that the norm is caused by specific historical circumstances. I think when a social constructivist calls it arbitrary, he just means he doesn't value the cause-and-effect process that generated it. Rejecting social darwinism is good actually, because evolutionary fitness etc. can be at odds with our goals.

"Selfish gene" comes from the eponymous book by Richard Dawkins, and centers on exactly that idea.

Religion is an interesting one, because I've just read a great book called "The Secrets of our Success", which talks about culture and inter-group competition, and religion seems a very effective way to strengthen cultural norms, and also to strengthen inter-group non-family ties, both of which are important for intergroup competition.

I'm personally still not a big fan, but it was interesting, and I do note a slide towards conservatism as I get older (although I think that's also the shift of the left away from liberality (of which I'm a fan) towards identity politics (of which I"m not).

I've seen quite a bit of suspicion about the idea that religion is pro-social (often substituted for the idea that religion instead is a memetic parasite that spreads by taking advantage of certain human biases without conferring an advantage upon those who adopt it), but I will say there is support for my hypothesis in the literature.

For example: "Converging lines of field and experimental evidence suggest that cultural evolution, building on certain innate cognitive foundations, has favored the emergence of beliefs in powerful moralizing deities concerned with the prosocial behavior of individuals beyond kin- and reciprocity-based networks (Norenzayan and Shariff 2008). Cross-cultural analysis of 186 societies has found that larger and more complex societies were much more likely to subscribe to potent deities directly concerned with morality and willing to punish norm violators (Roes and Raymond 2003; Johnson 2005). Studies conducted across a diverse range of societies including foragers, farmers, and herders, show that professing a world religion predicts greater fairness toward ephemeral interactants (Henrich et al. 2010). Experiments with North Americans show that unconsciously activating religious concepts lead to reduced cheating and greater generosity toward strangers (Bargh and Chartrand 1999; Mazar and Ariely 2006; Shariff and Norenzayan 2007), except among ardent atheists. Together, these cross-cultural, historical, and experimental findings suggest that (1) religion—as a phenomenon with potentially deep roots (Klein 1989)—has not always been about high moralizing gods and (2) modern world religions may have evolved to create a potent linkage between the supernatural and the prosocial. Thus, we hypothesize that cultural evolutionary processes, driven by competition among groups, have exploited aspects of our evolved psychology, including certain cognitive by-products, to gradually assemble packages of supernatural beliefs, devotions, and rituals that were increasingly effective at instilling deep commitment, galvanizing internal solidarity, and sustaining larger-scale cooperation."

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1162/BIOT_a_00018

Social constructivists often attack science and empiricism. They will say that objectivity, logic, and the like are tools that the powerful uses to oppress the weak. For you, the world we live in looks like world (1): Reason is real, some things are true and some things are false. For social constructivists, the world we live in looks like world (2): Reason and truth aren't real, but are illusions that an existing hegemony and powerful order uses to justify its power. That's why it appears so real, or appears that truth is so convincing.

Since you're all about empiricism, and supporting your beliefs with evidence, how would you distinguish the world we live in from (1) or (2), or do you just take it on faith that we live in (1)?

Reason and logic aren't properties of our world: They are absolute. You could say they are necessary properties of any world, there is no possible world where 2+2=5. They aren't empirically derived, they are what empiricism itself is built on.

It's true that entities can attempt to push false reason to gain social power. The answer to this is actual, better reason.

I believe what you call social constructivism is to some degree such an attempt: Delegitimizing logic and replacing it with an inconsistent system that elevates the viewpoints of specific people.

Radical hat on: the only absolute truth is power, and those with power use it to peddle and back other so-called truths.

I agree that there are absolute truths, but how sure are you that you have direct access to them? I agree that actual, better reason will always illuminate false prophets, but seeing a true proof and seeing a false proof look very similar.

I agree social constructivism is an attempt to dethrone an existing hegemon, and has an agenda.

I think ultimately enlightenment, reason, and empiricism are mistake theory, and require some sort of shared assumptions or shared trust in order to work in practice. Once you step outside of the narrow scientific domain, and into the wider one of relations and conflict, is reason really all that important? Would you accept an argument from an enemy?

I agree that there are absolute truths, but how sure are you that you have direct access to them? I agree that actual, better reason will always illuminate false prophets, but seeing a true proof and seeing a false proof look very similar.

Yes, my mind could be influenced in some way making me entirely incapable of applying reason - but following that line of thought only leads to intellectual capitulation. At some point I have to axiomatically assume that I'm in principle capable of understanding logic. So far it has worked out, and my ability to navigate the world I experience has consistently improved.

I think ultimately enlightenment, reason, and empiricism are mistake theory, and require some sort of shared assumptions or shared trust in order to work in practice. Once you step outside of the narrow scientific domain, and into the wider one of relations and conflict, is reason really all that important? Would you accept an argument from an enemy?

Yes, absolutely. I would, naturally, apply increased scepticism and scrutiny, double check their arguments and critically examine the sources for their factual claims. But in the end, being my enemy doesn't reliably prevent them from being right, so I can't dismiss their argument out of hand.

Reason is important because finding the truth is important. Conflict exists, which means some people don't work towards the truth - but this just makes it more important that I do. What else am I supposed to do? Even if I were to embrace conflict and work to maximising my own gain (which I don't want because it would make me a bad person) that mostly* doesn't tell me what policies would achieve that.

*Even many classic identity politics topics. For example, gender quotas in high positions: It seems my position would derive from my gender, but most men and women aren't actually directly affected by this, and there are arguments that a quota would benefit men (not sure how to steelman this, but it could still potentially be true), as well as harm women (by introducing stereotypes of "only got in by quota").

I second @Nantafiria in admonishing you to take this question to a forum which is not so unanimously “anti-woke” as this one; it’s not that you’re not going to get any insightful answers at all here, but rather that you’re not going to get any insight into what wokeness feels like from the inside, which seems to be what you’re asking for.

That being said, I’m going to give you my best attempt to describe what an actual “woke” (fair warning, I’m going to continue to put this word in scare quotes, because I believe that it’s intentionally under-defined and contains several motte-and-bailey imprecisions which are designed to be exploited) person thinks about when pondering the kinds of issues you’re asking about. Depending on which definition of “woke” you have in mind, I would have qualified as “woke” when I was in college a decade ago. I was exposed to many of these ideas several years before they exploded onto the mainstream, so I feel like I was exposed to a purer version of them, less adulterated and packaged for consumption by the general public than the strains of “wokeness” we see now.

The most important through-line connecting the various strains of “wokeness” is a belief in the centrality of power relations to every aspect of human life and society in a post-agricultural world. In the Marxist-Hegelian telling, the primordial state of humanity - what we would call the hunter-gatherer model of society - was profoundly egalitarian and non-hierarchical; every person was expected to contribute to the collective good in an amount commensurate with his or her ability to do so, and everyone understood the importance of providing for those members of society who could not “pull their own weight” - children, the elderly, the infirm/disabled, etc.

It wasn’t until the advent of agriculture that human societies began to be plagued by the twin evils of surplus and centralized political institutions, which produced a class of rent-seeking parasitic elites who could hoard surplus resources for themselves. This class had to overcome the perception of their own illegitimacy which would have been viscerally felt by all of the vast majority of people who were not members of that class; in order to defuse and redirect that resentment, that class of rent-seekers must have been incredibly adept at narrative-weaving - in creating powerful narratives which legitimated their privileged position. Priest-craft was certainly integral to that narrative-weaving, as was a sophisticated network of power-brokerage in which the privileged class could utilize leverage and patronage to play various factions of society against each other.

Why else would the mass of society, dispossessed by these rent-seekers, and having a vague pre-conscious ancestral memory of the idyllic egalitarian before-times, not simply rise up against these pathetic elites and reclaim their birthright? The fact that they didn’t is a powerful testament to the centrality and potency of narrative - specifically, elite-crafted narratives which legitimate hierarchy, inequality, and state power - in human society.

Hegel even talks explicitly in strangely religious, post-Christian terms about this. He references the metaphor of the Garden of Eden and the Fall, and he subverts this metaphor by saying that there is no literal god or Eden, but that this allegory actually represents the way that humanity was robbed of its idyllic anarcho-primitivist birthright by the advent of inegalitarian states. For Hegel, and subsequently for Marx in an attenuated and less explicitly religious sense, the teleological goal of humanity is to reclaim that birthright: to rebuild Eden, to dismantle the unjust structures who took it from us against our will by weaving webs of lies and cynical narratives.

So, you have an ideology to which the following axioms are central: 1. Hierarchical and unequal power relations are a (contingent) fact of human society; 2. The inherent injustice of those power relations is masked by self-serving narratives created and propagated by the class of individuals who benefit from those unequal power relations; 3. Some of those individuals may be intentionally creating and manipulating those narratives, but the majority of the individuals in the privileged class simply imbibe and repeat those narratives without investigating the truth value of those narratives, since to do so would be to risk delegitimizing the structures that allow their lifestyle to persist; 4. The only way to dismantle these unjust structural power relations - short of mass revolutionary violence, anyway - is to rhetorically deconstruct, attack, dismantle, and replace the legitimating narratives. You must first identify what those narratives are, which means you must constantly be vigilant against them. This vigilance sometimes requires a great deal of sophistication, because the narratives themselves are so sophisticated and are protected by a network of legitimating institutions which grant the narratives the armor of their support.

So, let’s look at discussions about race through that lens. First off, we have a clear example of a form of social capital which some people have and others don’t; those who have it enjoy a position of rent-seeking privilege, while those who don’t are barred from the privileged class and suffer accordingly. The social currency in question is whiteness. (Or, if you want to get even more sophisticated and up-to-date, you might even say “not-blackness”, as many black post-Marxists - see Charles Blow’s recent op-ed about the Nury Martinez debacle in Los Angeles for an example - predict the rise of a form of “lite supremacy” in which the racially privileged caste will continue to expand to encompass Asians, Latinos without significant African ancestry, and any other group that isn’t Black.)

Now that you’ve identified the vector along which this particular dynamic of unequal hierarchy is constructed, you then have to ferret out the narrative that people have internalized in order to legitimate that narrative. Remember: the default primordial state of humanity is egalitarian and does not recognize hierarchical distinctions between individuals, so any time you identify a hierarchy, there must, by definition, be a narrative preventing people from seeing it and instinctively revolting against it. So, what’s the narrative legitimating racial inequality? And, more importantly, what are the institutions that are propping that narrative up by granting it the imprimatur of their support?

The narrative, of course, is that this inequality is inevitable due to some inherent difference between classes of people, and any attempts to rectify this inequality will fail because it’s built-in. Big surprise there - this is the exact same form that every other hierarchy-legitimating narrative takes. The convenience of this narrative for the class of people benefiting from it is manifestly obvious and impossible to miss. How wonderful for you, the possessor of the social capital whiteness, that you just happen to be in the “biologically superior” caste, and there’s nothing we can ever do to change that, because the subaltern caste is just inherently worse than you. Nothing more to see here, folks, now get back to toiling and suffering while whitey hoards the fruit of your misery.

What’s the legitimating institution that protects this narrative? Well, it used to be the church. Their narrative was something like “God cursed Noah’s son Ham for looking upon his father’s nakedness, and now the descendants of Ham carry that ancestral curse which has made them natural slaves to the descendants of Japheth and Shem. It is God’s will, nothing we can do about it.” Or, at other times, instead of the descendants of Ham, blacks were said to bear the Mark of Cain, but the effect was the same. Well, we eventually deconstructed and delegitimated that particular narrative, and the institution which legitimated it now bears only a fraction of the power it once held; very few people uncritically internalize narratives propagated by churches anymore, at least not ones that contradict egalitarianism. So, the privileged caste needed to find a replacement institution to pass the narrative baton to, and they needed to do it in a hurry. Well, conveniently, the institution of Science™️ was there to step into the breach.

Science™️ is a very slick and effective power-legitimating institution, partly because it superficially seems to act in opposition to the old, defeated institutions such as the Church, and partially because it is so good at presenting itself as Objective and Narrative-Free. Once the proto-Marxists (the Enlightenment thinkers) showed up and dealt a knock-out blow to the Church, they had to then be co-opted by a narrative that allowed them to enter the privileged caste! Good lord, power-legitimating narratives are memetically powerful and infinitely-malleable, which is why we have to work so damn hard to relentlessly sniff them out. Now, the practitioners of Science™️ had obtained a form of social capital called Knowledge, and this allowed them to speak authoritatively and to, once again, intimidate the disempowered masses into submission. Do what you’re told, plebs, the Knowers have decreed that inequality is inevitable because some people are naturally worse than others. Conveniently, we the Knowers look and sound very similar to the guys who previously told you that their privilege is natural. Hell, in many cases they’re literally the same guys! But, nothing we can do about it. God - er, sorry, Science - made it this way. Get back to work!

Even if some of what the scientists are saying has some factual basis, that doesn’t excuse the fact that they are helping to once again lend legitimacy to the eternal narrative that powerful privileged people deserve their power. Our most important goal is to defeat that narrative. Everything else is secondary.

The answer to ‘How do they square the circle’ is always ‘epicycles’ for the intelligent and ‘they don’t’ for the not. That’s not specific to woke, it’s just a rule of life.

What are epicycles (in this context)?

Additional explanations which make the model clunky overall, but solve a specific problem that would render it untenable compared to the observed world.

First of all, I do think this post is pretty much just "why is my idiotic outgroup so idiotic as to believe in idiotic things?" and not the kind of thing I like seeing here, personally.

Second, I think the things you describe about biology-denial is common not just in "wokes" but in much of the general population as well. The wokes certainly are the most fervent believers in it and also one of the primary driving forces that push it onto the general populace, but they're by far not the only ones to buy into the denialism hook-line-sinker.

Third, I think the answer to your question is just that most people don't actually care to do the research into this stuff. Most people, wokes included, follow a sort of cargo-cult version of principles that happen to be convenient for them in the moment, not principles themselves. An example that comes to mind - because it was one of the first I noticed back in my SJW days - was wokes (perhaps proto-wokes? "Woke" wasn't nearly as common a term back then as it is now, and they were usually called SJWs) calling opinions they disagreed with "gross" as a way to denigrate them. It came as a shock to me, because those same individuals had spent the past decade denigrating the notion of objecting to something on the basis of personal disgust in the fight for gay rights and gay marriage. Yet there they were, objecting to something on the basis of personal disgust. It made me realize that they mistakenly believed they were principled; it wasn't that they believed in the principle of non-judgment on the basis of disgust while their conservative opponents didn't, it was that they just didn't find gay marriage disgusting and so had no issue with using such a principle as a convenient momentary tool with which to beat down their conservative opponents.

So when it comes to science and specifically the evolution of the human brain and human societies, they don't actually follow the principles of science to do the research into figuring out truths about the universe, they just think cheering really loudly for the banner that says "science" on it while pushing all the same ideas they already believe in is what it takes for them to be pro-science.

I don't think this is unique to wokes. It's perhaps particularly worse in them than many other ideologies, because woke-ism specifically has concepts designed to turn off critical thinking. But then again, that's not exactly unique to woke-ism either. It just happens to be the one that is acceptable to people who consider themselves pro-science through optimizing itself to have the most convincing, shiniest pseudo-academic/pseudoscientific veneer that hides the fact that it's all made of cardboard.

It's perhaps particularly worse in them than many other ideologies, because woke-ism specifically has concepts designed to turn off critical thinking

What do you mean by this? Do you have any examples?

The concept of "lived experience" being that, when someone belonging to a demographic group that has been deemed oppressed claims something, it is to be believed without skepticism. Any sort of good-faith questioning or checking is deemed to be a form of oppression. This concept is repeated in many places, such as the "microaggression," which is, by definition, a behavior that the "microaggressor" doesn't perceive as being an aggression and is entirely up to the judgment of the "microaggressed upon" but which is still something that the potential "microaggressor" has the responsibility to avoid doing. There's also "believe women" and "believe all women," which are slogans designed specifically to push people away from applying basic good-faith skepticism to claims of fact when women make claims of specific sexual assault against individuals.

Of course, in practice it's impossible to apply this sort of thing in a consistent manner; if 2 different black people claim contradictory things to each other, then what do you do? In practice, it just means you have license to believe whoever is more convenient for your own social status and comfort while dismissing the other through various means (e.g. "internalized white supremacy"). And this sort of thing can lead to self-reinforcement, because by believing the right people, you can lead yourself to the conclusion that concepts like logical consistency and empirical science are themselves merely tools of the white supremacist patriarchy designed for the purpose of oppressing minorities; and it doesn't get much more anti-critical thinking than that.

There's also the attacking of free speech as a principle, the mockery of "Well Akshually", the attacking of "just asking questions" or playing devils advocate (you're derailing!). So there's a whole bunch of anti-heresy mechanisms in place.

This view fails to account for many commonalities among civilisations, one of the clear ones being religion (one of the favourite woke whipping horses out there).

Woke has successfully borrowed from religion. It has appropriated the Christian concept of original sin (people have privilege assigned to them at birth due to immutable characteristics that they must strive for the rest of their life to redress), and other shared religious concepts like blasphemy (only certain people can say certain words, even in a neutral, journalistic, or academic context; only certain people may make certain foods, wear certain hairstyles, sell certain foods, perform certain music), atonement (restorative justice, public apology, doing the work), ritual (land acknowledgments, exchange of personal pronouns) and excommunication (canceling).

Sounds fully general, or close to it. Especially when the OP is arguing for such a broad usage of religion.

You could make all the same arguments about anti-woke rhetoric. Race realism is vaguely like original sin. Asking for pronouns becomes blasphemy. Cultural appropriation has nothing on the importance of gender roles. Any sufficiently broad social stance is comparable to religion.

See also Number 1.

I think that’s fair criticism.

Perhaps because of the large city in which I live, and the impact it has had even on center-left people and vaguely progressive-aligned non-political institutions, the old line that new converts to a religion are often-the most pious, has been pinging around in my head.

If I spent time at suburban school board meetings in the Bible belt, I might well have the same take on anti-woke, as opposed to it being something I see online and elsewhere.

I think I agree that religion can offer group selection benefits to a society and that this likely has been relevant in history.

Some of it also may have just been by chance as well, humans like a good story and maybe some of these religions are just very successful memes that do a good job at lighting up our neurons in a way that reproduces itself well. We should be careful to not fully confuse evolutionary fitness on the memetic landscape with fitness on the landscape of intergroup competition.

But it’s definitely true that it’s a useful lens. How else do we explain for example that once a man came out of a cave with a prophetic vision, and within one generation a group of desert nomads have conquered half of the known world, and that the territory they originally conquered still maintains their religion and often too their language some 1500 years later. That was a highly successful cultural meme which was the main driver leading a backwater ethnic group to huge social and linguistic power.

But if we accept this conclusion then we can also argue that secular societies are incredibly evolutionarily fit in the landscape of the modern world. And I believe this to be true. The intergroup competitive landscape is not what it was in the pre-modern world. If a modern secular country were to become deeply religious, there may be consequences in the level of their decision making which puts them at a disadvantage relative to other countries. Even if you have trouble accepting that conclusion, if we’re working from the thesis that a societies’ worldview determines evolutionary outcomes at the scale of the group, were confronted with the fact that it’s the secular countries which lead the world and that “your society having one religion they all believe” is currently inversely correlated with measures of human development, as well as with geopolitical power.

If we’re using an evolutionary lens to explain these things (which I think is quite useful and a fun way to look at history), we might also acknowledge that sometimes the evolutionary landscape itself shifts and favors certain adaptations over others. I’m waiting for any non-diverse mono-religious society to rise to global prominence to prove this thesis wrong, but I have trouble even imagining such a thing occurring in the modern world. I just don’t think it’s one of the favored adaptations for our current landscape.

But if we accept this conclusion then we can also argue that secular societies are incredibly evolutionarily fit in the landscape of the modern world.

I wouldn't get so ahead of ourselves. Societies have only been secular for the last 60 years or so - depending on how you define it, was 1950s American society (not just government) truly 'secular'? - while religious societies have been around since, well, since the dawn of history. The contemporary secular society is really a flash in the pan compared to the entirely of human history. Yes, I know that you could make some argument that the speed of history is accelerating or whatever, but it's still important to consider that the secular society is still in relative infancy. Any negative consequences of mass but societal changes will usually have some lag time. Maybe the broad decline we're seeing across the West is in part a consequence of the secularisation of society.

In addition to this, it also may be the case that widespread secularism in the first place is a consequence of the removal of environmental/selection pressures. In evolution, there's an idea that once selection pressures are removed, this no longer creates pressure that maintains the traits that were previously adaptive, leading to decay of traits down to the level that selection is operating. Most mutations degrade functioning instead of promoting it, and without selection pressures to weed out these destructive mutations they can accumulate and cause phenotypic loss.

Perhaps there has been a version of this occurring on the social level in that the technological advances in the West have led to relaxed selection pressure on these societies and their norms. It's an idea I've been playing with for a while that abundance and lack of competition has allowed for the fostering of historically unique social practices which can emerge only under a condition of relaxed selection. In other words, only the societies that don't have much to worry about and possess such a decisive advantage that few others can realistically compete with them can actually sustain a secular society (and not without creating problems of internal strife in the process).

This reconciles pretty well with the following observations that 1: secularism is a very recent and localised phenomenon whereas religion was absolutely ubiquitous for the vast majority of human history (and the more organised, moralising religions developed independently many times), 2: evidence exists to suggest that religion has pro-social effects, 3: the key scientific and technological advances that catapulted Western societies into being a world power were made long before they were secular, and 4: the adoption of secularism seems to correlate with the "broad decline" you've mentioned.

Could I have a definition of religion here? I think I could agree with some and disagree with others.

But if we accept this conclusion then we can also argue that secular societies are incredibly evolutionarily fit in the landscape of the modern world.

Secular liberal states are relatively young and for most of their history held strong religious assumptions. Truly irreligious societies are especially young and are already facing evolutionary challenges (more religious people have more kids).

I hope you're right but I'm not gonna raise the banner of victory yet. As long-lived as Islam, secularism and liberalism are not.

If a modern secular country were to become deeply religious, there may be consequences in the level of their decision making which puts them at a disadvantage relative to other countries.

This would imply that strongly religious modern countries are irrational (or rather: more irrational than secular states), which is debatable.

Also: secular societies also make bad decisions due to being bad at understanding religious societies - which are still the majority. American social engineering difficulties in Afghanistan come to mind (one minor example was a well-meaning American putting an ecumenical selection of religious verses on a football...that devout Muslims were then expected to kick*).

Or hell, they can make bad (or at least costly) decisions due to their own ideological concerns.

Even if I were to grant that secularism (and liberalism) was a good solution to the internal problems facing religiously divided European states, I do wonder if it is a good idea for more homogeneous states to abandon their cultural core, for a variety of reasons. If a nation is already strongly religious, how much does it gain?

* Keep in mind: devout Muslims will not even hold the Qur'an without performing ritual cleansing first.

As an example, the whole "races can't be easily delineated, there's no gene specific to any race, and there's more variation within races than between them" argument seems to be a poor attempt at deflection and simply doesn't hold up as a method of dismissing population-level differences. Just because races can't be easily delineated does not mean that race is a "social construct" - race might not be discrete, but it is a real physical entity with roots in biology and just because there's no clear dividing lines which can be drawn doesn't exclude the fact that if you do decide to draw these lines it's entirely possible you'd find differences which exist. None of what's said is inconsistent with the idea of innate variations in intelligence and ability that roughly correlate with observable phenotypic traits. All it takes is for the frequency of specific alleles which code for these traits to be unequally distributed, and you'll find aggregate differences. But the way it's presented exists to mislead people into thinking that the continuum-like nature of genetic differences means that these differences or even the concept of race itself as a biological entity is not something that one should even entertain.

This is basically correct: Races are categories, and while it is absolutely true that the categories (ie, where the lines are drawn) are socially constructed rather than given by nature, that does not mean that they are arbitrary, and it certainly does not mean that there are no average genetic differences between populations which we call Race A and Race B -- Eg: sickle cell anemia is far more common among the race we in the USA call "black" than the one we call "white." But it seems to me that you weaken your argument a bity when you refer to "the concept of race itself as a biological entity" rather than sticking with the argument that there are some actual average genetic difference between races, even if they are not "biological entities" but are socially constructed. The socially constructed argument is actually irrelevant; there is no need to refute it.

Even more than this, these "successful" religions that are common in civilisations share quite a few similarities in their dictates - selflessness, self-discipline, abstinence, etc.

What successful religions really have in common is a message that they are not a threat to elites: Christianity: Your reward will be in heaven, so if you are at the bottom, just chill a while. And, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Hinduism: Follow the rules, and stay in your place. Buddhism: The source of suffering is desire. So, to be happy, give up wanting to move up.

What successful religions really have in common is a message that they are not a threat to elites

Islam doesn't seem to like the others in this regard. Its founder denounced non-Islamic rulers and waged wars of aggression against them.

In his traditional biography Mohammed pissed off the elites of Mecca so much he had to leave to keep his life.

In Medina, he sponsored a more ecumenical document - the Constitution of Medina - that gave rights to the Jews and tribes living there as well as the new Muslims.

Of course, once he'd gathered up sufficient power to ignore it, he destroyed the Jews and seized Mecca. But that took a while.

In his traditional biography Mohammed pissed off the elites of Mecca so much he had to leave to save his life.

A pretty straight putt modification to @Gdanning's conjecture should be "successful religions (eventually) deliver a message that isn't threatening to (their) elites." Christianity was also extremely threatening the status quo at the start, which is why Diocletion and other Roman emperors tried so hard to stamp it out. But when a revolutionary new Christian elite under Constatine took their place, we get the Council of Niceaea, and all the inconvenient or threatening parts of the religion get sandpapered over. Eventually, the religion that said all rich people are literally going to hell morphs into something telling serfs to stay in their place and the duke gets to live in a palace because God wills it.

Eventually, the religion that said all rich people are literally going to hell morphs into something telling serfs to stay in their place and the duke gets to live in a palace because God wills it.

Note that even "rich people are going to hell" is not a threat to the status of the rich in the temporal world, but rather the opposite: It tells the poor that the rich will get theirs eventually, so there is no need to try to take them down now.

Those were more akin to external wars, were they not? As I understand it, in Medina, the success of Islam was via conversion of elites rather than by force.

I am referring to what successful religion tells those at the bottom of society how to act. I don't know a huge amount about the teachings of Islam about this, but the verse of righteousness does say that those are righteous who "are patient in poverty", and then there is this discussion

And, of course, this is distinct from what religions say about rulers who are apostates or who do not adhere to the religion at issue. Looking at this through a Darwinian lens, a religion that teaches that rulers must adhere to its teachings is likely to grow more than one that doesn't, at least once the religion gets large enough that the ruler can't simply crush it.

How do wokes/social constructionists/etc reconcile their views with the actual state of scientific knowledge or even basic logic? It seems clear to me that if one accepts genetics and evolutionary principles, it necessarily implies that 1: humans have a nature that is determined in large part by our genetics and 2: humans and human societies undergo selection on both an individual and group level.

Among woke-lite groups, AKA the gestalt that creates the Reddit frontpage, you're forgetting that they don't have the information you do. There's a lot of organic social infrastructure to prevent people from learning about group differences and the heritability of behavioural traits; you have to learn about them separately and then correlate the two sets of knowledge on your own. When I first read an internet comment saying the average black american's IQ was one standard deviation below average, my reaction was "Who did the study, the Klu Klux Klan?" For any academic who speaks about the topic openly, their reputations get dragged through the mud. Who wastes time investigating the claims of flat earthers?

Well, me. I investigated flat earth. I also investigated racist pseudoscience. And I didn't bail off any spurious offramps like iron deficiency in childhood or IQ tests being a measure of cultural knowledge that late aughts Google was eager to throw in my face.

For those who never investigate the problem to begin with, or get off one of the offramps, they "reconcile" it because there's nothing to reconcile. There's a reason why your side tends to be much better at passing ideological turing tests then theirs. They just don't know.

Now, there are a few "high inquisitors" like tenured critical theorists, internet moderators, or the SLPC who have to engage with this information enough to fight its dissemination. To steelman what they would say, the evidence for what you're talking about is not conclusive (iron deficiencies in childhood, shared environments, etc), and could have disasterous social consequences if the average idiot takes a simple conclusion from complex and mixed research. Could there be group differences? Maybe. Is there a genetic component? Maybe. Did Islam propogate through the world because it justified systemic violence against non-muslims, unlike other religions? Maybe.

But the impressionable average idiot has to be protected from fascists preaching radical ideology with oversimplified and deceptive statistics.

Now, there are a few "high inquisitors" like tenured critical theorists, internet moderators, or the SLPC who have to engage with this information enough to fight its dissemination. To steelman what they would say, the evidence for what you're talking about is not conclusive (iron deficiencies in childhood, shared environments, etc), and could have disasterous social consequences if the average idiot takes a simple conclusion from complex and mixed research.

This reminded me Sam Harris and Ezra Klein debate around Murray's Bell Curve book, race, IQ and all that with Harris defending existence of IQ gap. At one point Klein did use the argument that even if true (which he argued against), it would be bad for it to get out there. The discussion then derailed when Harris said he is interested in facts and what is true, for which Klein responded that Harris also has biases that prevent him from finding truth. When Harris denied such biases, Klein threw at Harris accusation that he did not have enough people of color on his podcast and the discussion got quite heated from there and turned into shit.

I absolutely lost any faith in Klein as an intellectual from there on. Anything he claims that is true or that he believes should automatically be suspicious as he may just lie for moral or political reasons. What was interesting is that Klein is fully aware of him engaging in this Conflict Theory thinking, his defense as I understand it is assuming that everybody is Conflict Theorist, some people just deny it. Another interesting notion to me is that Ezra knowing that he is a Conflict Theorist puts him on a moral high ground compared to misguided naive people like Harris who just delude themselves and do not have moral power to do what's right. To use an analogy, it is like CDC experts lying about efficacy of masks early on in order to prevent panic buying from general public. And they kind of admit it in similar fashion - people should have known that we lie and in fact it was a fantastic thing we did and we would do it again. Grow up and cough up some money so our good work can continue. I do not quite have my finger on what is going on here but I think this is very important phenomenon to understand.

Another interesting notion to me is that Ezra knowing that he is Conflict Theorist thinks this puts him on moral high ground compared to misguided naive people like Harris who just delude themselves and do not have moral power to do what's right.

This is an odd fact about the Left's Nietzsche-inspired standpoint view: if we really take the stance that the values of the Enlightenment (objectivity, universality and so on) are a lie to secure the position of one party, why should we care about the standpoint of the Left (i.e. the standpoint of the victims they claim to represent)?

If it's all just conflict and lies told to facilitate conflict then the minorities are "lying" too - this is exactly what Nietzsche lays out as slave morality. Which makes sense for them but why should anyone else care?

Two explanations. One: elites of every age and culture have engaged in a healthy dose of noble lying as it served them. (Sometimes noble, usually self-interested.) Two: divine command as an ethical framework has fallen off a cliff. A hundred years ago good christians took the Ninth Commandment rather seriously. Today most Ivy league educated lower elites have no moral framework and tend to waver between expediency and utilitarianism. Even when people claim to be deontologists, they rarely have the intellectual chops to justify their actions by a categorical imperative and are mostly going by gut.

I'd guess it's a mix. Explanation one is true for decision-makers at the top, who have always been mercenary liars; but the conflict theorification of the lower ruling class like Klein feels new. Using the Gervais Principle and Straussian language respectively, the sociopaths/wise are the same as always. The clueless/gentlemen have lost scripture and only hear from their God through prayer, and sometimes he tells them to lie, or importantly, to not seek that fruit.

Today most Ivy league educated lower elites have no moral framework and tend to waver between expediency and utilitarianism. Even when people claim to be deontologists, they rarely have the intellectual chops to justify their actions by a categorical imperative and are mostly going by gut.

I agree, however another point is how proud these people are for openly standing on one side of the conflict. It is seen as a moral and just thing to lie and decieve in order to "win". Or to be more precise and trying to walk in their shoes- in their minds it is not lying and decieving, nato really. They are doing the good work. In the past I had a thought experiment of insane Christian who decided to kill babies right after they were baptized. In mind of this Christian he is on a mission to fill the heaven with innocent souls and he is the only willing to pay the price of eternal damnation. He was the only "true" Christian who has the guts and moral chutzpah to pay the price unlike those other weakling wannabe Christians. He was willing to pay the ultimate price of his immortal soul to "do good". Of course the question is if he really is in the right or hopelessly in the wrong. For me it takes huge heaps of arrogance, narcissism and and of course also psychopathy to pull something like that off. Additionally it is a strategy that brings huge cost to oneself which makes it very hard to correct due to sunk cost fallacy coupled with consistency fallacy.

Only we now live in a society where instead of condemnation of similar despicable practices and as you say, willingness to throw away the whole game by failing to process ones behaviour through categorical imperative - we now have some new morality praising such destructive behavior. There are definitely some psychological, social and moral angles to process here and as I say I am not quite there yet to have some stable opinion on it.

if you believe the christian religion then why would sending young children to heaven before they have a chance to do something that damns themselves to hell be despicable. the afterlife is eternal, this life is nothing compared to it. The real despicable thing is the religion which set up an afterlife system with the unjust consequences that make that behavior make sense.

More than this, despite these people being very intent on portraying themselves as secular, scientific people, their viewpoints clearly are in conflict with any kind of scientific understanding

These were atheists of the noughties, breed nearly extinct by now.

Modern wokes see science and secularism as parts of white system of oppression and do not appreciate them in the slightest. The wokes love religions and traditions of BIPOC, they reject white oppressive religions and traditions.

Your arguments about social utility of religion were said many times before

https://i.imgur.com/v5zUuAl.jpg

and might persuade rationalist atheist (especially atheist with big house and portfolio), but would not impress the woke.

It's incidental to your claims, but Wikiquote thinks the quote at your link was misattributed.

How do wokes/social constructionists/etc reconcile their views with the actual state of scientific knowledge or even basic logic?

Simply and effectively: they deny it.

Just like literal six days creationists see geology and paleontology as satanic lie, wokes see genetics and evolutionary science as racist lie.

They know nothing about "actual state of scientific knowledge" and proudly refuse to learn anything it - why waste your time with some fascist garbage?

Try to show genetic data, IQ tables and bell curve graphs in any woke place and see how fast you get banned, regardless how many impeccable scientific citations your stuff gets.

Well no, literal six day creationists believe in geology and dinosaur digs. They have a variety of hour long YouTube videos about how the conclusions of those fields really support six days of creation 6,000 years ago.

I suspect that the woke are similar, but it’s possible I’m wrong.

There is a good article on Everything Studies with a nice graph showing how let's say rationalist view reality and how some more humanities inclined people view it. If one accepts the latter framework, then saying reality is socially constructed means the social order is socially shaped as opposed to the physical universe is socially conjured.

To further muddle the waters, many people say that social construction does not mean things are not real. Often used example is money: value of otherwise worthless physical pieces of paper stems from other people giving it value. Money undoubtedly is "socially shaped" but it does not make it unreal meaning that pieces of green paper are an illusion or somehow physically not existing. In that sense claim that race is socially constructed may mean that certain social aspects of race and its impact on daily lives of people is socially shaped even though it is obviously real in a sense that there are people with white skin and people with black skin.

This really is often confusing and even well meaning people may talk past each other. As an example I will use the term science. For somebody it may mean body of knowledge gathered by scientific method. For somebody else it means more philosophy and sociology of science meaning ways how grants are awarded, social processes that steer researchers into certain fields of research more than other fields and so forth. So saying that science is social construct is obviously true as science is done by people and they are working in socially shaped organizations using socially shaped processes. It does not mean that scientific body of knowledge is just some arbitrarily made up stuff. But then again it can be if let's say scientific social processes were driven by racism or whatnot.

Now to be frank, even if I do somewhat understand where social constructionists come from I think their insight has limited value. It would be better to define special terms for what they actually mean so if one says "science" we know if we are talking about scientific body of knowledge or something else. These discussions often take form of sophistry spreading confusion and they paradoxically contribute to the whole social constructivist premise. Which in a sense may be ultimate level of trolling: see, we made scientists say stupid things by sophistry and social pressure. We were right all along except in the past the social pressure was based on racism and misogyny and homophobia!

In that sense claim that race is socially constructed may mean that certain social aspects of race and its impact on daily lives of people is socially shaped even though it is obviously real in a sense that there are people with white skin and people with black skin.

That's the motte.

The bailey is that because race is socially constructed and not scientifically real, we can therefore assume any policy with disparate impact ("class starts at 10AM so show up before 10AM", "math questions have objective answers" or "don't beat up other children") is racist.

I think you have it backwards. The motte is the defensible part

Fixed, thank you.

That, or it may be genuine discussion of what should be considered racism and racist. To go for more benign example take claim like "psychology is science". It is at the same time a claim about what is psychology but also a claim of what properties science should have. Somebody saying "psychology is not science" can disagree with you about properties of psychology and/or properties of science.

And of course as said previously, this can be used as sophistry. You can use word games to become parasitic on some pre-existing meaning or valence of certain word (e.g. racism is bad) in order to either make the new thing (like disparate impact) seem a little bit like the original category (racism), or to change the meaning of the word (racism) a bit - or both at the same time.

While I'm aware of the redefinition of "racism", the bailey I describe isn't that. Lets roll with your psychology example:

  1. Psychological studies have little predictive value and people in the field don't seem very worried about replication or correctness.

  2. Psychology is a science, and science tells us that if you don't do gender affirming care/body positivity/etc, people will do suicides and such.

Now, (1) is just an empirical claim. Point (2) may have some embedded prescriptive linguistics about what "science" should means (I guess not predictions that tend toward accuracy, or correction of errors based on empirics coming out the wrong way).

However, if you noticed, (2) actually has an embedded implicit assumption: namely that science makes predictions which are generally true, unlike critical theory or english literature. And in the psychology case, people don't bring out (2) when folks complain about (1).

We can similarly decompose discussions of racism and HBD:

  1. The reason black people are underrepresented in technology is because black people for biological reasons lack the ability to write code, not race-influenced choices by people in technology.

  2. It is racism to require the ability to code in order to hire someone as a programmer because of the disparate impact.

(1) is an empirical claim, (2) may be a claim about the prescriptive linguistics of "racism". But unlike the psychology case, people do bring out the prescriptive linguistics as if it somehow is relevant to (and refutes) the empirical claim (1). That's the bailey.

Do people really trot (2) out to refute (1) in the racism example? I would expect many people to refute (1) by just saying, "that is racist" and not really even talk about disparate impact or business hiring practices.

No, they trot out "socially constructed" to refute (1). It's crazy to suggest a socially constructed identity would have biological effects, after all.

There are a lot of ways that things can be "real," for some value of real. The Statue of Liberty is a real thing, as it is a actual object in the physical world--reality in the most trivial and literal sense. But there are other legitimate senses of "real"--the US national debt, the number 2, Frodo Baggins, and Alexander Hamilton are all real on various different levels. As you say, the value of a dollar has a legitimate, socially-constructed reality, but so does something like "Donald Trump's reputation"--its exact parameters are highly contested, but no one doubts that "Donald Trump" is real, and that he has a reputation, which is socially constructed from the aggregate of perspectives on his character.

(I would describe "science" as a tool/process/methodology, rather than a body of knowledge.)

Coincidentally Everythingstudies also have a very good article about what real can mean and also how it creates confusion. But here I think is that the distinction is a little bit different: even taking Sherlock Holmes that exists as a fictional character, somebody can say that he also has some other aspects that were socially shaped or that this character himself impacts society in certain way. So if somebody says let's say Sherlock Holmes is racist this can have multitudes of meanings and it is not apparent which one is relevant in context of the discussion: is the character in the novel racist to other characters? Were the novels featuring this character some way perpetuating racism later down the road? Of course it also has to be noted that by playing with words in this way it opens large space of various rhetorical tactics and sophistry.

It is also often a feature, especially if the target of discussion is something else such as social transformation. For instance you can use these words with multiple meanings in order to fish for some hooks that are relevant to your discussion partner, thus finding out which context connects with the other person the best personally - for instance so called Freierian "generative themes". Then you can use other examples and connect it back to the original context, the original theme in a process of recontextualization in order to achieve some other end outside of just discussing ideas. In this sense this vagueness is a feature and not a bug.

Thanks for sharing that article; I thought it was insightful. "X exists" is a particularly slippery phrase, but it's one piece of a larger issue with communication--ultimately, there's a tradeoff between efficiency and precision, and the various aspects of language exist to manage that balance.

Indeed, in fine detail, various languages manage specific micro-equilibria differently, due to local conceptions of where efficiency can be sacrificed to precision, or vice versa.

English pronouns traditionally distinguish among first/second/third person, singular/plural, sex in the third person singular but not elsewhere, subject/object/possessive/reflexive, and so forth. Sometimes combinations of distinctions exist, and sometimes not: "you" is clearly second person, but ambiguously singular or plural--or subject/object, for that matter, it's all context-determined --whereas "I/we/me/us" retains both the singular/plural and subject/object distinctions.

There's a language--I forget exactly where, but I want to say Southeast Asia or Australia?--that has a distinction in its pronouns that English lacks: two different senses of "we," each with its own pronoun. In one sense, "we" includes the person or people being spoken to, in that "you and I" are part of "we." In the other sense, it does not, in that "you" are not part of "we."

"Are we in agreement?" includes the people being spoken to. "We are going to the store; do you want to come with us?" does not, but English uses the same word. The people using this language felt that there was a valuable distinction that justified maintaining two words here; English speakers generally don't even notice the same ambiguity.

Indonesian has that, and I always thought it was a super-useful concept.

How do wokes

You should, sincerely, find a better place to ask. Nobody here self-identifies as woke, preciously few people are even adjacent, and people who hate them, despise them, are numerous as they get. You'd get a better and more honest answer just-about anywhere that isn't here and, additionally, I think you kind've know it. That this is not a place for the woke to be is no grand secret.

A place full of wokies wouldn't be any better either though, because wokies mostly don't believe in critical reflection on their ideology.

This isn't a simple "boo outgroup!" sneer either, just a fact. Wokeism is the ideology of "Listen and believe!", of objectivity, rationality, logic, etc. being periodically accused of existing merely as servants of their great oppressors and excuses for their various *isms, and so on. Going "Akshually, what about genetics?" to wokies and expecting a productive response is like waltzing into a Soviet-era Politburo and trying to explain basic economic theory to them, or describing the Rule of Three to a Christian inquisitor and why it means that witchcraft is actually just as moral as Christianity.

Of course this kind of answers OP's question. "Scrupulously adheres to and agrees with empirically-observable reality, including the latest advances in genetics, etc." is not a basic tenet of woke ideology. "Anti-racism is always good and racism is always bad" is. You might as well ask how Christians can really believe that some guy walked on water given all that we know about physics, density, buoyancy, etc. It won't make a difference.

If you have faith, and if there's a sufficient distance between your personal circumstances and the negative consequences of that faith (and sometimes even if there's not if you're particularly adept at maniacal, masochistic self-delusion), then you can believe whatever you want. If you really think about it, in the vast majority of cases and not even just about woke stuff, reality (or at least acknowledging it) is optional, at least temporarily. But "temporarily" can last a heck of a long time in human terms, as the old saying about markets staying irrational longer than you can stay solvent highlights. Similarly, wokies can deny reality longer than your sanity can stay solvent.

For what it's worth, I do agree that posting what he did in a woke place would do him no good either. In general, posts such as these are going to generate more heat than light: you'll get people accusing you of badthink and people with an axe to grind regarding woke ideology much more than you will find people interested in coming up with a good answer. OP is better off finding someone to ask personally, without fifty hyper-online people staring at him and waiting to judge his virtue. The social dynamics to figure out good-faith believes plain and simply aren't there in the sort of wide-open online forum you can easily post such questions.

I get your point, and I agree with it, but I think a lot of users here lack anyone to ask personally, and that's partly why they are here. I can see the booo outgroup angle of the op, but I viewed it primarily as exasperation - it's the op saying "hey I'm not stupid, but this doesn't make sense to me, you guys are smart, do you understand it?"

And that's one of the points of this place I thought, it's a place you can ask questions you can't ask elsewhere. This place becomes kinda worthless if there are questions that you shouldn't ask here, but also can't ask anywhere else, doesn't it? (not a rhetorical question, I genuinely don't see a good solution to this problem.)

When people want to learn about rightist totalitarianism they read Eco Umberto and Arendt Hannah, not Gentile Giovanni and Rosenberg Alfred.

Thus if for other ideologies, external perception is favoured over internal one, why shouldn't it be for social justice?

Back in high school, we absolutely read the things fascists wrote to learn about that ideology. When I went on to study history in university, we did much the same. None of this happened all that long ago, and it seems to have worked out pretty well, so I don't know why I'd even agree with your base assumptions here.

Also - why are you flipping first names and surnames? What is that all about?

I apologize for typical minding then. It is just that my local public library has books regarding fascism by Arendt and Eco, but not by Hitler, Rosenberg or Gentile.

Also - why are you flipping first names and surnames? What is that all about?

previous poster is Hungarian? ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_names#Hungarian_surnames

I came here specifically for a principled anti-woke perspective. I do already engage in quite a bit of conversation with wokes, which is actually what kick-started this thread of mine. I'm currently in a server full of them, and sometimes the topic of politics comes up, and I often try to offer up some casual prompting and disagreement and see if they can clarify their positions to me a bit more. I am still no closer to thinking that their worldview is consistent with rational thought, and I think all I've actually managed to do is slowly drive myself crazy and make them slightly uncomfortable with me (despite me having offered up my most anodyne opinions).

If I were to come to a conclusion based on my interactions with woke leftists, I'd say a very good portion of their worldview is empty consequentialism, with any contradictions smoothed out by a mental barrier that goes something like "well it looks good and can be used to justify 'good' social policy, and our detractors who can muster up the energy to contradict us so fervently are more likely than not motivated by some underlying prejudice". Outside of the most vapid mockery of people and things they don't like, few actual arguments are put forward, and the ones that are put forward when I speak to them are not particularly strong and clearly fly in the face of any kind of rational realistic worldview. Many of the people who believe it possess a worldview that has everything to do with optics and nothing to do with reason or logic.

So yeah, I've talked to them quite a bit, and now I want ideas from here before I solidify this conclusion even further.

I'm curious, actually. Have you talked to anyone in particular, in private, outside the 'public' sphere that is such a server? Or are the conclusions you draw the sorts of conclusions you made from seeing them engage among themselves without further prodding?

Woke ideology is the space busybodies, the permanently aggrieved, social strivers, and grifters flock to; it appeals to these sorts of people very much. If you want to bully people for believing unpopular things, if you want to scold your neighbours for falling out of line, if you want to get power and status for little real effort, joining up with team woke is really really helpful. This isn't even a criticism of the ideology: humanity has always had people like these, we will always have them, and they will always be nuisant antisocial bastards dragging the rest of us down.

The problem, then, is figuring out who genuinely has reasoned themselves into a woke space, and who's there for the community instead. What proportion there is I cannot say, but there will absolutely be people with good arguments to make for whatever we might call woke. And insofar those people are around, asking them to reveal their power level in SocJus spaces and asking them to risk their own standing before people they know well just to entertain a heretic just isn't the way to go. Your curiosity about their ideology isn't worth all that much, and they rightly aren't going to give you a genuine answer out in the open like that.

Finally, as a parting thought..

I came here specifically for a principled anti-woke perspective.

Here as elsewhere, you'll mostly find people whose guiding anti-woke principle is that they really hate funko pops. It is what it is.

Have you talked to anyone in particular, in private, outside the 'public' sphere that is such a server?

Yes, I have had many one-on-one verbal conversations with the people there in voice-chat. The most common person I do this with is the user who seems the most reasoned, the most willing to listen to points, and who will at least make an attempt to steelman them. I remain very unconvinced, but regardless I have made an attempt to engage in many different social contexts.

Of course you have to be careful with how you say anything, since if they view you as an unprincipled member of their out-group any debate from there on is not going to be very productive.

I disagree. To use an analogy, the best people to ask about Christianity and the bible may be atheists, especially "converted" ones that spent years studying all there is in order to come to certain conclusion. Asking the question in your cookie cutter christian forum may often lead to incredulity, suspicion and even hostility of people who feel that their faith is threatened. I often see the same in woke spaces. Discussions often quickly devolve into some version of sneerclub and are ultimately useless.

As much as I find these questions a little boring now (likely because I’ve spent too much time reading themotte), this is a good place to ask because posters are genuinely interested in understanding the nature of wokism. Even though no one subscribes to the ideology, you might still find informative or interesting replies.

There's an industrial grade motte-and-bailey around the 'race is a social construct'. I encountered a medical doctor talking about how race was really just a social construct as opposed to biological, how there were really just populations with different distributions of alleles. The very next sentence she talked about how Ashkenazi jews are predisposed to have more of various kinds of illnesses. It seems that race is indeed biological! The argument is very much reliant on authority - I wasn't going to ask a pointed question about how those two ideas could be reconciled in a crowded room.

"Wealth is just a social construct - there are all kinds of complexities with debt, income, currency, liquid/illiquid assets and cost of living. Therefore progressive income tax is unfair and we should have a flat tax system!"

Nobody would accept this - wealth is a real thing and it's clearly a self-serving argument.

"Race is just a social construct - there are just populations with different distributions of alleles. But these different distributions of alleles don't have any substantive impact on intelligence or personality. Differences of outcome are a result of social institutions and/or oppression - these must be reduced by affirmative action."

I'm not woke, but I do think "Race is a social construct" has some merit. It's a terminological disagreement rather than a scientific one.

Someone who has one white parent and one black parent is often considered black, despite the genetic make-up being 50/50. National demographics on race also largely come from self-reported data in surveys, which have a famously growing list of races you can pick from.

As for intelligence differences between races, I think most people are simply ignorant rather than cognitively dissonant. It's not obvious to everyone that racial groups have different mean IQs, it's not something you learn from mainstream sources. Even once this fact is known, it's not crazy to think achievement disparities can be explained by culture and social institutions. We would all be a lot less economically productive if we moved to Haiti. Oppression isn't even a necessary factor.

Oh there are obviously issues with institutions, history and so on - but the sheer biologicality of it! Those very black-white mixed-race children have issues getting bone marrow because their parents often can't be donors. It was subtle discrepancies in the orbit of Mercury that doomed Newtonian physics. Above bone marrow issues alone would be enough to disqualify the 'race is not biological' argument if we were working purely quantitatively. A quick trip to the Olympics shows that African/blacks dominate sprinting but there's not a single black weightlifter to be found at the very top.

Race may be a social construct in a certain sense, but it's a very strong, useful social construct. The distinction between green and blue is arbitrary and continuous - but it's still there. There are such things as turquoise but green and blue are still real and useful. If the sky was green one day I'd be pretty shocked, if my apple was blue I'd know not to eat it!

But wealth is a social construct. You could give a monkey a hundred bananas and he may lord it over his peers, using it to coerce sexual favors and social position - but he couldn't imagine having a million bananas, more than he could ever eat, or create a system of classes dependent on banana-ownership, or leverage his bananas into purchasing banana plantations in El Salvador.

If wealth is real, it has a quality of subjective realness that only exist in human societies.

IIRC there've been a few experiments with teaching monkeys to use vending machines and they cottoned onto wealth very quickly.

I've noticed what you observe constantly. It's this bizarre phenomena of unidirectional knowledge I've almost singularly encountered in those that are woke and "educated". There are other forms of disordered thinking I've encounters among the religious right. But this particular form of disordered thinking I've only encountered there.

When I say unidirectional knowledge, I'm talking about bring up a fact, but you are only allowed to acknowledge the truth of that fact when you are using it to point in an approved direction. Otherwise you must deny it. So in your case, the fact is "race is a biological fact". If you use that fact to say anything unapproved, it's false. Like pointing out large measured IQ differences between African Americans and everyone else. But if you use that fact to help target funding towards neoliberal client populations, say African American's with sickle cell anemia or Jews in the New York media with other special health needs, then it's true.

Or maybe to take a less charged example. I'm tall. That's the fact. If it's pointed out I'm stronger and can reach high places, I will admit I'm tall. If it's pointed out I cost more to feed, and I'm awkward in confined spaces, I will deny until my dying breath that I'm tall.

A lot of this double think is facilitated by academia churning out split definitions. They will cleave "tall" into "good tall" and "bad tall". And they'll force all of society to adopt those terms, so you can't even think coherently about the topic anymore. I mean look what they did to sex and gender.

IIRC the measured IQ differences aren't "between African Americans and everyone else", they're between Africans and Whites/Asians, with other groups somewhere in the middle.

More on unidirectional knowledge, which is a nice phrase that crystalizes what I've observed for years:

I'll agree that it can be really hard to talk about complicated things in public. If I was asked the question implied above I would say it was more the case that race genuinely is a social construct, but that ethnicity shows human variation from shared history and genetics. So, 'Black' is a racial category but is never going to be an ethnic grouping, because there are dozens or hundreds of ethnicities with wildly differing histories and genetics that are lumped into that category; but Ashkenazi Jews are in contrast an ethnicity with a shared history and gene pool, as are say Telugu Hindus. So there is biology of ethnicity, but it's more difficult to have biological facts about the broader categories referred to as race.

An example of this that I can think of is health outcomes of South Asians or people from the Indian subcontinent, in Britain. There are high rates of predicted genetic problems if you're of South Asian descent, which can affect how likely a woman is to be referred for certain tests in pregnancy or a child for certain tests in infancy, because some South Asian groups have favoured kinship relations such as cousin marriage for cultural reasons. Other sub-populations within the South Asian heritage groups favour exogamy and are hence very much less likely to have the same rate of birth defects. But it's less acceptable for your midwife to sit down and enquire, "So, is the dad a first cousin of yours, are your mum and dad first cousins to each other?" than it is to have you check a 'race identity' box where you indicate you have heritage from the Indian subcontinent and they then refer you for additional tests on the basis of that racial category even though it's a broad category amongst whom many will not have any elevated risk.

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