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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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Good news everyone! We now have a formal, scientific scale for measuring wokeness! You can find the related preprint here.

Finland's newspaper of record, Helsingin Sanomat (HS) summarizes the meaning of "wokeness" (it's called "woke" in Finnish too, using the untranslated term - of course, it's an Anglo concept, after all).

In Finnish, woke means being awake, but it could also be translated as awareness.

Its supporters think it's relevant, and opponents think it's too sensitive to see things like racism, sexism and discrimination against gender minorities around.

There are two other English terms associated with the phenomenon: cancel and callout culture. Both mean actively intervening in the politically questionable activities or writings of others, for example on social media. Cancellation takes the interference up to a boycott of the person.

UNIVERSITY OF TURKU psychology researcher Oskari Lahtinen has developed a psychological meter that can be used to study the prevalence of woke attitudes. In his research, he calls them attitudes of social justice.

The research is now in a peer-reviewed scientific publication. You can read the preview version on the Psyarxiv service .

"I have been interested in how common such attitudes are in Finland," says Lahtinen.

"I take a small risk when I study the woke phenomenon, because people have really strongly differing opinions and strong feelings about it."

Later on some unsurprising results:

Lahtinen was not surprised that the strongest woke attitudes were in the humanities and social sciences, but the rise of psychology in his own field came as a nice surprise.

Among the students, the highest woke scores were obtained by psychology and social sciences students.

Natural science students, on the other hand, got the lowest scores on the scale. On average, they pretty clearly disagree with the woke claims.

AMONG THE UNIVERSITY staff, clearly the highest woke scores were in the humanities. Business scholars received the lowest scores. Those in the fields of natural sciences and medicine ranked in the middle, but they also disagreed with the woke claims on average.

Some other fields had so few respondents that the results are not reliable, according to Lahtinen.

It also turned out that in the entire material, women had stronger social justice attitudes than men based on the measure.

THE PARTICIPANTS also answered questions measuring anxiety, depression and happiness.

Those with high woke scores had more anxiety and depression than others. They were also less happy.

"It was interesting because this was the case regardless of whether the person had experiences of being oppressed themselves. The mere fact that you have such a worldview meant that you were also more depressed and anxious," says Lahtinen.

The differences in well-being were really big. Students with high wake scores had 71 percent more anxiety, 39 percent more depression, and almost seven percent less happiness than those with low wake scores.

HS has used this study to create an (intentionally facile) wokeness test. I'm linking to the original Finnish version, Google Translate couldn't get it to work. It's below the researcher guy's picture, clicking "Näytä lisää" will expand it. "Täysin samaa mieltä" means "Fully agree", "Jokseenkin samaa mieltä" means "Somewhat agree", "Jokseenkin eri mieltä" is "Somewhat disagree" and "Täysin eri mieltä" means "Fully disagree". The max score is 30.

The claims are:

  1. Human species has two biological genders.

  2. Trans women are women.

  3. It is not right to limit a privileged person's right to speech.

  4. Trans women in Olympics do not advance women's rights.

  5. One should not say things that might offend a disadvantaged person's feelings.

  6. We don’t need to talk more about the color of people’s skin.

  7. University reading lists should include fewer white and European authors.

  8. The police are by definition a racist institution.

  9. If white people have on average a higher level of income than black people, it is because of oppression.

  10. A white person cannot understand how a black person feels.

Uncanny how these results continue to be replicated in every society and every culture and moment.

Almost if wokeness have some kind of biological factor.

I'd see it as a form of peacocking; i.e., we demonstrate our extreme wealth, security and ostensible enlightenment by adopting highly visible, confrontational and unintuitive beliefs that less educated or poorer societies and individuals simply cannot afford to act on.

This may be uncharitable, so I claim no objective truth here, but this seems to me to be the closest analogue to biological phenomena.

I see it more as anti-status quo bias and being prone to anti hierarchy bias. Who benefits from wokeness? Anyone who is lower on the socioeconomic totem pole. You can also benefit as a straight white male by showing wokeness, since it makes you seem generous and humble (although obviously there is a limit where too much wokeness damages you)

Who benefits from wokeness? Anyone who is lower on the socioeconomic totem pole.

I would, rather accusatorily, say that a certain class of college educated unskilled white women are largely the benefactors. They get something visible and at least pretending to be important to do in their anti-productive administrative, HR and DEI jobs.

I would say women are lower on the totem pole than men, traditionally speaking, so that’s why they find wokeness appealing. It provides a means to self advocate in order to gain sinecures like what you’re talking about, despite being obviously less productive or useful.

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