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Antisuji comments on How to offend a rationalist (who hasn't thought about it yet): a life lesson - Less Wrong
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I felt offended reading this, even though I was expecting something along these lines and was determined not to be offended. I've come to interpret this feeling, on a 5-second level, as "Uh oh, someone's attacking my group." I'm sure I'd be a little flustered if someone said that to me in conversation. But after some time to think about it, I think my response would be "Why shouldn't math be applied to social justice?" And I really would be curious about the answer, if only because it would help me better understand people who hold this kind of viewpoint.
Also, I expect there are good reasons why it's dangerous to apply math to social justice, especially since most people aren't good at math.
Well, the friend had counterexamples to "math as a basis for society is good". I sort of skipped over that. They mentioned those who rationalized bad things like racism, and also Engels. (We both agree that communism is not a successful philosophy.) Counterexamples aren't really enough to dismiss an idea unless they're stronger than the evidence that the idea is good, but I couldn't think of such evidence at the time, and I still can't think of anything particularly convincing. There's no successful society to point at that derived all of its laws and givernment axiomatically.
Those are good examples that you need to be really careful applying math to society.
If you come up with a short list of axioms for a social group, and then use them to formulate policy, you're probably going to end up leaving the domain over which those axioms are valid. If you have a lot of power, this can be a really bad thing.