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Jacobian comments on "3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism" - Less Wrong
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It has taken me many years to realize that, but the more I look for it the more I notice it. I have a friend on Facebook who's a Syrian living in NYC, she keeps posting things like "Here's the proof Assad is actually a spy planted by the Israeli Mossad to cause genocide in Syria". I kept asking her how she could possibly believe it and got very confusing responses that didn't really address the question. And then it hit me: for her and for many Arabs "X is a Mossad spy" is simply an eloquent way of saying "I hate X", it has literally nothing to do with the Mossad at all. My friend was confused why I even bring facts about the Mossad into a discussion of whether Assad is a Mossad spy.
Viliam gave enough SJ examples, so I'll give one from the other side: there was a campaign by some famous PUA to boycott Mad Max: Fury Road because it's feminist propaganda. Hold on, isn't that the movie where the attractive women in skimpy clothes are called "breeders" whose job is to make babies? And then I realized:
Etcetera, etcetera.
Don't forget to notice that this works both ways. Your friend could easily segue into posting things like "Israeli government ordered the genocide in Syria" because hey! Assad is a Mossad agent, everyone know that.
I am not arguing that such statements should be taken literally. I'm arguing that they establish linkages in the minds of the speaker and the listeners and these linkages may well have real-world consequences.
Well, this is exactly the problem. First step is that people say random things just because they reflect the emotions they have at the moment. Second step is that later they sometimes derive logical consequences of what they previously said. Then bad things happen as a result.
Usually there is a boundary; people often have crazy beliefs in far mode, while having quite sensible beliefs in near mode. They can keep talking bullshit as long as it does not concern them directly, but when it becomes personal they can either conveniently forget to apply the bullshit, or have some general excuse such as "but this specific case is different". This can work surprisingly well as long as there is a social norm of not requiring people to actually act on their abstract beliefs.
Nerds usually lack the social skills to follow this strategy (because no one tells them about it explicitly; because applying this strategy to itself means never talking explicitly about it), usually harming themselves as the result, by following the norms that everyone applauds but no one except a few nerds actually follows. Sometimes they harm the others as the result, for example when they take the norm of killing unbelievers literally and become suicidal bombers; while for most of the society the same words in the holy scripture simply mean "boo unbelievers" without any impact on their everyday life.
And then there is the complication that our civilization became too complex and has too many channels where the far-mode beliefs translate into actions without people noticing that the boundary was crossed. For example, a person holding a stupid belief in far mode could never directly act upon the belief, but they might still vote according to the belief -- and then the politician in the office might actually do it.
It is a useful tool of propaganda to channel these emotions into far-mode beliefs that benefit some specific group. For example, any kind of frustration with various failures in coordination problems (what SSC readers would call "Moloch") can be channeled into hate against "Jews" or "capitalism" or "decadent western civilization", which can in turn influence the political orientation of people.
Yep, that's a problem and an additional problem is that this mechanism is often exploited by agitprop and, generally, dark arts at the social scale.
I don't think it has anything to do with nerds or social skills. If I had to come up with an expression for what prevents people from applying their abstract beliefs in practice, it would be the trite "common sense" (which, yes, I know, isn't exactly common).
Essentially it's the matter of being able to recognize consequences when they appear in front of your eyes. Most people, thankfully, require a large amount of pushing and shoving to make the transition from "Ethnicity X is bad" to "We will go and set fire to our neighbour's house and throw stones at his children". It's not that avoiding that transition is a social skill, it's more that watching a house burn and children cry has direct emotional impact that you need very high levels of ideological belief to override.
Your belief is mistaken.
I'll take your opinion under consideration.
Well, not really.
Fiction.
Ain't no such thing.
And what percentage of modern society is a gang member?
Yes, and..?
You didn't have to go that far back. Pretty much most WW2 fiction books assume the peak of morality is to kill as many Germans as possible. So?
Do rednecks qualify? What about white trash? X-) Or let's go global. Do you think Chinese peasants are particularly sophisticated people? India's slum dwellers?
A lot of feminists agreed with the PUAs' assessment of the movie as being pro-feminist. The guy who treated women as breeding stock was the antagonist. You aren't supposed to sympathize with Immortan Joe.
I've seen PUA stuff and I've seen the movie. Whilst it's true that the protagonists are mostly female and the bad guy is male, I wouldn't say it's pushing a feminist message. I don't think that the film vilifies men as a whole. I'm much more annoyed about ghostbusters actually.