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.
Nerds usually lack the social skills to follow this strategy
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 app...
The lead article on everydayfeminism.com on March 25:
3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism
(The link from "decolonization" is to "Decolonization is not a metaphor", to make it clear s/he means actually giving the land back to the Native Americans.)
I regularly see people who describe how social justice activists act accused of setting up a straw man. This article show that the bias of some SJWs against reason is impossible to strawman. The author argues at length that rationality is bad, and that justice arguments shouldn't be rational or be defended rationally. Ze is, or was, confused about what "rationality" means, but clearly now means it to include reason-based argumentation.
This isn't just some wacko's blog; it was chosen as the headline article for the website. I had to click around to a few other articles to make sure it wasn't a parody site.
But it isn't just a sign of how irrational the social justice movement is—it has clues to how it got that way.
The author came to hate "rationality" because s/he thought "rationality" meant "conventionality".
S/he didn't realize that white cis people don't use rationality either to understand their gender and social role. These are cultural values that parents deliberately program in before a child can become rational and come up with their own version.
Making my own inferences, I'd guess that
1. The author has had many unpleasant social experiences because of zis refusal to adopt a gender, and
2. The author is not a good reasoner, and while arguing over these experiences, often makes bad arguments, and gets told ze is irrational, and
3. The author is unable to distinguish discomfort with zis gender non-choice, from resistance to zis bad ideas, as having separate causes.
The 3 reasons are:
1. Being Rational Has No Inherent Value
2. Rationalism Is a Tool Made to Hurt Us
3. We Are Enough Without Rationalism
Also see the same site's recent article "4 Reasons Demanding ‘Objectivity’ in Social Justice Debates Can Be Oppressive".
ADDED, since I'm 50 karma in the hole anyway:
Ironically, today's "social justice" program demands a radical rationalism.
Social justice used to be a rationalist program on its surface, pointing out the irrationality of prejudice and the illogic in narratives used to justify oppression. But as society adjusted its pre-judgements closer to targets that were rational but still unequal, e.g., from "Women can't do engineering" to "Most women don't want to do engineering", the emphasis switched from being rational about our beliefs to irrationally assuming equality of everyone and everything, not just as a default starting point, but as a mandated endpoint. (Historically, this was tied to an influx of reality-denying continental philosophy into social activism in the 1960s.)
De-emphasizing rationality on its surface requires a more radical rationalism for its practical implementation. Changing social conventions has a cost. When we extend social justice beyond respect for difference that people have no choice over, such as race or sex, to roles that they choose, such as religion or gender, the justification for allowing everyone to defy any particular social convention must be a rational cost-benefit assessment. Many people enjoy the ritual interactions specified by social roles; they are part of their identities and one of their terminal values. A demand to give up these values must fall back onto consequentialist arguments.
(Is constant social pressure on the person doing the defying more important than thousands of irritations to the people who don't know how to deal with zim, and who feel their own identities inhibited in zis presence? I don't know. It's torture vs. dust specks.)
The new social justice program is ultimately to strip from human consciousness all shortcuts, biases, prejudices, pre-computations, and priors. This requires making each individual a rational consequentialist capable of reasoning zer way from every situation to a rational behavior. To know how to use social roles, people require either social heuristics (which will inevitably oppress somebody), or radical ends-based rationality. This is particularly true when people are allowed to unilaterally opt in or out of social roles, so that every situation has a mix of people demanding to be treated differently.
(It isn't clear whether priors are permissible in this rationality.)
Even the oppressed classes must be ideal rationalists (Homo economicus). If women are still allowed to prefer not to be computer programmers, or men are allowed to prefer not to raise children, a free market will make mandated equality cause, rather than alleviate, injustice.
Alternately, we could possibly say that social justice doesn't require radical rationality, provided that we allow no social roles (a commitment to radical individuality). This also imposes a cost in so far as social roles serve to increase social utility.