Is my defensive reaction to wokeism mind-killing me? Well yes, obviously to some extent. How bad of a mental massacre is it, though? Let's do a post-mortem on a recent failure (or semi-failure?) to find out. First and foremost, I wish to thank Walter & James, of
> As far as I've seen (though happy to be proven wrong) neither the journalistic titan that is LADbible (ಠ_ಠ) nor Eneasz nor any other rationalist™ that shared the original story has said anything about this act of what can only be called terrorism. Why, I wonder?
I read Walter and James’ Twitter thread and this one just seemed grotesquely in bad faith and so uncharacteristic of the rest of the thread that I have to wonder if it was an attempt at a joke that didn’t land. They would have to be taking the least charitable interpretation of events to assume that Eneasz (and probably the magazine he cited for the story) didn’t talk about these because of some motivation to pretend it wasn’t a problem or something. The answer - that Eneasz (and presumably the magazine since I assume the bomb threats came in after all this news storm kicked off) didn’t know about these was so likely I’d have bet 100 to 1 odds that it was the case.
Other than that, I love the ability of both parties here to talk to each other and not past each other and y’all seem like excellent people who’d make awesome company. Thanks for having this open back and forth dialogue.
Maybe next time try adding an epistemic status (e.g., [Epistemic status: 75%, could not find a better source]) and/or update note (e.g., [95%->95%. wokeism is a problem and situations like this are evidence that it is getting worse]). This imposes an additional cost on you posting, so maybe just limit them to topics you have trouble being rational about.
Bullying:
"[Parents saying that their child would come home crying after being the target of homophobic slurs and harassment] isn't evidence of bullying."
Is your odds ratio really 1:1 on this?
My prior on an eighth grader getting bullied is roughly 2-4 out of 20, which is close to the first source I found (16.7% for 2019, https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019054.pdf).
I'd expect that an eighth grader that comes home crying and reports being bullied is at least twice as likely to have actually been bullied compared to an eighth grader that only reports being bullied. I'd expect more false reports to teachers, so that would maybe be 1.5 times as likely.
They/Them Pronoun Requests:
"I assume [the student is straight and cis] because if they were gay or trans, it would be shouted from every leftist source."
What is your confidence in this assumption?
It must be pretty high for you to label Walther and James' use of the term "queer" as misleading.
I am not sure a lack of explicit reporting of the student's gender/sexuality would so heavily outweigh the student's insistence of they/them. I could not quickly find decent numbers on this, but about 5% of LGBTQ youths use they/them only (https://www.thetrevorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Trevor-Project-Pronoun-Research-Brief.pdf) and I'd expect that to be maybe 10 times as likely as non-LGBTQ youths.
"I am not willing to suffer for my enemies."
What about acquaintances or strangers? You jumped very quickly to enemies.
Suicide Study:
"I defy the data."
"Wait a minute, is that data really worth defying?" Does the data substantially contradict your model?
I wouldn't put much stock in the exact numbers, but I'd at least expect that transgender and nonbinary youths reporting that no one respects their pronouns would be more likely to attempt suicide than those that report everyone as respecting their pronouns. However, the key word to pay attention to is "report" because the perceptions of a suicidal youth would not be incredibly reflective of reality.
Does actually using the preferred pronouns of transgender and nonbinary youths lower their incidence of depression and suicide? Probably a little, at least, but it would be unlikely to be as large of an effect as their reported perception of others' respect.
Your reasoning seems deontological in this piece, is that endorsed?
Pure Utilitarianism normally doesn't care about categorisations (eg who is the bully), and doens't care about the true meaning of words (while being able to refer the the beliefs individuals have about words).
Eg the situation where everyone involved believes the grammatically correct way to refer to a nonbinary person is using "they" is very different from the one where they disagree on the matter, which again is very different from the one where they agree it is grammatically wrong.
If one ignores some human irrationality the correct action becomes that one of the parties pays the other money and gets their way (the side willing to pay more will pay, the side getting paid to change is the side where changing is the least costly), but society and how humans are wired makes this unlikely. Generally the morally good thing is for the side for which it is cheaper to bend, to be the ones bending. But as we can't use willingness to pay to gauge who is the least cost avoider, ones answer on which side should bend comes to depend almost completely on ones priors.
> As far as I've seen (though happy to be proven wrong) neither the journalistic titan that is LADbible (ಠ_ಠ) nor Eneasz nor any other rationalist™ that shared the original story has said anything about this act of what can only be called terrorism. Why, I wonder?
I read Walter and James’ Twitter thread and this one just seemed grotesquely in bad faith and so uncharacteristic of the rest of the thread that I have to wonder if it was an attempt at a joke that didn’t land. They would have to be taking the least charitable interpretation of events to assume that Eneasz (and probably the magazine he cited for the story) didn’t talk about these because of some motivation to pretend it wasn’t a problem or something. The answer - that Eneasz (and presumably the magazine since I assume the bomb threats came in after all this news storm kicked off) didn’t know about these was so likely I’d have bet 100 to 1 odds that it was the case.
Other than that, I love the ability of both parties here to talk to each other and not past each other and y’all seem like excellent people who’d make awesome company. Thanks for having this open back and forth dialogue.
Your tweet:
Maybe next time try adding an epistemic status (e.g., [Epistemic status: 75%, could not find a better source]) and/or update note (e.g., [95%->95%. wokeism is a problem and situations like this are evidence that it is getting worse]). This imposes an additional cost on you posting, so maybe just limit them to topics you have trouble being rational about.
Bullying:
"[Parents saying that their child would come home crying after being the target of homophobic slurs and harassment] isn't evidence of bullying."
Is your odds ratio really 1:1 on this?
My prior on an eighth grader getting bullied is roughly 2-4 out of 20, which is close to the first source I found (16.7% for 2019, https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019054.pdf).
I'd expect that an eighth grader that comes home crying and reports being bullied is at least twice as likely to have actually been bullied compared to an eighth grader that only reports being bullied. I'd expect more false reports to teachers, so that would maybe be 1.5 times as likely.
They/Them Pronoun Requests:
"I assume [the student is straight and cis] because if they were gay or trans, it would be shouted from every leftist source."
What is your confidence in this assumption?
It must be pretty high for you to label Walther and James' use of the term "queer" as misleading.
I am not sure a lack of explicit reporting of the student's gender/sexuality would so heavily outweigh the student's insistence of they/them. I could not quickly find decent numbers on this, but about 5% of LGBTQ youths use they/them only (https://www.thetrevorproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Trevor-Project-Pronoun-Research-Brief.pdf) and I'd expect that to be maybe 10 times as likely as non-LGBTQ youths.
"I am not willing to suffer for my enemies."
What about acquaintances or strangers? You jumped very quickly to enemies.
Suicide Study:
"I defy the data."
"Wait a minute, is that data really worth defying?" Does the data substantially contradict your model?
I wouldn't put much stock in the exact numbers, but I'd at least expect that transgender and nonbinary youths reporting that no one respects their pronouns would be more likely to attempt suicide than those that report everyone as respecting their pronouns. However, the key word to pay attention to is "report" because the perceptions of a suicidal youth would not be incredibly reflective of reality.
Does actually using the preferred pronouns of transgender and nonbinary youths lower their incidence of depression and suicide? Probably a little, at least, but it would be unlikely to be as large of an effect as their reported perception of others' respect.
Your reasoning seems deontological in this piece, is that endorsed?
Pure Utilitarianism normally doesn't care about categorisations (eg who is the bully), and doens't care about the true meaning of words (while being able to refer the the beliefs individuals have about words).
Eg the situation where everyone involved believes the grammatically correct way to refer to a nonbinary person is using "they" is very different from the one where they disagree on the matter, which again is very different from the one where they agree it is grammatically wrong.
If one ignores some human irrationality the correct action becomes that one of the parties pays the other money and gets their way (the side willing to pay more will pay, the side getting paid to change is the side where changing is the least costly), but society and how humans are wired makes this unlikely. Generally the morally good thing is for the side for which it is cheaper to bend, to be the ones bending. But as we can't use willingness to pay to gauge who is the least cost avoider, ones answer on which side should bend comes to depend almost completely on ones priors.