I thought the confusion between subjectivity and objectivity was, itself, fascinating. For me it cuts right to the heart of the confusion about whether trans women are women.
If you start from the belief that your observations and intuitions are objective facts, everything else follows fr…
I thought the confusion between subjectivity and objectivity was, itself, fascinating. For me it cuts right to the heart of the confusion about whether trans women are women.
If you start from the belief that your observations and intuitions are objective facts, everything else follows from there.
Your “truth” is genuinely just as true as anybody else’s. And there’s no external, objective standard that can override your feelings. Not even your biology. So if you “feel” as if you’re the opposite sex, what standard could there be to say otherwise?
Of course, if you’re intellectually consistent, you also need to believe that other people’s observations are equally objective. So if their observations conflict with yours, you have a real problem on your hands. Which is why this discussion so quickly devolves into good vs evil, victim vs bigot dynamics.
There’s no way to talk it out and arrive at the truth. You already *know* the truth. And that means the other person is either lying or some kind of evil weirdo, living in a separate reality to yourself and all the “good” people who affirm you.
My own observation is that many of the prescriptions of CSJ would immediately fall apart if we applied mutuality or reciprocity - or simple "treat others as you would want to be treated"; their only use is for differential advantage in seeking power-over.
"My subjective truth trumps your objective truth" is one of those.
"You have to call me whatever I want" is another
"Microaggressions" comprise yet more
"Only whites can be racist" is another example
Actually, it's hard to come up with a CSJ prescription which IS symmetric.
At some level I understand this. Their worldview is oppressed vs oppressor/privileged, and their goal is to give advantage to the oppressed and pull down the privileged, using any means necessary. What they don't take into account is that by inverting the bias and discrimination and dismissing mutual benefit and reciprocity as underpinnings of their new society, they inherently create permanent conflict - which they won't always win, except in their own heads as the morally superior ones. Guilt trips justifying institutionalized discrimination will never create a stable, peaceful and prosperous society, there has to be something in it for both/all sides, not just the self appointed moral high ground side. The CSJ mindset thinks that a slight easing of guilty feelings is enough to give in return, but that will not work.
" What they don't take into account is that by inverting the bias and discrimination and dismissing mutual benefit and reciprocity as underpinnings of their new society, they inherently create permanent conflict - which they won't always win"
🎯 I think, in some cases there's also a genuine degree of trying to balance the books. I can understand the argument that you can't go straight from discrimination to equality, otherwise the effects of the discrimination are never addressed. But there's so little of that in practice. It's almost always just a vindictive game of "it's our turn to be the oppressors now."
And if there was overall a sense of wise balancing, of surgical application of temporary evidence-based interventions with a feasible and limited goal, I could support it.
However, it's hard to find such sentiments in the movement. Instead the CSJ advocates seem to be institutionalizing systemic "counter-oppression" as a perpetual right and entitlement.
I sometimes want to ask "if in 2124, 100 years from now, there was still a perceived need for substantial positive discrimination to rebalance the books, would that be a success or a failure in your worldview?". I have NEVER seen any time limit supported by advocates. (I think a supreme court justice in the 90's was talking about giving it another 25 years before it should not be needed). According to many advocates, the world is as bad for POC today as it was before Rosa Parks, they are extremely resistant to conceding any progress achieved by over half a century of positive discrimination, yet they want to continue the same policies "as long as needed" - as long as there are any disparities.
My view is: "If the unilateralist policies are objectively and measurably working to reduce the gaps, then we should be able to project how long until sufficient parity is achieved and continue on course towards that time; if they are not moving effectively towards a parity goal after decades, we should rethink the policies.".
In a democratic society, I see positive discrimination as similar to chemotherapy - inherently dangerous and unhealthy, but potentially helpful in specific cases in well calculated limited doses for limited periods with close monitoring and based on solid evidence. But I see nearly zero inclination towards that latter approach. Instead it's framed as a morality based entitlement, without regard to actual outcomes.
Alas, I believe that it's human nature that if you say to ANY group "you will get extra power and considerations for only so long as you don't achieve parity", then there will be many within that group who correctly perceive their best option being not to heal or grow into equal opportunity and equal achievement so they can benefit from special considerations. Not everybody, but a substantial subset. Societies need to beware of institutionalizing perverse incentives, no matter how well meaning.
“ I believe that it's human nature that if you say to ANY group "you will get extra power and considerations for only so long as you don't achieve parity", then there will be many within that group who correctly perceive their best option being not to heal or grow into equal opportunity and equal achievement so they can benefit from special considerations.”
I don’t think this is what’s going wrong. I don’t think black kids, for example, are holding themselves back in school so they’ll get “extra power or considerations.” Nor, in fact, do I think they HAVE extra power or considerations.
I think a selection of people, white and black, get a great deal of money and power from peddling a particular narrative on racism. This narrative has the advantage of being true in some cases. But its effects are smaller than they pretend and the causes are more complex than they pretend and they benefit from hiding this fact (I’m currently writing about Roland Fryer and his research on police violence, which is a case study in this phenomenon).
Black people in general don’t benefit from this narrative. And they don’t want to prevent themselves from healing and succeeding. Even if they received benefits, which again, in the overwhelming majority of cases they don’t, those benefits wouldn’t be worth the downsides. But the narrative is a powerful thing. And there’s a great deal of effort and money put into spreading it. Again, people of all colours are convinced by it.
We are not disagreeing, actually. The dynamics of not wanting to admit any progress and gaining power by claiming victimhood are manifested largely by a subset of the population - who nevertheless have an influence on others.
One of the things I got from recently beginning to read Dalrymple is that the concepts and framings of academia filter down to ordinary people in distorted forms. So it would not be that black school kids are weighing the benefits and advantages of claiming victimhood in their identity for themselves, but that they inherit the results of opinion leaders who are making those choices, consciously or unconsciously. For example, very few grade schoolers are comparing Roland Fryer's research with BLM's framing of society and choosing the latter for conscious advantage. But that doesn't mean that the embrace of victimhood as the path to power is not filtering down to grade schoolers. Even a young student might observe, for example, a teacher who is afraid to punish a minority kid because they greatly fear being accused of racism, and intuit that as one of the levers they themselves can also use for power (getting their way) - consciously or not.
I agree with your description of the dynamics, for example of exaggeration and minimization of some underlying kernel of truth, but I see those dynamics as being partly empowered as a manifestation of the forces I was describing, rather than as being opposed to or independent of what I am suggesting.
"Even a young student might observe, for example, a teacher who is afraid to punish a minority kid because they greatly fear being accused of racism, and intuit that as one of the levers they themselves can also use for power (getting their way) - consciously or not."
Again, I think you're vastly overestimating the power and influence that minority kids can wield in this way.
For starters, the majority of these kids go to schools where their teachers are also people of colour. They don't get to play the racism card. Second, how often do you think this is effective even in cases where the teacher is white? I spend a great deal of time reading about this kind of stuff, and can only think of a handful of stories where a teacher has faced any consequences because of a student's accusation of racism in the past five years. This, out of what? Around 100,000 schools?
BLM's narrative wasn't embraced as a path to power. BLM *used* the narrative as a path to power (and mainly money). Absolutely. But the people who embraced it just swallowed the narrative because they lacked the critical thinking skills to see through it. A combination of news profiteering, social media engineering, and actual racism in policing, convinced millions of people, many of them white, that there was a genuine emergency. They truly believed tens of thousands of unarmed black people were being gunned down for sport.
Speaking of narratives, the narrative that black people in general gain from crying racism is pervasive, false, and is also pushed by people trying to gain power and influence. Ibram X Kendi and Nikole Hannah Jones and Robin DiAngelo do not represent the overwhelming majority of black people. And certainly not black kids. But I keep seeing people attribute their hucksterism far too broadly.
The narrative about endless racism certainly breeds hopelessness or apathy in some kids (as do the realities of their environment in some cases), but not a sense that there's power to be gained through it. In fact, the powerlessness that it breeds is one of the key reasons why I think it harms black people far more than "systemic racism" or other forms of interpersonal racism. And these latter two don't benefit black people either.
As Fryer and others have shown, when black kids are given opportunities and have high expectations placed on them, they work as hard and perform as well as anybody else. Even if they've previously been underperforming.
Very few people are dumb enough to believe that they're better off playing the victim than taking advantage of their opportunities. But some people are cynical or stupid enough to prevent them from getting those opportunities because they're busy debating whether saying "Grandfathered in" is racist.
Hard to tell when you're being sarcastic; I may be somewhere on the spectrum in this regard.
But my belief is that truth has an existence independent of the observer, I even reject the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, and Schrödinger's Cat with it. I believe in MWI and I have reasons I will not mention in public.
And when a tree falls in the forest with nobody to hear it, it does make a sound, because it creates sound waves, alternating regions of compression and rarification in the air.
So there. Phooey.
Oh, by the way, thanks for this column. Although it's probably my least favorite of all your writings thus far, it kicked my ass to get me writing on my own 'stack, finally.
I am going to do another, an anonymous 'stack not connected to my identity because there are some experiences I need to get into print before I die. I will disclose to a very few people.
I think questions like these are occasionally interesting and generally a waste of time because they don't often lead anywhere useful. Quantum mechanics being an obvious exception. There's lots of room to debate what truth is and what objectivity is and even "who's to say." I think your outright rejection of these concepts is limiting.
But when it comes to practical matters, like women's rights or children's safeguarding, for example, my lack of patience for abstractions is much more similar to yours.
Not many realize how profoundly unsettling QM was to not just physics but to the philosophical foundations of scientific method.
I read one paragraph in a book by Karl Popper comparing intractability with the ultimate unknowability dictated by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle; it was some of the clearest thinking in my experience.
It was not all that long ago that to claim to, or even to seek to, understand how things actually worked (“realism”) was regarded as conceit and unscientific.
Yeah, exactly. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is one of the clearest assaults on the concept of objective truth. Of course, we aren't living at the Planck scale. I don't think we need to apply QM to our understanding of daily life and especially of law.
But relativity, too, has lots of interesting things to say about how changes of reference frame can produce two, equally valid interpretations.
I want to note that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle doesn't really invalidate there being objective truth, it only affects the outer limits of the measurability of same. There is a tradeoff at quantum scales between the precision with which we can measure position and the precision with which we can measure momentum.
It would be a solid counter to an argument that objective truth is always measurable to infinite precision, but who makes that assertion?
The proponents of CSJ sometimes argue against "objectivity" by pointing out that humans cannot reach absolute objectivity (thus, in their minds, objectivity can be discarded entirely in favor of their favorite subjectivity, to be imposed on others coercively).
However, that misses the point, which is that we can be relatively more objective or more subjective, and that there are real world benefits to developing the former end of the spectrum.
“we can be relatively more objective or more subjective, and that there are real world benefits to developing the former end of the spectrum.”
Yep. This is exactly the point I was making in my conversation with Jane. In our own private world, it’s fine if subjectivity is king. In areas where we collide with others, the attempt at objectivity offers us the best chance of being both fair and correct.
As for Heisenberg, maybe I should have been a little more precise and said it’s the clearest assault on the belief that we can perceive objective truth. There’s the sense that if we just think hard enough or look closely enough, we can figure out all the answers. And Heisenberg, along with Gödel and others, remind us that there will always be a degree of uncertainty in our understanding of the world.
And I’m glad that uncertainty is there. It (hopefully) keeps us humble.
More like the latter. I will not go into any detail online save to note that I have adamantly disbelieved in everything supernatural and paranormal since I was about 12, and then around 20 I started having experiences. Not coincidences. Reliably repeatable experiences, culminating in one that made my skepticism ridiculous.
If you want to read it after I'm done, and it will be quite long, please email to my burner account solonaquila431@gmail.com and include your pledge to not reveal my identity to anyone you refer to the article.
"trying to nail jelly to a tree."
Haha, I like this.
I thought the confusion between subjectivity and objectivity was, itself, fascinating. For me it cuts right to the heart of the confusion about whether trans women are women.
If you start from the belief that your observations and intuitions are objective facts, everything else follows from there.
Your “truth” is genuinely just as true as anybody else’s. And there’s no external, objective standard that can override your feelings. Not even your biology. So if you “feel” as if you’re the opposite sex, what standard could there be to say otherwise?
Of course, if you’re intellectually consistent, you also need to believe that other people’s observations are equally objective. So if their observations conflict with yours, you have a real problem on your hands. Which is why this discussion so quickly devolves into good vs evil, victim vs bigot dynamics.
There’s no way to talk it out and arrive at the truth. You already *know* the truth. And that means the other person is either lying or some kind of evil weirdo, living in a separate reality to yourself and all the “good” people who affirm you.
My own observation is that many of the prescriptions of CSJ would immediately fall apart if we applied mutuality or reciprocity - or simple "treat others as you would want to be treated"; their only use is for differential advantage in seeking power-over.
"My subjective truth trumps your objective truth" is one of those.
"You have to call me whatever I want" is another
"Microaggressions" comprise yet more
"Only whites can be racist" is another example
Actually, it's hard to come up with a CSJ prescription which IS symmetric.
At some level I understand this. Their worldview is oppressed vs oppressor/privileged, and their goal is to give advantage to the oppressed and pull down the privileged, using any means necessary. What they don't take into account is that by inverting the bias and discrimination and dismissing mutual benefit and reciprocity as underpinnings of their new society, they inherently create permanent conflict - which they won't always win, except in their own heads as the morally superior ones. Guilt trips justifying institutionalized discrimination will never create a stable, peaceful and prosperous society, there has to be something in it for both/all sides, not just the self appointed moral high ground side. The CSJ mindset thinks that a slight easing of guilty feelings is enough to give in return, but that will not work.
" What they don't take into account is that by inverting the bias and discrimination and dismissing mutual benefit and reciprocity as underpinnings of their new society, they inherently create permanent conflict - which they won't always win"
🎯 I think, in some cases there's also a genuine degree of trying to balance the books. I can understand the argument that you can't go straight from discrimination to equality, otherwise the effects of the discrimination are never addressed. But there's so little of that in practice. It's almost always just a vindictive game of "it's our turn to be the oppressors now."
Yes, that rebalancing is the part I understand.
And if there was overall a sense of wise balancing, of surgical application of temporary evidence-based interventions with a feasible and limited goal, I could support it.
However, it's hard to find such sentiments in the movement. Instead the CSJ advocates seem to be institutionalizing systemic "counter-oppression" as a perpetual right and entitlement.
I sometimes want to ask "if in 2124, 100 years from now, there was still a perceived need for substantial positive discrimination to rebalance the books, would that be a success or a failure in your worldview?". I have NEVER seen any time limit supported by advocates. (I think a supreme court justice in the 90's was talking about giving it another 25 years before it should not be needed). According to many advocates, the world is as bad for POC today as it was before Rosa Parks, they are extremely resistant to conceding any progress achieved by over half a century of positive discrimination, yet they want to continue the same policies "as long as needed" - as long as there are any disparities.
My view is: "If the unilateralist policies are objectively and measurably working to reduce the gaps, then we should be able to project how long until sufficient parity is achieved and continue on course towards that time; if they are not moving effectively towards a parity goal after decades, we should rethink the policies.".
In a democratic society, I see positive discrimination as similar to chemotherapy - inherently dangerous and unhealthy, but potentially helpful in specific cases in well calculated limited doses for limited periods with close monitoring and based on solid evidence. But I see nearly zero inclination towards that latter approach. Instead it's framed as a morality based entitlement, without regard to actual outcomes.
Alas, I believe that it's human nature that if you say to ANY group "you will get extra power and considerations for only so long as you don't achieve parity", then there will be many within that group who correctly perceive their best option being not to heal or grow into equal opportunity and equal achievement so they can benefit from special considerations. Not everybody, but a substantial subset. Societies need to beware of institutionalizing perverse incentives, no matter how well meaning.
“ I believe that it's human nature that if you say to ANY group "you will get extra power and considerations for only so long as you don't achieve parity", then there will be many within that group who correctly perceive their best option being not to heal or grow into equal opportunity and equal achievement so they can benefit from special considerations.”
I don’t think this is what’s going wrong. I don’t think black kids, for example, are holding themselves back in school so they’ll get “extra power or considerations.” Nor, in fact, do I think they HAVE extra power or considerations.
I think a selection of people, white and black, get a great deal of money and power from peddling a particular narrative on racism. This narrative has the advantage of being true in some cases. But its effects are smaller than they pretend and the causes are more complex than they pretend and they benefit from hiding this fact (I’m currently writing about Roland Fryer and his research on police violence, which is a case study in this phenomenon).
Black people in general don’t benefit from this narrative. And they don’t want to prevent themselves from healing and succeeding. Even if they received benefits, which again, in the overwhelming majority of cases they don’t, those benefits wouldn’t be worth the downsides. But the narrative is a powerful thing. And there’s a great deal of effort and money put into spreading it. Again, people of all colours are convinced by it.
We are not disagreeing, actually. The dynamics of not wanting to admit any progress and gaining power by claiming victimhood are manifested largely by a subset of the population - who nevertheless have an influence on others.
One of the things I got from recently beginning to read Dalrymple is that the concepts and framings of academia filter down to ordinary people in distorted forms. So it would not be that black school kids are weighing the benefits and advantages of claiming victimhood in their identity for themselves, but that they inherit the results of opinion leaders who are making those choices, consciously or unconsciously. For example, very few grade schoolers are comparing Roland Fryer's research with BLM's framing of society and choosing the latter for conscious advantage. But that doesn't mean that the embrace of victimhood as the path to power is not filtering down to grade schoolers. Even a young student might observe, for example, a teacher who is afraid to punish a minority kid because they greatly fear being accused of racism, and intuit that as one of the levers they themselves can also use for power (getting their way) - consciously or not.
I agree with your description of the dynamics, for example of exaggeration and minimization of some underlying kernel of truth, but I see those dynamics as being partly empowered as a manifestation of the forces I was describing, rather than as being opposed to or independent of what I am suggesting.
"Even a young student might observe, for example, a teacher who is afraid to punish a minority kid because they greatly fear being accused of racism, and intuit that as one of the levers they themselves can also use for power (getting their way) - consciously or not."
Again, I think you're vastly overestimating the power and influence that minority kids can wield in this way.
For starters, the majority of these kids go to schools where their teachers are also people of colour. They don't get to play the racism card. Second, how often do you think this is effective even in cases where the teacher is white? I spend a great deal of time reading about this kind of stuff, and can only think of a handful of stories where a teacher has faced any consequences because of a student's accusation of racism in the past five years. This, out of what? Around 100,000 schools?
BLM's narrative wasn't embraced as a path to power. BLM *used* the narrative as a path to power (and mainly money). Absolutely. But the people who embraced it just swallowed the narrative because they lacked the critical thinking skills to see through it. A combination of news profiteering, social media engineering, and actual racism in policing, convinced millions of people, many of them white, that there was a genuine emergency. They truly believed tens of thousands of unarmed black people were being gunned down for sport.
Speaking of narratives, the narrative that black people in general gain from crying racism is pervasive, false, and is also pushed by people trying to gain power and influence. Ibram X Kendi and Nikole Hannah Jones and Robin DiAngelo do not represent the overwhelming majority of black people. And certainly not black kids. But I keep seeing people attribute their hucksterism far too broadly.
The narrative about endless racism certainly breeds hopelessness or apathy in some kids (as do the realities of their environment in some cases), but not a sense that there's power to be gained through it. In fact, the powerlessness that it breeds is one of the key reasons why I think it harms black people far more than "systemic racism" or other forms of interpersonal racism. And these latter two don't benefit black people either.
As Fryer and others have shown, when black kids are given opportunities and have high expectations placed on them, they work as hard and perform as well as anybody else. Even if they've previously been underperforming.
Very few people are dumb enough to believe that they're better off playing the victim than taking advantage of their opportunities. But some people are cynical or stupid enough to prevent them from getting those opportunities because they're busy debating whether saying "Grandfathered in" is racist.
That was very good.
Hard to tell when you're being sarcastic; I may be somewhere on the spectrum in this regard.
But my belief is that truth has an existence independent of the observer, I even reject the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, and Schrödinger's Cat with it. I believe in MWI and I have reasons I will not mention in public.
And when a tree falls in the forest with nobody to hear it, it does make a sound, because it creates sound waves, alternating regions of compression and rarification in the air.
So there. Phooey.
Oh, by the way, thanks for this column. Although it's probably my least favorite of all your writings thus far, it kicked my ass to get me writing on my own 'stack, finally.
I am going to do another, an anonymous 'stack not connected to my identity because there are some experiences I need to get into print before I die. I will disclose to a very few people.
"So there. Phooey."
I think questions like these are occasionally interesting and generally a waste of time because they don't often lead anywhere useful. Quantum mechanics being an obvious exception. There's lots of room to debate what truth is and what objectivity is and even "who's to say." I think your outright rejection of these concepts is limiting.
But when it comes to practical matters, like women's rights or children's safeguarding, for example, my lack of patience for abstractions is much more similar to yours.
Not many realize how profoundly unsettling QM was to not just physics but to the philosophical foundations of scientific method.
I read one paragraph in a book by Karl Popper comparing intractability with the ultimate unknowability dictated by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle; it was some of the clearest thinking in my experience.
It was not all that long ago that to claim to, or even to seek to, understand how things actually worked (“realism”) was regarded as conceit and unscientific.
Yeah, exactly. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is one of the clearest assaults on the concept of objective truth. Of course, we aren't living at the Planck scale. I don't think we need to apply QM to our understanding of daily life and especially of law.
But relativity, too, has lots of interesting things to say about how changes of reference frame can produce two, equally valid interpretations.
I want to note that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle doesn't really invalidate there being objective truth, it only affects the outer limits of the measurability of same. There is a tradeoff at quantum scales between the precision with which we can measure position and the precision with which we can measure momentum.
It would be a solid counter to an argument that objective truth is always measurable to infinite precision, but who makes that assertion?
The proponents of CSJ sometimes argue against "objectivity" by pointing out that humans cannot reach absolute objectivity (thus, in their minds, objectivity can be discarded entirely in favor of their favorite subjectivity, to be imposed on others coercively).
However, that misses the point, which is that we can be relatively more objective or more subjective, and that there are real world benefits to developing the former end of the spectrum.
“we can be relatively more objective or more subjective, and that there are real world benefits to developing the former end of the spectrum.”
Yep. This is exactly the point I was making in my conversation with Jane. In our own private world, it’s fine if subjectivity is king. In areas where we collide with others, the attempt at objectivity offers us the best chance of being both fair and correct.
As for Heisenberg, maybe I should have been a little more precise and said it’s the clearest assault on the belief that we can perceive objective truth. There’s the sense that if we just think hard enough or look closely enough, we can figure out all the answers. And Heisenberg, along with Gödel and others, remind us that there will always be a degree of uncertainty in our understanding of the world.
And I’m glad that uncertainty is there. It (hopefully) keeps us humble.
MWI?
Problem is, most who read it will think, quite reasonably, that I’m crazy.
And how it that a problem? (OK, kidding a bit)
Crazy like a shaman, or crazy like a danger to yourself or society? Like somebody recounting an alien encounter or a ghost?
More like the latter. I will not go into any detail online save to note that I have adamantly disbelieved in everything supernatural and paranormal since I was about 12, and then around 20 I started having experiences. Not coincidences. Reliably repeatable experiences, culminating in one that made my skepticism ridiculous.
If you want to read it after I'm done, and it will be quite long, please email to my burner account solonaquila431@gmail.com and include your pledge to not reveal my identity to anyone you refer to the article.
I'd certainly be interested, if only I knew where to find it.