Comment by kelseyfrog
5 days ago
The article missed the biggest opportunity to be curious by avoiding the question: What if they're right?
5 days ago
The article missed the biggest opportunity to be curious by avoiding the question: What if they're right?
> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe... It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
To be fair, he does say the above, which is close enough. The problem with asking "what if they're right" is that there's no single formulation of beliefs shared universally by such large and diverse group, so you can't consider whether they are right or not, only whether each individual expression is.
But there’s this statement as well:
> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be…
The whole idea of woke (in the non pejorative sense) is that you’ve done the work to perceive the actual problem.
That statement shows that he hasn’t, which I think undermines the good parts of the essay.
Except in plenty of cases, Paul's claim is demonstrably true. People vastly overestimate the racial disparity in police uses of force, for example: https://manhattan.institute/article/perceptions-are-not-real...
When people were asked whether male-dominated or female-dominated industries were sexist, they vastly overestimated the degree of gender discrimination as compared to the experimentally observed rates (and in the case of male-dominated industries, they got the direction of discrimination backwards): https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S07495978230005... from https://id.elsevier.com/as/authorization.oauth2?platSite=SD%...
The whole pattern of people saying what amounts to "the fact that you disagree with me means you haven't bothered to examine the problem" is a very unfortunate trend. Did it occur to you that perhaps he did do the work on studying the problem, and came to a different conclusion?
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It's also a little suspect when a white man talks the degree to which racism (and by extension, sexism and homophobia) is a problem. The way he writes about it is such a casual dismissal that it sounds like gas lighting to me.
Has anyone ever referred to him with a racial epithet? Has he been stopped and frisked? Racially profiled? When was he last treated as if his ideas aren't as good because of his gender? Or passed up for a promotion for any of these reasons? Was he ever treated as if he is unworthy of marriage because he loves the wrong person? Has he worried about whether or not his name sounds a little too ethnic on his resume? Has he ever been called a dirty ____?
Among other things, including being called racial epithets, and worry about whether or not my name sounds a little too ethnic, I've had to listen to contemporary American politicians talk about how my ethnic group controls lasers from space.
But no, racism is not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be? It's easy to say that when you never experienced it.
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The entire thing is an exercise in complaining about a thing that goddamn near everyone agrees is bad, then using that to complain about a much larger movement that probably aims to address a lot of legitimate issues, in such a way that you can always retreat if challenged. There's a memed name for this tactic, and it's extremely on display here.
"Well of course by 'the woke' I only meant the ones I'm talking about, and since I'm choosing what that means let's just say part of the definition includes that they think racism is an even bigger problem than it is—whatever amount you think it's a problem, they think it's a bigger one, so even you think they are wrong! So as you can see I wrote precisely and correctly and you're an idiot who can't read."
But in fact it's all nonsense. This whole essay is a bunch of mealy-mouthed gibbering, because it relies so heavily on that kind of thing. It's either saying something boring that 99% of people already agree with, or it's expressing the more controversial (and dumber) thing that's getting everyone here worked up, but accusations of the latter can be deflected by claiming it's only doing the former (in which case, why bother writing it in the first place...?)
Essays like this are one of the few things LLMs are already entirely capable of replacing us for. Bad ones that mostly lack actual content, and don't even really need to be right because they're constructed such that they can't be wrong.
Isn't that Akin to arguing if something should be a 9.8 or a 9.5 on a completely arbitrary scale with no shared definition.
From what you say, anyone who disagrees about the nature or severity of the problem hasn't done the work and is flat out wrong.
If so, then the whole idea of wokeness collapses into the state of infallible enlightenment where everything one says is correct.
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Yeah, that's where he lost me too. I get the impression that in his head the firing of a college president is a bigger problem than racism.... like bro 24% of the world lives in a caste system. I don't know if human kind will ever be capable of treating people without preference across beauty, age, race, etc.
I'd be curious how he "sizes" the import of these problems (priggishness, prejudice) and whether it's just drawn directly from personal frustrations of a wealthy white billionaire in the most progressive state in the world.
> > Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be…
Rich, coming from a rich white male. Hey, we're not lynching people anymore!
The whole point of "wokeness" is being legitimately aware of these issues and not just sweeping them under the rug with an "it's a problem, but not as bad as they say".
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mmskXXetcg
This is a fantastic response. Wokeism is a pseudo-religion, and Dawkins's response to the in vouge religion is timeless.
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> with far left views that in the recent decade have become the loudest voice basically every online platform. > the same toxic far left hub that Reddit has become > shifting away from the far left messaging that has been the default
That entire post has left reality a long time ago. Honestly, this level of resentment can't be healthy.
> angry, myopic, us-vs-them extreme thinking.
You've clearly become what you're (allegedly) so vehemently against.
I think it's best to understand it in terms of entirely different separate realities that define political ideologies nowadays, like it's not just that I disagree with you, we don't even share the same plane of existence anymore. Like for example conservatives love to call Biden a marxist/far-leftist — it's incomprehensible gibberish to me, it goes against everything I believe to know about reality, but it probably makes a lot of sense to you, you might even agree with the statement. It's not a disagreement in the traditional sense, it's not something we could talk about and reach some sort of mutual understanding.
The same is true with people using the term "woke", to describe something they believe exists and is a great danger somehow, the most important political struggle of our times even perhaps. And you're right, in your perception of reality it really is scary and worth fighting against. It's just that I believe you are living in a dangerous, delusional fantasy that has nothing to do with reality. That's why finding common ground is pretty much impossible unfortunately.
Like one time I saw a conservative calling the world economic forum a far-left institution, I really don't think a productive conversation between leftists, liberals and conservatives is even possible at this point.
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interesting example of the whole phenomenon. presumption of guilt and sentencing and dismissal without any evidence of wrongdoing.
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