IT

inclusive_throwaway

38 karmaJoined Mar 2019

Comments
1

Not a downvoter - I think this discussion is inevitable and may as well happen here and now - but it seems obvious why the downvotes were silent; the above is the dominant view amongst employers (most media, all corporations, nonprofits, civil services); so dissenting from it under your own name is a liability.

I found this piece thoughtful and full of sensible caveats, and I liked the survey, even if it was highly nonrandom. It sets a worrying lower bound on the size of the problem and makes me update a bit toward taking alienation seriously. But it does little else - where is the cost-benefit analysis? You mention that the proposal removes a safe space for people without soft skills who just want to know the truth. Why is this cost necessarily less than the assumed and unestimated cost of alienating others? Why is this the place to give unempirical deontology a pass?

The ideas we mention in these areas are widely accepted in social psychology and sociology and are added for context.

Consensus in these two fields seems to be being used as a proxy for truth. However, what social psychologists say is known to be insufficient for this purpose, because the methods generally used there systematically produce false significance. This is relevant here because several irreplicable soc. psych. effects are load-bearing pillars of the above kind of proposal (for instance stereotype threat and implicit association testing). This unreflective endorsement of a field with such bad epistemics doesn't inspire much confidence, since what is being asked is that the above fields get a free pass, that everyone act as if they were true.

It is easily possible that the proposal is the right choice for a movement which wants to grow and diversify without bringing shaming and smearing upon itself. The above does almost nothing to show that this is the case.

The proposal - for us to self-censor - also comes a week after SSC was forced into censorship by extreme proponents of the above view, and so might be suffering from association with that. I'm writing this as a throwaway, not because I think the OP would retaliate, but because there are demonstrably others who would.

I wish the following didn't matter but I fear I have to put it, to be taken seriously: I'm working-class and disabled.