Sad, but predicted. It's academic opportunism. "We may not have a spine, but we do have tenure, so let's roll with the tide." This is usually accompanied by vaguely positive statements and wishful thinking. It was already evident when The Closing of the American Mind was published, over 30 years ago. The ever advancing commercialization of universities has made the staff even more susceptible to public opinion (and public here means: their students and benefactors).
Public opinion laughs at this woke nonsense, though. I mean "egg parent" and "sperm parent." JFC. You're not gonna hear that IRL. It's only in elite academic circles that you'll find anybody who doesn't roll their eyes at this.
This is a version of the silent majority argument, and I think you underestimate how much the public is onboard with these policies. And give it a few decades, opposing them will simply be outside of the Overton window.
Competing over conformity is the Olympics sports of our time and boy is society keen on participating.
The public just wants to give the underdog a fair shot; they don't care much about what's happening in academic publishing, but they get angry if they perceive that somebody is being oppressed because of who or what they are. A few decades from now, the public response will depend on how successfully these issues were cast as matters of justice.
Then why do I never hear woke language IRL? People who I associate with are overwhelmingly left of center and under 35 BTW, so sample bias is actually making this a stronger indication of public opinion.
Edit: and anybody who has ever dealt with an HOA knows that the silent majority is absolutely a real thing.
The key is that it doesn’t take ‘a majority’ to affect change. Activists just need to be in positions of power, or put pressure on those that are.
The average person in ‘the silent majority’ is against all the ‘wokeness’ but won’t actually fight it. They’ll prefer to reassure themselves that no one truly believes it while doing virtually nothing to confront those who are pushing it.
As far as your HOA example goes, I’ve found most people really do not like being in one, but are relatively helpless when it comes to actually changing the association’s rules.
I lived in Chicago and I heard woke stuff all the time at work (we had some pretty insane DEI meetings and posters around the office), among friends, at church, and of course protests/demonstrations/riots on the streets.
I think it’s not evenly distributed IRL and that has some people feeling like “woke” is just some Republican boogeyman. Also, people seem to be forgetting the #MeToo and #BLM eras surprisingly quickly—woke ideology spurred nationwide protests and riots and somehow that seems to be getting memory-holed.
I work in an environment that has a lot of focus on DEI, training, posters etc. Unless you're standing in front of the equivalent of a polit officer the language is used mockingly. This isnt some right wing coven but a mix of perspectives. This mocking stems from the shared recognition of the absurdity of the issue.
As far as Me Too and BLM being "memory holed" that has more to do with the movements themselves. They each started with very real sparks but were both consumed rather quickly by movements that bore little resemblance to those sparks. They abused their support for unrelated and often self serving objectives and made themselves irrelevant as a result.
My wife works as a marketing consultant for major US corporations (including but not limited to FAANG). In pitching to companies, her company explicitly (and cringeingly) advertises their diversity—race, gender, nationality, languages spoken, etc and their commitment to DEI. Her company holds DEI meetings internally and with clients where they basically cite disparities out of context and get collectively (and performs timely) angry about them. To be clear, her company is not in the DEI space, it’s just a competitive advantage to get contracts. In meetings with her coworkers (1:1 or group), no one is mocking DEI at all—there are lots of True Believers and others who just don’t want to rock the boat (including my wife, for better or worse), but no one is openly critical (subjectively, people are definitely afraid to be seen as failing to toe the party line).
Previously, she worked at a non-profit which was also not DEI affiliated but was obsessed with DEI stuff. Again, no one was openly critical of anything remotely DEI related.
I’ve had similar experiences at every company I’ve worked for as a software engineer.
I’m not arguing that our experiences are THE experience, but there are definitely a lot of places that take DEI super-seriously. My thesis isn’t “DEI is taken super seriously everywhere”, but rather that how seriously it is taken isn’t evenly distributed across the country or across industries.
I sort of agree that we underestimate support for these policies, but critically I think we underestimate who (rather than how many people) supports these policies—notably the elites in Hollywood, media, academia, and business (at least via DEI platforms in every major company).
Even still, I’m somewhat optimistic that this ideology won’t be adopted in its current form because it’s so inconsistent and often counterfactual, and I believe in a sort of “truth floats”. Moreover, our society is already “less woke” (or whatever term you prefer) than we were in the BLM and #MeToo eras.
Honestly, my biggest concern is that proponents of woke ideology are pretty successfully framing it as the only alternative to Republican anti-wokeness or otherwise as the best way to “own the conservatives”. At least that’s the impression I get from debates I’ve had.
I have a number of friends who, a decade ago, jumped down the super woke rabbit hole. They’re quite far from academia - in fact the one thing that ties most of them together is that they didn’t bother going to university and then spent a long chunk of time essentially unemployed. So it isn’t just the elite and the Hollywood types… although my anecdotal evidence isn’t any better than your anecdotal evidence. :P
Oh, I fully agree that it isn’t limited to academia. I’m only saying that your unemployed super-woke friends aren’t as influential as Hollywood, the media, government bureaucrats, academia, DEI departments, etc. :)
I've only known a single person who buys in to all this stuff, and my social circle leans overwhelmingly left. And with "this stuff" I don't make the basic precepts – many people agree on that – but rather the more outlandish "woke" interpretations of things: "structural racism exists and is a problem": sure, loads of people agree with that, as do I. But "math education is full of white supremacy culture" ... yeah, not so much.
Not a very scientific poll by any standard of course and I'm sure it's a biased selection in all sorts of ways, but it doesn't seem that common of a viewpoint to me.
I think the reason that you don't get a lot of pushback is that accusations of racism, transphobia, ableism, etc. are completely toxic, no matter how bullshitty they are. If you have to say "I'm not racist" then you've kind of already lost. It's a "cheat code" for winning the argument; the ultimate "stfu hammer". And you have to ask yourself: do I really have anything to gain by engaging on this and what do I risk losing?
Structural racism exists and is a problem, but the clearest, most obvious and most prototypical example of a structurally racist society is not the United States; it's Latin America. Where racialized ideology got its start in the first place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casta and where the whole of society was twisted over five centuries to build up and sharpen a correlation between ancestry, social status and in fact outright social oppression and coercion. Of course this correlation is quite obvious today and explains much about the social dysfunction that persists there.
Does structural racism then exist in the U.S.? Undoubtedly so in some places, especially those that were most influenced by Latinx norms and by the homegrown culture of oppression in the South. But to call it ubiquitous to the U.S. as the "woke" almost always do is to deeply misunderstand the nature of it.
I guess? I'm afraid I'm not too familiar with the history of South-America.
I don't think it's unreasonable for people to primarily focus on their own country in their own time. Historical context is important, sure, both to understand the cause of today's problems as well as put things in perspective. But in the end, I'm not so sure if it really matters all that much when discussing contemporary issues in e.g. the US or Europe.
I mean, you can look up how the ancient Greek treated their women and suddenly you will find that modern feminists from the 70s didn't have all that much to complain about either, never mind contemporary countries like Saudi-Arabia. It's interesting to learn about it for all sorts of reasons, but in the end ... not really all that directly relevant when discussing the status of women in your own country.
> But in the end, I'm not so sure if it really matters all that much when discussing contemporary issues in e.g. the US or Europe.
Of course it matters. Even if we only consider those who seemingly have no concern at all for the plight of oppressed people outside of their own society - it's a natural experiment that lets us witness the real, actual consequences of structural racism in their purest form, and over the very long run (a time-span of several centuries in fact). Which is kinda important when you attach so much relevance to it as a causal factor. It lets us compare and contrast outcomes, and find out whether other things might also be relevant.
> kinda important when you attach so much relevance to it as a causal factor. It lets us compare and contrast outcomes, and find out whether other things might also be relevant.
I'm not so sure it's that easy; unabashed naked racism such as Casta is quite a different thing than what we might call "subtle racism" as currently exists in countries like the US, but also Europe. Both the effects and the solutions seem quite different to me.
> those who seemingly have no concern at all for the plight of oppressed people outside of their own society
That seems rather strong. It's not a matter of "not caring", it's that situations in other countries are complex so I don't even understand them, and usually can't really understand them properly even if I tried as I don't speak the language. Besides, what am I supposed to do about something like women's rights in Saudi-Arabia or the plight of native people in the Brazilian rain forests? Post something on Twitter about it in English? Yeah, that'll fix it for sure...
---
As a general comment: these terms are always "relative" to a degree. I grew up fairly poor in Western Europe; we never had money for anything, lived without electricity as a child for a while, didn't have things like car, computer, holidays, new clothes, etc.
If we compare my situation to various communities in, say, Nigeria I was "rich": clean running water easily available, good free education, good free health care, never truly went hungry, was never homeless, etc. By comparison, I was still "rich". Even in my own country I'm sure many people have had it much worse. Never mind if we start looking at the full historical context and start comparing against people 100, 200, 500, etc. years ago.
In spite of all of that, "I grew up poor" is a fairly accurate and reasonable description in the context of growing up in Western Europe.
Similarly, you might take issue that structural racism in the US is small compared to something like Casta (or Jim Crow, or many other things), and that is certainly true, but it's not a contest, and for the experience of contemporary people growing up and living in the US ... it doesn't really matter that some other people had it even worse.
> unabashed naked racism such as Casta is quite a different thing than what we might call "subtle racism"
The two are causally linked, though. Overt racism as in Casta gives way to subtler and more structural issues over time. But everything we observe about those places, even today, seems to suggest that these structural issues are highly relevant there.
> Post something on Twitter about it in English? Yeah, that'll fix it for sure...
It's called raising awareness. In fact, there's more merit in doing so wrt. issues that most are unaware of. Everyone and their dog knows about structural racism in the U.S. by now; very few seem to know or care about the issue as it occurs elsewhere, and in far more problematic forms.
> In spite of all of that, "I grew up poor" is a fairly accurate and reasonable description in the context of growing up in Western Europe.
Socio-economic marginalization is in fact very different from absolute poverty and deprivation of the kind we might see today in Nigeria. One of the more surprising facts about countries where absolute deprivation is a real concern is the varying correlation between it and social marginalization. People in the historical past were surely living in material deprivation by modern standards but, by and large, they had a rich and tight-knit social life; they were not marginalized as most people in relative poverty might be nowadays in the West.
The challenge with looking at these different situations as “experiments” is the number of confounders and/or scarcity of facts. It’s ripe for projection and confirmation bias, best to not draw generalizations or conclusions.
> I think the reason that you don't get a lot of pushback is that accusations of racism, transphobia, ableism, etc. are completely toxic, no matter how bullshitty they are.
I see the tide is starting to turn a bit on this, these accusations don't have the same power that they used to. Probably because of far too many "boy who cried wolf" situations.
For example, women saying that they want to keep female-only spaces for their dignity and safety are often accused of being transphobic. Many are shrugging that off and saying: if that's transphobia then so be it, proves my point. And increasingly, people are agreeing with them.
>Many are shrugging that off and saying: if that's transphobia then so be it, proves my point. And increasingly, people are agreeing with them.
Women can push back against accusations of transphobia because they can respond with accusations of sexism. Since there are accusations on both sides, this doesn't show that accusations are losing power.
Public opinion is a schizophrenic cultural phenomenon that most people understand in a hyperlocal sense.
This is generally how language works. People at the edges of understanding propose a lot of new ideas and reframings, and some gain broader footholds in popular use.
I’ve been on both sides of this debate because sometimes the innovators push beyond what I think makes sense. But they are innovating.
I asked a dictionary and it thought your comment expressed insufficient awareness of different definitions of words. You can decide if that’s funny to you in a thread that is also about defining language and reacting to it.
schizophrenic:
2: contradictory or antagonistic qualities or attitudes
>insufficient awareness of different definitions of words
Lot of that going around.
If you look up "retard" in Merriam-Webster, it says "informal + offensive : a foolish or stupid person"
If you look up "schizo" in Merriam-Webster, it says "a schizophrenic individual".
If you look up "psycho" in Merriam-Webster, it says "a deranged or psychopathic person —not used technically"
Think about this and you will become enlightened.
(I should make it clear that I agree with you if you think the idea of policing "schizo" and "psycho" like people police other terms is impossible, absurd. They can't be destigmatized or merged into "neurodiversity". All I really wanted or expected to do was shock some awareness.)
You didn’t shock any awareness, though — the idea that you could in this case is based in your perception that you knew more than me (or that this was a competition in who could be more ableism-aware) which is likely based on your own lived experience where it is probabilistically most likely to be true. We are in the long tail here though where it is not only possible but fairly likely that the person you’re talking to is at least as much of an outlier as you are, and where someone else may have already come out the other side of an extended and overwrought diversity awareness education of trauma-informed everything and be thoroughly done with it.
Your offense at the term and/or your friend’s reaction was based on your own outdated associated definition and/or your assumption of what you understood my definition to be, my understanding, and/or my awareness.
People often think they are “smarter” because others make concise comments and the big brains, instead of assuming competence, assume that every corner of the discussion that wasn’t fleshed and rounded out in the original comment is an opportunity for a brilliant unique thought, discovery, or observation of theirs that is unknown to the commenter. That’s often not the case.
>this was a competition in who could be more ableism-aware
Ah, that's just it - I assumed you were "ableism-aware".
I believe in the spirit of the XKCD cartoon "Ten Thousand" (https://xkcd.com/1053/) and do not think it's ever appropriate to shame people for not knowing what "everybody" knows. Much less assume strangers are ignorant so that I can inform them.
"Ableism-awareness" is common. "Schizo-awareness" is nonexistent, as is, I think, proven by the mainstream dictionary you linked to.
I think it's because students tend to either trust the academic hierarchy, or understand that they need to adhere to what they're being taught in order to pass the course.
When I was studying biology as an undergraduate, there were a number of religious students who vehemently disagreed with evolutionary theory, but would work under - in their minds - the assumption of this fiction being true in order to get decent grades.
The same may well be true of students being taught that woke gibberish like "egg parent" and "sperm parent" are the correct terms to use. Or they just accept it as technical jargon as they would with all the other domain-specific language used in their course.
This used to be the case with saying "transwomen are women", for instance. Now you're called a bigot if you disagree, and there is a chance this post even gets removed or flagged because facts be damned if it could potentially hurt feelings.
So don't assume the general public will stand up against insanity as much as you would like them to.
Did they properly cite the previous work of Trofim Lysenko? He was the first to indict Western geneticists as "fly lovers and people haters" who promote imperialism and bourgeois false science. Failing to cite his work in this context is flagrant academic dishonesty.
After he was discovered in the Soviet Union and exiled he spent the remainder of his career being funded by the American ruling class to continue his research. Kind of invalidates your argument a little bit huh
I have no sense of scale for that. Is that high? Low? If it's high, does it necessarily mean it's influential too (e.g. it can be cited and then rebuked in other papers)?
Well that just moves the question to another layer doesn't it? Why do the students and benefactors push this view? Because they are taught thus by professors, closing the circle?
Personally I think the answer is anti-discrimination legislation. To be precise, the chilling effects of it. If someone goes against the "woke" it may not be illegal itself, but it means everything they do will be subject to more scrutiny and they risk being judged more severely for the same misstep. Thus anti-discrimination legislation, I conjecture, gradually select the woke to the top of the elite.
>> anti-discrimination legislation, I conjecture, gradually select the woke to the top of the elite.
ironically, you're making a perfect argument for natural selection in evolutionary studies selecting... people who will eventually deny the existence of natural selection.
I wonder if this is also an end stage of a lot of other systems of knowledge.
I’ve heard it described as: anti-discrimination legislation puts the burden of proof on employers to prove they aren’t motivated by discrimination, which is essentially impossible so they instead try to show that they are more committed to “anti-racism” than the median institution, which of course raises the median to the point where exceeding the median requires increasingly ridiculous, performance stuff.
Initially I was skeptical of this model because it only explains administrators’ fervor, but as I thought through the knock-on effects, I think it probably does a decent job of explaining faculty and student zeal as well, at least over time.
> Why do the students and benefactors push this view? Because they are taught thus by professors, closing the circle?
Your reasoning applied to the 1960s would say that students only opposed the Vietnam War because their professors told them to. You should ascribe more agency to university students.
Much more likely that their professors just taught them biology and how to operate lab equipment.
Graduate students especially are incentivized to come up with new ways of seeing the world. That’s what writing a dissertation is all about. This is the same mindset carried over from biology to a social issue normally seen as unrelated.
Edit: Those who are downvoting without replying, have you been to grad school, or are you just imagining what professors spend their time telling their students?
I believe you're right, it does seem to have had a significant effect.
Perhaps it's also interesting to imagine the societal changes if law and policy prohibited discrimination based on being disadvantaged by class, wealth and income. We may well edge towards a genuinely more equitable society, rather one that just pays lip service to it based on one's identity.
Though it's unlikely to ever happen, given the economic and political system we exist in. It would disadvantage the wealthy and well-connected too much for them to permit it.
Author William Deresiewicz some months ago commented on why academics (administrators, professors, and students) push this view in "American Education's new dark age" https://unherd.com/2022/03/american-educations-new-dark-age/ , previously discussed in HN with 2 or 3 comments:
I’ve been trying to get access to academic tools and data to research my own genetic condition and I’ve been required to pledge allegiance to anti-racism more than once. Basically if I stumble on something that could be considered racist then I guess it’s a breach of terms. I don’t intend to publish so it doesn’t bother me but it does seem antithetical to finding fundamental truths.
You can find any fundamental truth that doesn't oppose that every single psychological trait has exactly the same average and deviation across ... really any group. Which is an outstanding claim, and therefore your priors should be it's extremely unlikely.
I should add that I've taken to do my own research because I little faith in the actual scientists to do a good job, and the faith that I have left is diminishing. A lot of the science is needlessly incredibly slow and it appears that once someone has found something they can get funding for they drag it out forever as it's easier to get repeat funding than try for new funding. Then there is all the accidental (and not so accidental) p-hacking that is so prevalent that it appears that being good at math would be an impairment to an academic career.
And no, I think the age of a person is very relevant to their willingness to change based on what we know scientifically about the way our brains wire and prune over our lives. But it’s a sacred cow here.
"Science" says old people are less willing to change their language to suit politically correct fads? I wonder what it must say about people too young to recognize the first fashionable wave of politically correct zealotry they happen to get caught up in. There's probably a word for how they feel looking back at themselves later.
There are definitely people overplaying the woke position but language evolves.
I’m likely as old as you. Your arrows missed their target here.
If Jerry weren’t so identified with his language he might have read the paper and found a middle ground. Instead he’s located himself further in the opposite direction of where we are headed. Not that the paper’s authors know exactly where that is, either.
I can't speak for all generations and all political movements, but the "politically correct zealotry" of my generation is now widely understood to have been on the correct side of history, and, in the eyes of the cultural mainstream, the language we were looking to change has come to be seen, at best, as outdated and slightly embarrassing.
That said, I saw it go the other way for some of the issues that one of my older siblings was excited about back in the day.
It's just possible that, "This idea seems to be most popular among young people," doesn't actually function as a stunning rhetorical coup de grace for any side of any cultural debate.
>> the "politically correct zealotry" of my generation is now widely understood to have been on the correct side of history
Maybe you're right, but if you were in that kind of wave - I guess you mean the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, not the widely mocked PC movement of the 80s? - you were exceptionally lucky from a world-historical point of view. Currently, the same words might also be uttered by one of the hostage takers in the Iranian revolution, any member of the Taliban, or one of the older prison guards at a concentration camp in Xinjiang. (Really. Imagine each of those people saying that sentence). Point being, those words usually sound absurd to anyone who doesn't share your political and cultural frame of reference.
Synaptic pruning mostly ends before the age of 20 and any relationship pruning has to the psychological concept of 'willingness to change' seems like a wild conjecture you just now plucked from thin air.
Yeah I should have gone even more generic with my term than pruning probably as it implies synaptic pruning when what I actually meant was like a plant: all of the reductions of connectivity that come with age including the reduction in neurons and increase in glial cells, etc.
Depending on how these networks are structured they may not be able to change much, but if they are structured in better ways then aging is less impactful.
I definitely could have been better in this thread.
Clearly it's not impossible for older people to change or learn new things, as there are many examples of this.
That on average the ability to do this decreases with age is irrelevant when judging a single person. Judging individuals by general population statistics (which are often – though not always – true) is pretty much what discrimination is.
I judged him first by his ranting use of language and his argument, then by his other posts, and also frankly by that domain name, before doing research and finding he was… seasoned.
Are we meant to hide our biases for some higher purpose? We all have them.
Were old men of the early 20th century who were making their living writing about science using the language of the 19th century told to change their language? What does the story say?
This has got to be the only time in history that legions of non-Java programmers have stood up with united voices to bitterly decry. . . using a name that's terser and easier to type.
I was not aware of this. The fact that this got through is maddening.
There is a person who campaigned for 5+ years to get the term "index" changed to "staging." Everyone agreed with this change. There is a ton of evidence that it's better. The patch was written. But one person refused it and it got shut down.
The framing in the title seems somewhat disingenuous to me. This is one article in that journal, it's not an editorial and as far as I can tell there is nothing to indicate that this article represents the opinions of the journal or its editors.
The more interesting criticism of the paper are only paraphrased without quotes, I'm not sure I understand the arguments here without reading the original paper in full.
There is one part I think that is interesting from an entirely different point of view, and that is that "fitness" is probably not the best term for this concept in evolution. I don't think I've ever heard evolution explained without the caveat that "fitness" in evolution doesn't mean what we understand commonly as fitness. It's more about the survival of the best adapted one, and not the strongest one.
There are some terms in biology that are far from ideal, but they stick because we used them for a long time. Another example is the "central dogma of molecular biology", Crick later admitted that he misunderstood what dogma actually means when he coined that term. The term is simply wrong in this case, but it still remains.
> Another example is the "central dogma of molecular biology", Crick later admitted that he misunderstood what dogma actually means when he coined that term. The term is simply wrong in this case, but it still remains.
It remains because it is understood, making it not wrong. It is far from ideal, language wise, if we were to take language as more important than how language is used.
> It's more about the survival of the best adapted one, and not the strongest one.
The same applies to the usage of "fitness", that you chose to misunderstand. Do you also misread "islamophobia"? Are all usages of "literally" literal?
"fitness" in evolution doesn't mean what we understand commonly as fitness. It's more about the survival of the best adapted one, and not the strongest one.
It's almost as if the original author meant to say "fit for purpose".
Thats also wrong, its the good enough for a environment. And environments are many and ever changing. A fish sweating glycol into his body, is deadly sick on this planet (well maybe except the poles), but well adapted aka fit on alot of other planets.
Finally, environments swing, for example by increasing and decreasing mouse populations, which may even within a species allow for epigenetic adaptions (good times reproduce, bad times sit on a pole and do energy efficient nothing), which then explains initial diversity and "neuro divergence" in animal popultions. Usual trigger is economic stresses.
Now lets all pray to the great sinus curve of the environment in the sky.
"good enough for the environment" is exactly what "fit" means.
"fitness" means "how well it fits [into the environment]". It's perfectly anti-ablelist right from the start -- a tenet of anti-ableism is that "disability" is a problem in the environment, not in the individual.
"fitness = strength" is a corruption of the original meaning.
The common translation of "survival of the fittest" in Dutch is "survival of the strongest", which is even worse!
I do think "fitness" is often misunderstood, as is evolution in general. Even though the basic principles aren't that hard it's kind of tricky to really "get" natural selection. It's like trying to "get" just how huge astronomical distances are, or how a river could have formed the grand canyon: it's so far outside of our regular every-day experiences it takes some effort.
I'm not sure if s/fittest/best adapted/ (or something along these lines) would help, but it might? Of course, good general education about evolution would help even more, but yeah, that's been controversial for 150 years now...
> and as far as I can tell there is nothing to indicate that this article represents the opinions of the journal or its editors.
From the article or it's comments, the journal's editors actually solicited this submission, it wasn't submitted and then approved after passing a standard review.
Civilization/society is, in a lot of ways, a human rejection of natural selection as the fundamental force driving our species's future.
But evolution as a process, as much as we can ascribe these terms to a stochastic process, is inherently abelist and eugenicist? Like, that's what natural selection is.
Both the author's analysis and the reviewed paper are dumb.
It's just the same process of selection operating at a higher level. Not on genes, but on social systems and institutions. Thus e.g. Socialism was developed under the assumption that human nature itself could somehow be changed in the service of a collective goal, the "New Socialist Man". But this ultimately failed, and so Socialism was mostly abandoned. (What some call socialism today is more of a minor adjustment on capitalism, trying to improve its overall outcomes without central planning of all production activity.)
Is that even a paper? Which advancement does it make for science apart cosmetic terminology? Language doesn't define reality, if you study linguistics just a little bit. Sadly today the exact opposite is pushed forward by a lot of entities. Using this or that term won't advance science an inch. Doing serious research using whatever term, as long as it's understandable, would make for better papers.
A lot of the controversy stems from the fact that most people need to understand what a critical theory is, as they take its outputs at face value, react, and then politically neutralize themselves leaving the theorist to troll again.
The basic principle behind all of these 'isms, is they operate on the same mechanism, which originates in a few places, notably psychotherapy, where by beginning with an inconsistent premise (see Godel), you can prove anything within its downstream system of logic. Once you have accepted that, you will accept anything built on top of it. Logically, it is a universal solvent, where if you can introduce inconsistency into a line of reasoning, it dissolves the bonds of logic and reason by rendering them inconsistent and decoheres the ideas built on them. The reason you do this theraputically is to temporarily separate a patient from the logic of the story they tell about themselves as a means to relieve suffering long enough for them to process feelings about the events that led them to that conclusion. However, it got applied to literary criticism, and expanded from there.
You can riff on a critical theory infinitely, seemingly proving conclusions in it effortlessly because of its base logical inconsisency. In this case, and pretty much all mainstream critical theories, the mechanism is a positive conclusion from a negative premise. The negative premise in these 'isms is that anti-badness is a positive value, principle, or ideal. A critical theory frames reality in terms of this negatively defined lens, and then shows how otherwise neutral and real things do not meet the condition of being anti-bad.
Hence why you get someone riffing on insufficient anti-badness in a science journal and seeming to make sense, assuming you have accepted the underlying negatively defined fallacy that anti-badness is a sufficient or necessary condition for anything.
However, the effect of this is similar to that of the therapist, where it creates a dependency on the critic to resolve the inconsistencies they have caused. It's mesmerism, and "problematic" has become the universal slogan charlatanism. The hardest part about unpacking it is getting people to admit how thoroughly they have been fooled.
Once you are arguing in terms of whether you are not ablist or anti-bad enough, you have already taken the bait, and you are arguing at a disadvantage within the inconsistent framework of rules in the critical theory, which was designed to distract and keep you from resisting their seizure of the reins of the journals, institutions, funding bodies, and other "means of production," just like they do whenever a society develops industrial capability. They exploit your trust, agreeableness, and good nature, tell you that you have a false consciouness, and that you have been terrible this whole time, and that only their approval can heal.
There's one way out, which is perhaps also ablist because it requires the use of one's middle finger, but it's the only way.
>Once you are arguing in terms of whether you are not ablist or anti-bad enough, you have already taken the bait, and you are arguing at a disadvantage within the inconsistent framework of rules in the critical theory,
The best way to escape quick sands is to actively avoid getting into quick sands.
This is such a poignant analysis of these -isms. Do you have any recommended readings by any chance?
> A defensive approach will not work. As a common example, we need to refrain from claiming that whatever ableist or eugenic connotations terms such as “fitness” and “selection” may have in the public sphere, we understand their apolitical technical definitions. This does not hold water because our views, and especially the views of scientists new to the field, are inevitably shaped by the public sphere and public discourse around evolutionary biology—hence the persisting popularity of survival of the fittest in general biology narratives and manuscripts.
This seems like a deeply stupid strategy. This sets up a whack-a-mole game of constantly changing apolitical technical language as the new terms then become co-opted by misuse or bad actors. This literally just happened with "woke", which used to be a positive term and is now used pejoratively.
For people so concerned with the impact of history they seem particularly inclined to ignore it when it suits them.
> These ableist teaching practices also serve to alienate and marginalize disabled and chronically ill students (Hales 2020) and may be partially responsible for disabled students and scholars exiting the field, along with noninclusive teaching/ researching practices (Laurentino et al. 2021). The proportion of disabled evolutionary biologists is far below the population average (Rushworth et al. 2021; 10.8% vs. 26% overall), as is the proportion of doctorate recipients who are disabled (8.1% of life sciences PhD recipients in 2020 vs. the same 26% of the population; NCSES 2021), although this is very hard to study quantitatively given small sample sizes in present studies (Wanelik et al. 2020).
This seems to be pretty much in line with the US national average of abled vs. diasbled people with at least a Bachelor's degree. [0] I'm sure there are still barriers that exclude disabled people from higher learning that we can and should work on deconstructing, but there's also a fundamental issue of some disabilities making people less able to perform academic work.
And this to me seems to be the crux: I have the bad suspicion that people talking about ableism have the goal of fundamentally disavowing disucssion about ableness. But this is from my point of view pretty fundamental to how I view the world, and it seems basically delusional to me to deny the differences in ableness we have as humans.
This article has given me a lot to think about, and I should read more on the topic, any suggestions very welcome!
It seems important to age adjust these rates as disability increases with age. So phd students are young and comparing their rate of disability to the entire population doesn’t seem very useful.
It also seems difficult to compare the rate of disabled biologists with the overall populations as many disabled people don’t work at all and would not consider biology or any profession. So of course the rate would be lower than the population.
>It’s one thing when magazines like Scientific American go all catawampus on science, but another entirely when a good scientific journal itself succumbs to wokeness.
>The article below, from July’s American Naturalist [...] shows two things. First, it’s one of the more ludicrous examples of science policing I’ve seen. Second, it shows how the American Society of Naturalists [...] has gone down the same woke road as the other ecology and evolution societies.
As someone once said, "everything woke goes to shit". There are few ideologies as pervarsive and corrodive as Wokeness. At the end of the day, it's ultimately about power and ruling over people's thought process.
>The piece’s hectoring tone, which tells us what we MUST do, pervades the entire paper, especially the final section, “A path forward.” Oh, and here’s part of the acknowledgments—the obligatory self castigation
That's par for the course:
1. Point out a non-existent problem (or amplify it to gigantic proportions if it does).
2. Pontificate how it affects some marginalized group(s) and how the problem's day-to-day existence mortally affect the livelihood of said group(s). It's important you're talking on behalf of the group(s) and that you don't provide any evidence.
3. Try to introduce some methodology and/or framework to solve the problem. It's important this new framework be the only "path forward", and morally justified to bully others to accept it even if it has no merits.
>(I have yet to understand what unlived experience is! And what do white settlers have to do with ableism?)
Neither do I!
>The paper, as you’ll see, is really an indictment of biology and undergraduate genetics for not using sufficiently woke language.
It seems that ship unfortunately sailed a long time ago. Nowadays it's about denying reality, and being forced to participate in some individuals' theatrics and self-image or else you'll be labeled a -phobic or -ist.
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On a different note, give Coyne's books (Faith vs Fact and Why Evolution Is True) a read. Highly recommended.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadCompeting over conformity is the Olympics sports of our time and boy is society keen on participating.
Edit: and anybody who has ever dealt with an HOA knows that the silent majority is absolutely a real thing.
The average person in ‘the silent majority’ is against all the ‘wokeness’ but won’t actually fight it. They’ll prefer to reassure themselves that no one truly believes it while doing virtually nothing to confront those who are pushing it.
As far as your HOA example goes, I’ve found most people really do not like being in one, but are relatively helpless when it comes to actually changing the association’s rules.
I think it’s not evenly distributed IRL and that has some people feeling like “woke” is just some Republican boogeyman. Also, people seem to be forgetting the #MeToo and #BLM eras surprisingly quickly—woke ideology spurred nationwide protests and riots and somehow that seems to be getting memory-holed.
As far as Me Too and BLM being "memory holed" that has more to do with the movements themselves. They each started with very real sparks but were both consumed rather quickly by movements that bore little resemblance to those sparks. They abused their support for unrelated and often self serving objectives and made themselves irrelevant as a result.
Previously, she worked at a non-profit which was also not DEI affiliated but was obsessed with DEI stuff. Again, no one was openly critical of anything remotely DEI related.
I’ve had similar experiences at every company I’ve worked for as a software engineer.
I’m not arguing that our experiences are THE experience, but there are definitely a lot of places that take DEI super-seriously. My thesis isn’t “DEI is taken super seriously everywhere”, but rather that how seriously it is taken isn’t evenly distributed across the country or across industries.
Even still, I’m somewhat optimistic that this ideology won’t be adopted in its current form because it’s so inconsistent and often counterfactual, and I believe in a sort of “truth floats”. Moreover, our society is already “less woke” (or whatever term you prefer) than we were in the BLM and #MeToo eras.
Honestly, my biggest concern is that proponents of woke ideology are pretty successfully framing it as the only alternative to Republican anti-wokeness or otherwise as the best way to “own the conservatives”. At least that’s the impression I get from debates I’ve had.
Not a very scientific poll by any standard of course and I'm sure it's a biased selection in all sorts of ways, but it doesn't seem that common of a viewpoint to me.
I think the reason that you don't get a lot of pushback is that accusations of racism, transphobia, ableism, etc. are completely toxic, no matter how bullshitty they are. If you have to say "I'm not racist" then you've kind of already lost. It's a "cheat code" for winning the argument; the ultimate "stfu hammer". And you have to ask yourself: do I really have anything to gain by engaging on this and what do I risk losing?
Does structural racism then exist in the U.S.? Undoubtedly so in some places, especially those that were most influenced by Latinx norms and by the homegrown culture of oppression in the South. But to call it ubiquitous to the U.S. as the "woke" almost always do is to deeply misunderstand the nature of it.
I don't think it's unreasonable for people to primarily focus on their own country in their own time. Historical context is important, sure, both to understand the cause of today's problems as well as put things in perspective. But in the end, I'm not so sure if it really matters all that much when discussing contemporary issues in e.g. the US or Europe.
I mean, you can look up how the ancient Greek treated their women and suddenly you will find that modern feminists from the 70s didn't have all that much to complain about either, never mind contemporary countries like Saudi-Arabia. It's interesting to learn about it for all sorts of reasons, but in the end ... not really all that directly relevant when discussing the status of women in your own country.
Of course it matters. Even if we only consider those who seemingly have no concern at all for the plight of oppressed people outside of their own society - it's a natural experiment that lets us witness the real, actual consequences of structural racism in their purest form, and over the very long run (a time-span of several centuries in fact). Which is kinda important when you attach so much relevance to it as a causal factor. It lets us compare and contrast outcomes, and find out whether other things might also be relevant.
I'm not so sure it's that easy; unabashed naked racism such as Casta is quite a different thing than what we might call "subtle racism" as currently exists in countries like the US, but also Europe. Both the effects and the solutions seem quite different to me.
> those who seemingly have no concern at all for the plight of oppressed people outside of their own society
That seems rather strong. It's not a matter of "not caring", it's that situations in other countries are complex so I don't even understand them, and usually can't really understand them properly even if I tried as I don't speak the language. Besides, what am I supposed to do about something like women's rights in Saudi-Arabia or the plight of native people in the Brazilian rain forests? Post something on Twitter about it in English? Yeah, that'll fix it for sure...
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As a general comment: these terms are always "relative" to a degree. I grew up fairly poor in Western Europe; we never had money for anything, lived without electricity as a child for a while, didn't have things like car, computer, holidays, new clothes, etc.
If we compare my situation to various communities in, say, Nigeria I was "rich": clean running water easily available, good free education, good free health care, never truly went hungry, was never homeless, etc. By comparison, I was still "rich". Even in my own country I'm sure many people have had it much worse. Never mind if we start looking at the full historical context and start comparing against people 100, 200, 500, etc. years ago.
In spite of all of that, "I grew up poor" is a fairly accurate and reasonable description in the context of growing up in Western Europe.
Similarly, you might take issue that structural racism in the US is small compared to something like Casta (or Jim Crow, or many other things), and that is certainly true, but it's not a contest, and for the experience of contemporary people growing up and living in the US ... it doesn't really matter that some other people had it even worse.
The two are causally linked, though. Overt racism as in Casta gives way to subtler and more structural issues over time. But everything we observe about those places, even today, seems to suggest that these structural issues are highly relevant there.
> Post something on Twitter about it in English? Yeah, that'll fix it for sure...
It's called raising awareness. In fact, there's more merit in doing so wrt. issues that most are unaware of. Everyone and their dog knows about structural racism in the U.S. by now; very few seem to know or care about the issue as it occurs elsewhere, and in far more problematic forms.
> In spite of all of that, "I grew up poor" is a fairly accurate and reasonable description in the context of growing up in Western Europe.
Socio-economic marginalization is in fact very different from absolute poverty and deprivation of the kind we might see today in Nigeria. One of the more surprising facts about countries where absolute deprivation is a real concern is the varying correlation between it and social marginalization. People in the historical past were surely living in material deprivation by modern standards but, by and large, they had a rich and tight-knit social life; they were not marginalized as most people in relative poverty might be nowadays in the West.
I see the tide is starting to turn a bit on this, these accusations don't have the same power that they used to. Probably because of far too many "boy who cried wolf" situations.
For example, women saying that they want to keep female-only spaces for their dignity and safety are often accused of being transphobic. Many are shrugging that off and saying: if that's transphobia then so be it, proves my point. And increasingly, people are agreeing with them.
Women can push back against accusations of transphobia because they can respond with accusations of sexism. Since there are accusations on both sides, this doesn't show that accusations are losing power.
This is generally how language works. People at the edges of understanding propose a lot of new ideas and reframings, and some gain broader footholds in popular use.
I’ve been on both sides of this debate because sometimes the innovators push beyond what I think makes sense. But they are innovating.
I asked someone with schizophrenia and they thought this pretentious comment was hilarious in the midst of a thread on ableism.
schizophrenic:
2: contradictory or antagonistic qualities or attitudes
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/schizophrenic
Perhaps your friend would prefer to be referred to as having schizophrenia spectrum disorder as that is now the more accurate term.
Lot of that going around.
If you look up "retard" in Merriam-Webster, it says "informal + offensive : a foolish or stupid person"
If you look up "schizo" in Merriam-Webster, it says "a schizophrenic individual".
If you look up "psycho" in Merriam-Webster, it says "a deranged or psychopathic person —not used technically"
Think about this and you will become enlightened.
(I should make it clear that I agree with you if you think the idea of policing "schizo" and "psycho" like people police other terms is impossible, absurd. They can't be destigmatized or merged into "neurodiversity". All I really wanted or expected to do was shock some awareness.)
You didn’t shock any awareness, though — the idea that you could in this case is based in your perception that you knew more than me (or that this was a competition in who could be more ableism-aware) which is likely based on your own lived experience where it is probabilistically most likely to be true. We are in the long tail here though where it is not only possible but fairly likely that the person you’re talking to is at least as much of an outlier as you are, and where someone else may have already come out the other side of an extended and overwrought diversity awareness education of trauma-informed everything and be thoroughly done with it.
Your offense at the term and/or your friend’s reaction was based on your own outdated associated definition and/or your assumption of what you understood my definition to be, my understanding, and/or my awareness.
People often think they are “smarter” because others make concise comments and the big brains, instead of assuming competence, assume that every corner of the discussion that wasn’t fleshed and rounded out in the original comment is an opportunity for a brilliant unique thought, discovery, or observation of theirs that is unknown to the commenter. That’s often not the case.
Ah, that's just it - I assumed you were "ableism-aware".
I believe in the spirit of the XKCD cartoon "Ten Thousand" (https://xkcd.com/1053/) and do not think it's ever appropriate to shame people for not knowing what "everybody" knows. Much less assume strangers are ignorant so that I can inform them.
"Ableism-awareness" is common. "Schizo-awareness" is nonexistent, as is, I think, proven by the mainstream dictionary you linked to.
When I was studying biology as an undergraduate, there were a number of religious students who vehemently disagreed with evolutionary theory, but would work under - in their minds - the assumption of this fiction being true in order to get decent grades.
The same may well be true of students being taught that woke gibberish like "egg parent" and "sperm parent" are the correct terms to use. Or they just accept it as technical jargon as they would with all the other domain-specific language used in their course.
So don't assume the general public will stand up against insanity as much as you would like them to.
In mine, he died "in obscurity" in Russia in 1976.
Unless of course the sources that say so are disinformation from the ruling class.
I have no sense of scale for that. Is that high? Low? If it's high, does it necessarily mean it's influential too (e.g. it can be cited and then rebuked in other papers)?
Personally I think the answer is anti-discrimination legislation. To be precise, the chilling effects of it. If someone goes against the "woke" it may not be illegal itself, but it means everything they do will be subject to more scrutiny and they risk being judged more severely for the same misstep. Thus anti-discrimination legislation, I conjecture, gradually select the woke to the top of the elite.
ironically, you're making a perfect argument for natural selection in evolutionary studies selecting... people who will eventually deny the existence of natural selection.
I wonder if this is also an end stage of a lot of other systems of knowledge.
Initially I was skeptical of this model because it only explains administrators’ fervor, but as I thought through the knock-on effects, I think it probably does a decent job of explaining faculty and student zeal as well, at least over time.
Your reasoning applied to the 1960s would say that students only opposed the Vietnam War because their professors told them to. You should ascribe more agency to university students.
Much more likely that their professors just taught them biology and how to operate lab equipment.
Graduate students especially are incentivized to come up with new ways of seeing the world. That’s what writing a dissertation is all about. This is the same mindset carried over from biology to a social issue normally seen as unrelated.
Edit: Those who are downvoting without replying, have you been to grad school, or are you just imagining what professors spend their time telling their students?
Perhaps it's also interesting to imagine the societal changes if law and policy prohibited discrimination based on being disadvantaged by class, wealth and income. We may well edge towards a genuinely more equitable society, rather one that just pays lip service to it based on one's identity.
Though it's unlikely to ever happen, given the economic and political system we exist in. It would disadvantage the wealthy and well-connected too much for them to permit it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30748684
And no, I think the age of a person is very relevant to their willingness to change based on what we know scientifically about the way our brains wire and prune over our lives. But it’s a sacred cow here.
I’m likely as old as you. Your arrows missed their target here.
If Jerry weren’t so identified with his language he might have read the paper and found a middle ground. Instead he’s located himself further in the opposite direction of where we are headed. Not that the paper’s authors know exactly where that is, either.
That said, I saw it go the other way for some of the issues that one of my older siblings was excited about back in the day.
It's just possible that, "This idea seems to be most popular among young people," doesn't actually function as a stunning rhetorical coup de grace for any side of any cultural debate.
Maybe you're right, but if you were in that kind of wave - I guess you mean the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, not the widely mocked PC movement of the 80s? - you were exceptionally lucky from a world-historical point of view. Currently, the same words might also be uttered by one of the hostage takers in the Iranian revolution, any member of the Taliban, or one of the older prison guards at a concentration camp in Xinjiang. (Really. Imagine each of those people saying that sentence). Point being, those words usually sound absurd to anyone who doesn't share your political and cultural frame of reference.
Depending on how these networks are structured they may not be able to change much, but if they are structured in better ways then aging is less impactful.
I definitely could have been better in this thread.
That on average the ability to do this decreases with age is irrelevant when judging a single person. Judging individuals by general population statistics (which are often – though not always – true) is pretty much what discrimination is.
Are we meant to hide our biases for some higher purpose? We all have them.
“Evolutionists” should take care that dogma doesn’t replace broader understandings of science than they’re used to.
I want my master branches back, GitHub.
[0] - https://github.com/git/git/commit/028cb644ec6450fa9438ba6b6d...
There is a person who campaigned for 5+ years to get the term "index" changed to "staging." Everyone agreed with this change. There is a ton of evidence that it's better. The patch was written. But one person refused it and it got shut down.
Edit: here is the actual link https://felipec.wordpress.com/2021/08/10/git-staging-area-re...
The more interesting criticism of the paper are only paraphrased without quotes, I'm not sure I understand the arguments here without reading the original paper in full.
There is one part I think that is interesting from an entirely different point of view, and that is that "fitness" is probably not the best term for this concept in evolution. I don't think I've ever heard evolution explained without the caveat that "fitness" in evolution doesn't mean what we understand commonly as fitness. It's more about the survival of the best adapted one, and not the strongest one.
There are some terms in biology that are far from ideal, but they stick because we used them for a long time. Another example is the "central dogma of molecular biology", Crick later admitted that he misunderstood what dogma actually means when he coined that term. The term is simply wrong in this case, but it still remains.
It remains because it is understood, making it not wrong. It is far from ideal, language wise, if we were to take language as more important than how language is used.
> It's more about the survival of the best adapted one, and not the strongest one.
The same applies to the usage of "fitness", that you chose to misunderstand. Do you also misread "islamophobia"? Are all usages of "literally" literal?
It's almost as if the original author meant to say "fit for purpose".
Finally, environments swing, for example by increasing and decreasing mouse populations, which may even within a species allow for epigenetic adaptions (good times reproduce, bad times sit on a pole and do energy efficient nothing), which then explains initial diversity and "neuro divergence" in animal popultions. Usual trigger is economic stresses.
Now lets all pray to the great sinus curve of the environment in the sky.
"fitness" means "how well it fits [into the environment]". It's perfectly anti-ablelist right from the start -- a tenet of anti-ableism is that "disability" is a problem in the environment, not in the individual.
"fitness = strength" is a corruption of the original meaning.
I do think "fitness" is often misunderstood, as is evolution in general. Even though the basic principles aren't that hard it's kind of tricky to really "get" natural selection. It's like trying to "get" just how huge astronomical distances are, or how a river could have formed the grand canyon: it's so far outside of our regular every-day experiences it takes some effort.
I'm not sure if s/fittest/best adapted/ (or something along these lines) would help, but it might? Of course, good general education about evolution would help even more, but yeah, that's been controversial for 150 years now...
From the article or it's comments, the journal's editors actually solicited this submission, it wasn't submitted and then approved after passing a standard review.
But evolution as a process, as much as we can ascribe these terms to a stochastic process, is inherently abelist and eugenicist? Like, that's what natural selection is.
Both the author's analysis and the reviewed paper are dumb.
The basic principle behind all of these 'isms, is they operate on the same mechanism, which originates in a few places, notably psychotherapy, where by beginning with an inconsistent premise (see Godel), you can prove anything within its downstream system of logic. Once you have accepted that, you will accept anything built on top of it. Logically, it is a universal solvent, where if you can introduce inconsistency into a line of reasoning, it dissolves the bonds of logic and reason by rendering them inconsistent and decoheres the ideas built on them. The reason you do this theraputically is to temporarily separate a patient from the logic of the story they tell about themselves as a means to relieve suffering long enough for them to process feelings about the events that led them to that conclusion. However, it got applied to literary criticism, and expanded from there.
You can riff on a critical theory infinitely, seemingly proving conclusions in it effortlessly because of its base logical inconsisency. In this case, and pretty much all mainstream critical theories, the mechanism is a positive conclusion from a negative premise. The negative premise in these 'isms is that anti-badness is a positive value, principle, or ideal. A critical theory frames reality in terms of this negatively defined lens, and then shows how otherwise neutral and real things do not meet the condition of being anti-bad.
Hence why you get someone riffing on insufficient anti-badness in a science journal and seeming to make sense, assuming you have accepted the underlying negatively defined fallacy that anti-badness is a sufficient or necessary condition for anything.
However, the effect of this is similar to that of the therapist, where it creates a dependency on the critic to resolve the inconsistencies they have caused. It's mesmerism, and "problematic" has become the universal slogan charlatanism. The hardest part about unpacking it is getting people to admit how thoroughly they have been fooled.
Once you are arguing in terms of whether you are not ablist or anti-bad enough, you have already taken the bait, and you are arguing at a disadvantage within the inconsistent framework of rules in the critical theory, which was designed to distract and keep you from resisting their seizure of the reins of the journals, institutions, funding bodies, and other "means of production," just like they do whenever a society develops industrial capability. They exploit your trust, agreeableness, and good nature, tell you that you have a false consciouness, and that you have been terrible this whole time, and that only their approval can heal.
There's one way out, which is perhaps also ablist because it requires the use of one's middle finger, but it's the only way.
The best way to escape quick sands is to actively avoid getting into quick sands.
This is such a poignant analysis of these -isms. Do you have any recommended readings by any chance?
Yeah. So shut up. Your ideas don’t count!
> A defensive approach will not work. As a common example, we need to refrain from claiming that whatever ableist or eugenic connotations terms such as “fitness” and “selection” may have in the public sphere, we understand their apolitical technical definitions. This does not hold water because our views, and especially the views of scientists new to the field, are inevitably shaped by the public sphere and public discourse around evolutionary biology—hence the persisting popularity of survival of the fittest in general biology narratives and manuscripts.
This seems like a deeply stupid strategy. This sets up a whack-a-mole game of constantly changing apolitical technical language as the new terms then become co-opted by misuse or bad actors. This literally just happened with "woke", which used to be a positive term and is now used pejoratively.
For people so concerned with the impact of history they seem particularly inclined to ignore it when it suits them.
E.g., https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1937-00266-001
The sign is changed to escape folk connotations but in time reality asserts itself the signed subsumes the new sign and the cycle repeats.
This seems to be pretty much in line with the US national average of abled vs. diasbled people with at least a Bachelor's degree. [0] I'm sure there are still barriers that exclude disabled people from higher learning that we can and should work on deconstructing, but there's also a fundamental issue of some disabilities making people less able to perform academic work.
And this to me seems to be the crux: I have the bad suspicion that people talking about ableism have the goal of fundamentally disavowing disucssion about ableness. But this is from my point of view pretty fundamental to how I view the world, and it seems basically delusional to me to deny the differences in ableness we have as humans.
This article has given me a lot to think about, and I should read more on the topic, any suggestions very welcome!
[0] https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2015/people-with-a-disability-l...
It also seems difficult to compare the rate of disabled biologists with the overall populations as many disabled people don’t work at all and would not consider biology or any profession. So of course the rate would be lower than the population.
https://www.britannica.com/art/newspeak
As someone once said, "everything woke goes to shit". There are few ideologies as pervarsive and corrodive as Wokeness. At the end of the day, it's ultimately about power and ruling over people's thought process.
>The piece’s hectoring tone, which tells us what we MUST do, pervades the entire paper, especially the final section, “A path forward.” Oh, and here’s part of the acknowledgments—the obligatory self castigation
That's par for the course:
1. Point out a non-existent problem (or amplify it to gigantic proportions if it does).
2. Pontificate how it affects some marginalized group(s) and how the problem's day-to-day existence mortally affect the livelihood of said group(s). It's important you're talking on behalf of the group(s) and that you don't provide any evidence.
3. Try to introduce some methodology and/or framework to solve the problem. It's important this new framework be the only "path forward", and morally justified to bully others to accept it even if it has no merits.
>(I have yet to understand what unlived experience is! And what do white settlers have to do with ableism?)
Neither do I!
>The paper, as you’ll see, is really an indictment of biology and undergraduate genetics for not using sufficiently woke language.
It seems that ship unfortunately sailed a long time ago. Nowadays it's about denying reality, and being forced to participate in some individuals' theatrics and self-image or else you'll be labeled a -phobic or -ist.
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On a different note, give Coyne's books (Faith vs Fact and Why Evolution Is True) a read. Highly recommended.