This line gives me pause: Why has "wokeness" become annoying? Because right-wing media talks about nothing else. They complain about the "woke agenda" and never seem to give a definition that...
Exemplary
This line gives me pause:
Racism exists and is bad. But wokeness has become so annoying that lots of people have antibodies to talking about racism or acknowledging it. Now it’s hard to call out race-related problems without looking like a woke grifter.
Why has "wokeness" become annoying? Because right-wing media talks about nothing else. They complain about the "woke agenda" and never seem to give a definition that isn't propagandistic and designed to cause fear.
Maybe the effects described are more prevalent than I realize, but calling out race-related issues is not going away, nor should it.
But before its bastardization, "wokeness" was about being aware of race-related issues. In the context of white people in America, being woke is supposed to help alleviate unconscious bias, because the awareness of the issues is supposed to encourage change in behavior and attitudes.
Calling out racism and being aware of ingrained racist ideology in society is a good thing. If I'm accused of being woke because of that, I would take pride in it, not be ashamed.
It is true that term has been twisted, and now it's more true to say it is a label more akin to "virtue-signaling", aka hypocrisy. But if I'm truly woke, then it is genuine.
The author's quote really rubs me the wrong way. It just doesn't seem to align with reality. I could be wrong though.
I mean performative "wokeness" definitely exists, and as a young person that goes to arty things I am definitely building up some antibodies to " deconstructing black trans fem bodies in the post...
I mean performative "wokeness" definitely exists, and as a young person that goes to arty things I am definitely building up some antibodies to " deconstructing black trans fem bodies in the post cultural era" or whatever when I see it, not that there isn't any meaningful commentary behind those words but because there is a stylistic choice to discuss these things using this language and in this way. Literally just because the language of liberal arts college anthropology/gender studies classes can be tiring.
This ultimately doesn't stop me from self identifying as a leftist, but I do wish it wasn't so popular in these spaces to appear as woke and transgressive as possible.
We also need people to talk about housing, and crime and poverty, and generally more tangible material issues that you don't need a degree from a liberal arts school to engage with.
Seriously, it’s like no one wants to acknowledge nuance, either that or the conversation has been manipulated in this way to divide people across clean lines.
Seriously, it’s like no one wants to acknowledge nuance, either that or the conversation has been manipulated in this way to divide people across clean lines.
Unfortunately optics matters and it's not enough to be right about something, you have to be convincing. At least if you want to change minds. If the goal is just to vent and make yourself feel...
Unfortunately optics matters and it's not enough to be right about something, you have to be convincing. At least if you want to change minds.
If the goal is just to vent and make yourself feel superior to others, then yeah you can throw optics out the window.
True, but there have been people who didn't want to hear about or confront the existence of social injustices for orders of magnitude longer than "wokeness" has existed, so I find it hard to...
True, but there have been people who didn't want to hear about or confront the existence of social injustices for orders of magnitude longer than "wokeness" has existed, so I find it hard to believe that wokeness antibodies better describe the reason for their apathy than whatever the reasons have always been.
I don't disagree entirely, but I think the critique of wokeness from within the left comes from a critique of a college educated elite. Leftism has always been a labour movement "workers of the...
I don't disagree entirely, but I think the critique of wokeness from within the left comes from a critique of a college educated elite. Leftism has always been a labour movement "workers of the world unite". College kids who despise the working class are maybe not the best representatives of the left.
I want poor uneducated racists and homophobes to have access to healthcare and housing, not just LGBTQ POC. It's a failure to understand that material conditions, mostly poverty and access to education, lead to bigotry.
Working class has somehow come to mean "anyone who has a job", rather than blue collar workers, which have become an afterthought. As a result leftism has degraded into advocation for social liberties without a focus on class.
Leftism has never been a single, unified movement, and never can be. Leftism, from my reading, has always been for the equal and equitable treatment of the common people and against exploitation...
Leftism has never been a single, unified movement, and never can be. Leftism, from my reading, has always been for the equal and equitable treatment of the common people and against exploitation by (or perhaps even the existence of) the ruling class. And people's ideas of what that equal and equitable treatment looks like are wildly different. Eg. Anarchists, socialists, and communists can and have cooperated from the start, but they've also fought from the start.
But I can't say I've ever come across anything but support for the labour movement. I'm only one person and haven't been involved with leftism very long so obviously I haven't come across every possible opinion, but I certainly don't get the impression that blue collar workers have become an afterthought.
I never went to university though so maybe that rhetoric is actually prevalent there and I just never got exposed to it, but it definitely isn't prevalent in the spaces I am part of.
Yes, that’s a controversial assertion made in passing that really should have been substantiated. Are there are really people who want “call out race-related problems” but don’t want to be seen as...
Yes, that’s a controversial assertion made in passing that really should have been substantiated.
Are there are really people who want “call out race-related problems” but don’t want to be seen as “woke” because the word has negative connotations for them? I can imagine that. Maybe Scott Alexander feels that way because “woke” has negative connotations in the circles he’s in? Maybe it’s an issue for people outside the US who encounter racial problems in ways that don’t really map to US politics?
“Woke” has mildly negative connotations for me and I’m not attached to it anyway, but it’s a contested term and maybe the negative connotations some people have should be resisted? This reminds me of another article Alexander wrote: Give Up Seventy Percent Of The Way Through The Hyperstitious Slur Cascade:
I’m writing this post so that the next time someone comments with “did you know that term you used, which was the standard until six months ago and which nobody was ever offended by until then, is now considered offensive, why don’t you use term XYZ instead?”, I can give my honest answer: “Because it’s less than 70% of the way through the hyperstitious slur cascade, and that’s the boundary that I’ve set for myself.”
If you think Alexander is giving up on “woke” too early, or maybe pushing it over the edge, that’s a reason to be annoyed by it.
I honestly have only encountered this term used negatively among the conservative "anti-woke" crowd. It's been tainted enough by that crowd that I don't see it used often outside of that crowd...
“Woke” has mildly negative connotations for me and I’m not attached to it anyway, but it’s a contested term and maybe the negative connotations some people have should be resisted?
I honestly have only encountered this term used negatively among the conservative "anti-woke" crowd. It's been tainted enough by that crowd that I don't see it used often outside of that crowd anymore, so when I see an author (like this one) say something like "wokeness has become so annoying that..." I am immediately suspicious of their motives. While it's certainly possible they're approaching the issues in good faith, I have pretty much only encountered this use of language from performatively "anti-woke" conservatives who most definitely are not.
The fact that this guy also hugely misrepresents the circumstances surrounding both cryptocurrency and IQ in what is a clear straw-man of their critics in the same section does not endear me to him either.
Those three examples are all supposed to be about mainstream overreaction and of course if you share the mainstream opinion, you probably don’t see it as an overreaction. I think using historical...
Those three examples are all supposed to be about mainstream overreaction and of course if you share the mainstream opinion, you probably don’t see it as an overreaction. I think using historical examples might have been less distracting? As far as I can tell, Scott Alexander really believes what he wrote, though he represents complicated debates with brief caricatures of them.
I think accusing people of making up straw-men is largely obsolete nowadays because out there on the Internet, any straw-man you can imagine probably does exist somewhere. You don’t need to make up people who make bad arguments, you can just find some and argue against them.
The question is why we should care about those particular bad arguments, given the infinite supply of bad arguments? One way to justify it is that it’s correcting misinformation, but this is still boring and/or annoying for people who don’t have that particular misconception, haven’t seen it around, or don’t think it’s important.
It’s certainly annoying and will seem uncharitable when people react to bad arguments made by your “side” rather than choosing the best arguments. This is extremely common though. It tends to create a bad cycle of polarization where everyone learns a lot more about how the worst people on the other side say nasty and/or thoughtless things. (I think cryptocurrency is a great example of this, where there are lots of terrible arguments between boosters and skeptics.)
[C]ognitive biases are real, well-replicated, and have strong explanatory value. Grifters went on to argue that they controlled every facet of our lives, which made lots of people allergic to the whole field. But that’s an over-reaction, and we should go back to “merely” believing them to be real, well-replicated, and with strong explanatory value.
...
They exist. They can be demonstrated in the lab. They tell us useful things about how our brains work. Some of them matter a lot, in the sense that if we weren’t prepared for them, bad things would happen.
But usually we know about these. Hyperbolic discounting is a cognitive bias. But when it affects our everyday life, we call it by names like “impulsivity” or “procrastination”. Our grandmothers’ grandmothers’ struggled against these and taught us to beware of them. Cognitive scientists have come up with formal models of them, but when we understand them properly, we aren’t surprised by their existence.
There might be exceptions in certain unnatural pastimes like investing in the stock market. Probably past generations of stock traders discovered some of these biases by accident, and try to pass them down to new Wall Street interns. But there haven’t been a hundred generations of stock traders, so the knowledge is still fragmentary and inconsistent. Maybe cognitive science has reached a point where it can supplement or codify this kind of wisdom - or maybe it hasn’t reached that point yet.
This line gives me pause:
Why has "wokeness" become annoying? Because right-wing media talks about nothing else. They complain about the "woke agenda" and never seem to give a definition that isn't propagandistic and designed to cause fear.
Maybe the effects described are more prevalent than I realize, but calling out race-related issues is not going away, nor should it.
But before its bastardization, "wokeness" was about being aware of race-related issues. In the context of white people in America, being woke is supposed to help alleviate unconscious bias, because the awareness of the issues is supposed to encourage change in behavior and attitudes.
Calling out racism and being aware of ingrained racist ideology in society is a good thing. If I'm accused of being woke because of that, I would take pride in it, not be ashamed.
It is true that term has been twisted, and now it's more true to say it is a label more akin to "virtue-signaling", aka hypocrisy. But if I'm truly woke, then it is genuine.
The author's quote really rubs me the wrong way. It just doesn't seem to align with reality. I could be wrong though.
I mean performative "wokeness" definitely exists, and as a young person that goes to arty things I am definitely building up some antibodies to " deconstructing black trans fem bodies in the post cultural era" or whatever when I see it, not that there isn't any meaningful commentary behind those words but because there is a stylistic choice to discuss these things using this language and in this way. Literally just because the language of liberal arts college anthropology/gender studies classes can be tiring.
This ultimately doesn't stop me from self identifying as a leftist, but I do wish it wasn't so popular in these spaces to appear as woke and transgressive as possible.
We also need people to talk about housing, and crime and poverty, and generally more tangible material issues that you don't need a degree from a liberal arts school to engage with.
Seriously, it’s like no one wants to acknowledge nuance, either that or the conversation has been manipulated in this way to divide people across clean lines.
It also sounds a bit like "the people trying to stop us from sticking our heads in the sand are the real reason we're sticking our heads in the sand"
That's a great summary of why that line made me stop.
Unfortunately optics matters and it's not enough to be right about something, you have to be convincing. At least if you want to change minds.
If the goal is just to vent and make yourself feel superior to others, then yeah you can throw optics out the window.
True, but there have been people who didn't want to hear about or confront the existence of social injustices for orders of magnitude longer than "wokeness" has existed, so I find it hard to believe that wokeness antibodies better describe the reason for their apathy than whatever the reasons have always been.
I don't disagree entirely, but I think the critique of wokeness from within the left comes from a critique of a college educated elite. Leftism has always been a labour movement "workers of the world unite". College kids who despise the working class are maybe not the best representatives of the left.
I want poor uneducated racists and homophobes to have access to healthcare and housing, not just LGBTQ POC. It's a failure to understand that material conditions, mostly poverty and access to education, lead to bigotry.
Working class has somehow come to mean "anyone who has a job", rather than blue collar workers, which have become an afterthought. As a result leftism has degraded into advocation for social liberties without a focus on class.
Leftism has never been a single, unified movement, and never can be. Leftism, from my reading, has always been for the equal and equitable treatment of the common people and against exploitation by (or perhaps even the existence of) the ruling class. And people's ideas of what that equal and equitable treatment looks like are wildly different. Eg. Anarchists, socialists, and communists can and have cooperated from the start, but they've also fought from the start.
But I can't say I've ever come across anything but support for the labour movement. I'm only one person and haven't been involved with leftism very long so obviously I haven't come across every possible opinion, but I certainly don't get the impression that blue collar workers have become an afterthought.
I never went to university though so maybe that rhetoric is actually prevalent there and I just never got exposed to it, but it definitely isn't prevalent in the spaces I am part of.
Yes, that’s a controversial assertion made in passing that really should have been substantiated.
Are there are really people who want “call out race-related problems” but don’t want to be seen as “woke” because the word has negative connotations for them? I can imagine that. Maybe Scott Alexander feels that way because “woke” has negative connotations in the circles he’s in? Maybe it’s an issue for people outside the US who encounter racial problems in ways that don’t really map to US politics?
“Woke” has mildly negative connotations for me and I’m not attached to it anyway, but it’s a contested term and maybe the negative connotations some people have should be resisted? This reminds me of another article Alexander wrote: Give Up Seventy Percent Of The Way Through The Hyperstitious Slur Cascade:
If you think Alexander is giving up on “woke” too early, or maybe pushing it over the edge, that’s a reason to be annoyed by it.
I liked the article overall, though.
I honestly have only encountered this term used negatively among the conservative "anti-woke" crowd. It's been tainted enough by that crowd that I don't see it used often outside of that crowd anymore, so when I see an author (like this one) say something like "wokeness has become so annoying that..." I am immediately suspicious of their motives. While it's certainly possible they're approaching the issues in good faith, I have pretty much only encountered this use of language from performatively "anti-woke" conservatives who most definitely are not.
The fact that this guy also hugely misrepresents the circumstances surrounding both cryptocurrency and IQ in what is a clear straw-man of their critics in the same section does not endear me to him either.
Those three examples are all supposed to be about mainstream overreaction and of course if you share the mainstream opinion, you probably don’t see it as an overreaction. I think using historical examples might have been less distracting? As far as I can tell, Scott Alexander really believes what he wrote, though he represents complicated debates with brief caricatures of them.
I think accusing people of making up straw-men is largely obsolete nowadays because out there on the Internet, any straw-man you can imagine probably does exist somewhere. You don’t need to make up people who make bad arguments, you can just find some and argue against them.
The question is why we should care about those particular bad arguments, given the infinite supply of bad arguments? One way to justify it is that it’s correcting misinformation, but this is still boring and/or annoying for people who don’t have that particular misconception, haven’t seen it around, or don’t think it’s important.
It’s certainly annoying and will seem uncharitable when people react to bad arguments made by your “side” rather than choosing the best arguments. This is extremely common though. It tends to create a bad cycle of polarization where everyone learns a lot more about how the worst people on the other side say nasty and/or thoughtless things. (I think cryptocurrency is a great example of this, where there are lots of terrible arguments between boosters and skeptics.)
From the blog post:
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