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Notes -
That conflict vs. mistake article is pretty wild to go through.
Not, "mistake theorists believe that black people are dumber, but hide their power levels because doing otherwise would mean sticking their necks out."
...an almost exact summation of why the technocracy supported anti-HBD views. And the only way to get Scott to reveal his true thoughts was to change who was powerful. No amount of debate and convincing would have worked - he was already privately convinced, after all.
I reject the idea that there is a hard binary - you can believe that mistake theory is right for some circumstances for some people and conflict theory in others. When I talk to my dad about how stupid DEI is, he is receptive. When I argue with my brother about HBD... well it's just a bad idea. Thanksgiving dinners are a lot more pleasant if I just accept conflict theory on that one and recognize the only way to change anyone's mind is to simply win a presidential election first.
Why is it a wild read? You seem to be saying Scott is part conflict theorist, but I don't think you've argued it well.
A mistake theorist does not lie down on a train track to kill himself. He will move out of the way of an oncoming train. A mistake theorist will not try to have a discussion with a train. Likewise, a mistake theorist knows that conflict theorists exist. He will probably not try to have a discussion with them.
Know the difference
For Scott to "be a Conflict theorist on some things" you would need to demonstrate that he believes his opponents to be the enemy, in the #2 sense. I think you've only demonstrated that he does not lie down on train tracks.
He himself is someone who could only be modelled by conflict theory - his public actions and stated opinion were not motivated because he was mistaken about HBD; he misrepresented his own beliefs because the dominant intellectual paradigm prevented the technocracy (ie Scott) from publicly advancing the most accurate viewpoints or influencing policy in a logical direction. He could only be 'convinced' by a display of political power by the opposition. This is exactly the situation presented by the conflict theorist in the quote I pulled.
Oh, this doesn't make Scott a Conflict Theorist (Know the difference between #1 and #2). This just means the Conflict Theorist's description of reality is correct - Power is power.
Agreed. I was trying to say that the post was wild because in retrospect because many of the conflict theorist's beliefs seem justified in retrospect, and that Scott's own revealed behavior is a repudiation of his (and, admittedly, my own) naive inclination towards mistake theory as a descriptive model.
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