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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29676 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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And if you want to convince white liberals that they are wrong, I think that you would probably be more effective by doing stuff like subtly introducing them to data that puts their assumptions into question than you would be by going into it assuming that most of them are opportunistic social climbers who do not actually care about the truth.

I would love to live in a world in which I could redpill woke people just by spitting a ceaseless barrage of facts and logic™ at them until their worldview crumbles into dust. Unfortunately, after a decade of arguing with woke people using pretty much exactly this approach, I don't have a great deal of confidence in its efficacy. Wokeness is a fully self-contained and self-consistent paradigm. In a remarkably short period since its inception, it has evolved antibodies for any objection one might raise against it - not necessarily good antibodies, but antibodies nonetheless. If you tell a passively woke person a politically uncomfortable fact, they will generally defuse the cognitive dissonance by appeals to ignorance ("I'm sure that's only one of several studies showing that Asian-American households make more money than white American households, and other studies have found otherwise"), while a hardcore true believer will do so by retreating into conspiratorialism ("you really think the Amerikkkan police only shot 30 unarmed black men this year? There's no way the police are reporting every single black man they kill").

Really, I think the idea that woke people can be persuaded just by showing them facts and data is the same sort of naïveté Scott described as endemic on the 2000s internet, in which atheists apparently believed that Christians and/or creationists would leave the faith en masse once presented with ironclad evidence of Biblical inconsistency or irreconcilable fossil records. It's fair to say that didn't go as they hoped.

You're preaching to the choir. I'm not arguing that it's possible to convince the majority of woke people with facts. I'm just arguing about what is more likely to be effective when trying to convince that fraction of woke people who are persuadable.

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