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To poke slightly at this one aspect: perhaps the movement started in the 90s and early 00s with adult 3-foundationers, but because of institutional capture, a generation of 6-foundationer children grew up influenced by this ideology (instead of the more natural-to-them 6-foundation traditional conservatism), and they fleshed it out into a full 6-foundation system of its own.
I wouldn't call the 3-foundationers SJers; I'd call them "90s liberals" or something (and there were 6-foundationers earlier than the 90s, just not in large numbers). But yes, that's my working bulverism of SJ as well.
It reminds me of the theory that young children form a creole language based on an adult pidgin.
That's the definition of a creole, yes? A pidgin spoken as a mother tongue.
Last I heard, that was the generally accepted theory, but like pretty much everything in linguistics, it's always being poked at.
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What are these foundations? Why are there three versus six? I'm not familiar with this terminology.
As the others said, moral foundations - care/harm, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation.
Everyone cares about the first three, but WEIRD (white/educated/industrialised/rich/democratic, and especially autistic) people care much less about the last three (while caring more about care/harm), which generates liberalism (and is why liberals frequently fail ideological Turing tests for conservatism, because it's harder to hypothetically add things to a moral compass than to remove them).
As @fishtwanger said, Haidt's book laying these out is dated because it predates SJ. My best working theory of SJ is that it's what happens if you try to cram 90s liberalism down the throats of people who are six-foundation-inclined; they will take superficial features of it, connect them to the missing foundations, and produce a bizarro-world morality that has all six foundations but lacks coherence and is divisive rather than unifying.
As I said above, this is a bulverism; it's an explanation for "why would people believe this crazy thing despite its craziness" rather than "what is the thesis of this thing and is it true". I don't like bulverism, and I don't like thinking of people as, well, morons susceptible to memetic effects. But it's the most sense I've managed to make of SJ.
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Yes, moral foundations theory. It's not the most grounded theory, because the foundations were largely eyeballed from initial data and then expanded based on feedback and discussion, instead of being chosen by some sort of factor analysis. And if someone does enough research on this to put it on solid ground, "three" and "six" are probably not what the result will be. But they're good enough for a shorthand.
The original book is interesting. It's dated, because it came out shortly before SJ hit, and it didn't anticipate SJ at all. But it's prophetic, because its thesis explains exactly why SJ is the way it is. And then there's the last section, which isn't talked about much, but which strikes directly at the heart of the rationalist project. It suggests that our capacity for rational thought is actually a capacity for rationalization and rhetoric, evolved to help us form strong coalitions with other humans, to help in intergroup competition. And that it's entirely incidental that this also happens to allow us to think rationally about the world, although it might be inevitable (as long as the simplest model is also correct). Which has some implications about LLMs, too.
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I'm pretty sure this is referencing moral foundations theory.
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