It’s bizarre. So much effort covering the subjectivity of categorization but so little interest in objective data to collect about the real world effects of abstract/subjective categories on the subject of those categories.
Also the masturbatory “even disenfranchisement is subjective” sort of claims, as if that isn’t defineable and objectively measurable.
It sure takes some hard squinting and looking away to be truly race and gender-blind. It pairs well with vigorous back patting.
popo: Do you really believe this? I hope this is just a “Devils’ advocate on the Internet” sort of thing.
Yes. There was a study which surveyed 40-somethings working in higher education that supports this. Full disclousure: I responded that yes, we are better. Empirically.
How would it possibly be convenient when changing the way the human mind symbolizes is so difficult? Saying that this is the avoidance of positive action sounds like dismissing it out of hand. “It’s impossible because I’m not going to do it”.
I did give an example about the illusion of self-importance. Here’s a method I employ at times. If something appears to be true/false, but depends upon how it concerns me personally, it is of limited applicability. If it appears to be true/false for humans moreso than other organisms, then it is of limited applicability. If it appears to be true/false only for organisms rather than the universe in general, then it is of limited applicability. So, here is a simple three-step exercise which anybody can use to deconstruct the primacy of their sense of self.
The distinction I was taking pains to make was that it is not the perceptions themselves which tend to be problematic, but the underlying mechanisms of sense, symbology, and self. Without changing how this is done, people see the same kinds of problems, and yield the same kinds of answers. I am sorry if this seems divisive, it seems to really bother people.
This is rife with prior assumptions. How do these genders/sexes measure value of labor or anything else? And there is the whole economic game about whether or not labor can/should be commodified, whether or not value can truly be exchanged, and if “wages” as they are typically used are even desirable. I am opposed to sexism, but I am also opposed to employment generally. So I think that men and women (whatever either of those may be) would both be actively buying into their own oppression in pursuit of wages.
The problem with this is that trends equal redundancy. Health is achieved through diversity, so I think there is little value in large groups of people doing anything the same way. Homogeneity/monoculture is more of a failure of social processes.
You and I apparently do not frame the problems the same way. Identity politics is counterprodutive, identity is a product of egoism and is not sufficiently “real” to liberate people. The current oppression is caused by people claiming that they are special. And disenfranchised people strive to solve it by asserting their specialness over their oppressors. It has been a self-perpetuating cycle for thousands of years, and exchanging the names of an ingroup/outgroup at any stage in history does not change the way that game functions.
So much effort? Hardly, it seems completely obvious and simple to explain.
I am interested in people creating and using social structures with objective, empirical bases. Not in people passing off their direct personal engagement in society. You and I can create a social reality together with actual metrics, because we are then voluntary participants. There is no overarching nebulous “everybody” who we can say much about. In game theory terms, there are no ways to evaluate a persons success or failure in any society without knowing what their own personal goals are. It requires being blind to how each point in your data set prefers to be treated, who they consider their peers to be, how they choose to live. Otherwise, how you frame the narrative of your study says more about you than it does the people who’s data you harvested.
It’s an example of you unilaterally framing the narrative between us, perhaps in order to affect how I am perceived by others. I try to not believe much of anything. The rhetorical device is that of a panopticon, positing a position which has no outside. I don’t buy it. A few hundred years ago in Europe, people probably argued that there was no “outside” of Christianity. You either wilfully participate in it, or else you are a rebel merely reacting to it. Some probably believed it, but that makes it no more intellectually dishonest. A few years back, I was in a subculture where many philosophically insisted the same thing about DJs. You are either a DJ, or a potential DJ, or a wanna-be DJ - you have no other legitimate options, because that is the menu of choices I have created for you. Have you stopped beating your spouse? Taking this approach makes discussing it with you feel more like some weird contest than like you are actually trying to communicate with me. It seems more like I said something you don’t relate to, so you are trying to frame me as an outlier. I can’t respect that. If you were really interested in what I think, then my guess is that you would ask openly, without so many leading questions.
I suspect, however, that if asked explicitly whether they think women are less intelligent than men, a higher proportion of millennial men would say “no”, and they probably wouldn’t be lying about their conscious beliefs.
Which would lead to the depressing conclusion that changing men’s opinions about gender equality seems to leave unconscious bias intact. What can be done?
Unfortunately the truth of science is to a considerable degree what your professor thinks (Mach, he of the Mach number, got away with “not believing” in atoms even after radioactive disintegration was discovered.)
Quine was a big influence on me. Also, like someone else whose work influenced me, he worked on deciphering German Naval Enigma. Quine and Turing are partly responsible for making me the cranky person I am today.
Perhaps I misinterpreted Mach, but I perceived his stance was that the chain of inference from instrumental readings at some point breaks away from our own experience and therefore our models of reality beyond this scale must recognized as just that: models.
That or he was trolling to make an important point by targeting atom theory.
I don’t think so. There is a lot of evidence that Mach’s work caused him to see reality as continuous. Mach seems to me an example of the kind of would-be philosopher of science who takes a view so abstract that it denies the reality of scientific investigation. He’s like someone standing in Benz’s workshop telling him that the internal combustion engine is a sub-optimal prime mover so he should wait until someone comes up with a perfect battery. On the two major issues of the 20th century - the atomic theory and relativity - he demonstrated Clarke’s Law by being completely wrong.
I’ll admit, I know very little about Mach beyond that essay. I don’t understand why someone with such views would still refute the usefulness of these theories, regardless of whatever the Ultimate Truth Reality (and our knowledge thereof) may be.
