an article written by Arthur Chu that seems to suggest otherwise
Except that the article says that Chu doesn’t want the focus just to be Jeopardy!, not that Scott Drucker (the person who was actually proposing to make the movie, and the person whose Kickstarter it was) doesn’t want it to be. And my reading of both Chu’s article and the Kickstarter page is that Drucker’s goals were not necessarily the same as Chu’s, even though obviously both were hoping that cooperating with the other guy would do something for both people’s goals.
Which is why they made a successful plan and got the money, but Arthur didn’t. [...] For example, he didn’t put a high-status-behaving white girl into his movie.
The comparison here is with Anita Sarkeesian, to whom you linked before, right? Now, it seems to me that the reason why Anita Sarkeesian put a high-status-behaving white girl into her videoblogging is because she is a high-status-behaving white girl (in so far as videoblogging about video games can count as high-status behaviour), and it doesn’t seem either obviously insincere for her to act as such, or obviously incompetent for Chu not to have done likewise. And I’m not sure what you think Scott Drucker should have done with a high-status-behaving white girl, or how it would have made the Kickstarter more successful.
What, by the way, makes you think that Anita Sarkeesian doesn’t truly believe in her cause? I’ve only seen a small quantity of her stuff, but what I’ve seen looks sincere (and fairly plausible) to me.
that’s where the real money and power are in his faction
You may be right (perhaps it depends what counts as “his faction”) but your link from the word “are” doesn’t seem to me to say what I think you’re implying it does. It’s arguing that “solidarity is for white women”, but the stress is on “white”, not “women”; I’d summarize the message as something like “contemporary feminism portrays itself as being for women, but really it’s only interested in white women and black women get ignored or thrown overboard whenever it’s convenient”.
If Arthur Chu is such a defender of oppressed people, [...]
Wait, what? When did I say or imply or suggest that he is? I certainly didn’t intend to. (Not because I particularly think he isn’t, but because I have no idea whether he is and had no idea that that was the question that was meant to be at issue.)
I had a look through some of his writing, and he doesn’t spend much of his time defending anyone by name. He spends much more attacking large-scale phenomena. I don’t see any obvious reason why this indicates either cluelessness or hypocrisy. But that’s kinda irrelevant; I never claimed that Chu is a great defender of oppressed people, and I have no idea how “you’re being one notch too cynical” turned into “Arthur Chu is a great defender of the oppressed”.
it seems to me that the reason why Anita Sarkeesian put a high-status-behaving white girl into her videoblogging is because she is a high-status-behaving white girl (in so far as videoblogging about video games can count as high-status behaviour), and it doesn’t seem either obviously insincere for her to act as such, or obviously incompetent for Chu not to have done likewise.
I have not verified it personally, but it is believed among Gamergate fans that Feminist Frequency is a project of Jonathan McIntosh. If that is true, then it was a strategic move to use Anita Sarkeesian as a public face of the project, because McIntosh himself could not use the “damsel in distress” effect to generate as much money.
Analogically, the correct way to make money using Arthur Chu would be to somehow make him a part of a project focused on white women. He would officially be a mere sidekick of a female protagonist. Then he could write many articles attacking everyone who gets in the way of his project.
(Oh damn, now I am in a full political mode. Well, I tried to explain what I meant.)
The fact that he didn’t do this, I process as an evidence for (a) sincerity of his beliefs, and (b) obliviousness about the rules of the game.
When did I say or imply or suggest that he is [a defender of oppressed people]?
You didn’t. The Kickstarter project called him “a spokesperson for social justice”.
It appears to me that all kinds of things are believed among people highly invested in one side or other of the “Gamergate” flap, and that being so believed is not very strong evidence for the truth of anything.
(The people producing those videos say he’s “producer and co-writer”. Cynical-me suspects that “Gamergate fans” think he must be the real driving force because Anita Sarkeesian is a girl and therefore not to be taken seriously. I do hope cynical-me is wrong. Not-so-cynical me thinks Sarkeesian is more likely to be the real driving force because, other things being equal, a woman is more likely to feel strongly about this stuff than a man.)
the correct way to make money using Arthur Chu
No, the correct way to make money using Arthur Chu is to have him play Jeopardy!. That’s been done and it seems to have worked pretty well.
I’m having trouble figuring out what you think is actually going on here. It seems to be something like this: some unscrupulous person decides that their goal is “to make money using Arthur Chu” (why?) and then decides that the best way to do that is via a focus on social justice (why??) but then fails to include a high-status-looking white girl as Viliam’s Guide To Exploiting Social Justice People would have told him to and therefore fails, whereas if they had had a high-status-looking white girl as central character the Kickstarter would have made a load of money.
But that doesn’t make a bit of sense to me, so probably my different political/social/psychological assumptions are stopping me working out what scenario you have in mind.
(The more likely scenario seems to me to be this, obtained by taking things more or less at face value. Scott Drucker sees that Arthur Chu has raised a bit of a ruckus, and been somewhat successful, by playing Jeopardy! in an unorthodox way; maybe he also thinks Chu is an interesting guy. So he decides to make a little documentary about Chu and his Jeopardy! playing. He contacts Chu. Chu is prepared to play along, but he has got very much into social justice and wants that front and centre in the documentary. Drucker is willing to go along with this because “Chu gets angry about stuff” fits his narrative pretty well, and also because he can’t make the documentary without Chu’s cooperation. They put up their Kickstarter page, and it turns out that actually the internet has mostly forgotten about Chu and people who are interested in unorthodox Jeopardy! tactics mostly aren’t very interested in social justice. To first order, no one wants to back the project. The Kickstarter fails. The end. In my version of the scenario, making a cute rich white girl the central character would have made it no longer a documentary about Chu, hence uninteresting to Scott Drucker; would have been unacceptable to Chu for all kinds of reasons; and would have made little difference to the success of the Kickstarter unless it happened to get noticed by a lot of people who enjoy looking at cute white girls so much they’ll fund anything with one in it. That audience might overlap somewhat with the Jeopardy! fans; maybe not so much with the social justice warriors.)
You didn’t. The Kickstarter project called him “a spokesperson for social justice”.
OK. So what conclusion am I supposed to draw from that plus the fact (assuming it is one) that he never happens to have defended a poor black woman by name in his writings online? I’d have thought it might be “Chu is insincere and isn’t really interested in social justice”, except that you have said several times that you think he is sincere.
It appears to me that all kinds of things are believed among people highly invested in one side or other
True for many political debates in general. Both sides start with different sets of “facts”. In worse case, some of those “facts” are factually wrong. In better case, those facts are true, but were selected from the set of all possible facts to support a specific conclusion.
Thus a rational debate would have to start by establishing a base of mutually accepted facts. If you skip this step and go ahead, it will catch you later at some moment.
(For example, we might agree that Jonathan McIntosh is involved in Feminist Frequency, and that his name is usually not mentioned; someone who does not do a background research might easily come to a conclusion that Anita Sarkeesian is doing this alone. -- Of course whether this is a trivial technical detail or a damning evidence, that depends on many other assumptions.)
I’m having trouble figuring out what you think is actually going on here.
I think (p = 0.9) that McIntosh and Sarkeesian are following the “Guide To Exploiting Social Justice People”. I think (p = 0.6) that Chu is not aware of this, and that he believes they are simply doing the right thing. And, being a good person, he wants to do the right thing, too. (But he fails precisely because he is not following the Guide.) I do not have an opinion on Drucker yet, as I have almost no data about him.
making a cute rich white girl the central character … would have made little difference to the success of the Kickstarter unless it happened to get noticed by a lot of people who enjoy looking at cute white girls so much they’ll fund anything with one in it
It’s not about cuteness and enjoying, but about saving the damsel in distress (but of course if the damsel is white and high-status, saving her is a higher priority). The cute central character would be described as struggling with barbaric hordes of low-status men in STEM fields. Arthur Chu would pose as an expert on STEM fields and on nerds, using Jeopardy as credentials. He would also profess that the damsel is at least 10× smarter than him; she just didn’t have a chance to prove it (because we all know how the society oppresses women). Chu would be the knight defending the damsel. But the real hero who can fix the world by the power of her awesomeness, that would be the damsel. Next step is to generate a controversy, and use the backlash as a proof that the forces of evil have united against this awesome damsel, but you can still send your money to make the good side win. Also, it will serve as a convenient excuse if the project fails.
This is what my Guide To Exploiting Social Justice People would recommend. It also requires having allies in media, who will cover the story from the correct angle, and will refuse to give a platform to opponents or competing projects.
So what conclusion am I supposed to draw from that plus the fact (assuming it is one) that he never happens to have defended a poor black woman by name in his writings online?
My guess (p = 0.6) is that Arthur Chu is trying to do the right thing, but by being mindkilled he sacrificed his ability to notice that he may be doing it wrong.
What is the base probability that if one tries to become “a spokesperson for social justice”, their best cause will be publicly defending an abusive rich white American woman with powerful friends? So if you happen to find yourself in such situation, you may want to slow down and reflect on what happened. You probably didn’t plan it this way, but your brain had an evolutionary adaptation to do it for you.
(The people producing those videos say he’s “producer and co-writer”. Cynical-me suspects that “Gamergate fans” think he must be the real driving force because Anita Sarkeesian is a girl and therefore not to be taken seriously. I do hope cynical-me is wrong. Not-so-cynical me thinks Sarkeesian is more likely to be the real driving force because, other things being equal, a woman is more likely to feel strongly about this stuff than a man.)
Since it’s been brought up...
As far as I can tell the best evidence they have for this is a widely circulated video (from before FemFreq) in which she says she’s “not a fan of videogames”.
And Mcintosh clearly “feels strongly about this”, as much as any woman I’ve seen. The Gamergate people created a whole hashtag to display his tweets (#FullMcintosh), which also became, incidentally, what they use to indicate that they think someone has gone particularly far down the SJ rabbit hole.
Personally, I think the conclusion Viliam mentions doesn’t rest in very solid evidence, but it’s not far-fetched either. (meanwhile, the “because she’s a girl” hypothesis looks very unlikely to me)
What, by the way, makes you think that Anita Sarkeesian doesn’t truly believe in her cause? I’ve only seen a small quantity of her stuff, but what I’ve seen looks sincere (and fairly plausible) to me.
I’m not sure how familiar you are with videogames, or which of her videos you’ve seen. But I can’t imagine how some of the ones I’ve seen could possibly have been made without outright dishonesty.
As far as I can tell the best evidence they have for this is a widely circulated video (from before FemFreq) in which she says she’s “not a fan of videogames”.
And some Feminist Frequency tweets repeating what McIntosh posted before: 1, 2, I think there are more but I cannot find them now. (Memetic hazard: here is the “argument” in a form of a youtube video.)
By the way Feminist Frequency is a project account, not Sarkeesian’s private account (although it uses her photo), so it wouldn’t be a damning evidence even if McIntosh would really sometimes use it. Also, when two people cooperate and have similar opinions, it would not be so unlikely to use the same words. = this is just a weak evidence
Except that the article says that Chu doesn’t want the focus just to be Jeopardy!, not that Scott Drucker (the person who was actually proposing to make the movie, and the person whose Kickstarter it was) doesn’t want it to be. And my reading of both Chu’s article and the Kickstarter page is that Drucker’s goals were not necessarily the same as Chu’s, even though obviously both were hoping that cooperating with the other guy would do something for both people’s goals.
The comparison here is with Anita Sarkeesian, to whom you linked before, right? Now, it seems to me that the reason why Anita Sarkeesian put a high-status-behaving white girl into her videoblogging is because she is a high-status-behaving white girl (in so far as videoblogging about video games can count as high-status behaviour), and it doesn’t seem either obviously insincere for her to act as such, or obviously incompetent for Chu not to have done likewise. And I’m not sure what you think Scott Drucker should have done with a high-status-behaving white girl, or how it would have made the Kickstarter more successful.
What, by the way, makes you think that Anita Sarkeesian doesn’t truly believe in her cause? I’ve only seen a small quantity of her stuff, but what I’ve seen looks sincere (and fairly plausible) to me.
You may be right (perhaps it depends what counts as “his faction”) but your link from the word “are” doesn’t seem to me to say what I think you’re implying it does. It’s arguing that “solidarity is for white women”, but the stress is on “white”, not “women”; I’d summarize the message as something like “contemporary feminism portrays itself as being for women, but really it’s only interested in white women and black women get ignored or thrown overboard whenever it’s convenient”.
Wait, what? When did I say or imply or suggest that he is? I certainly didn’t intend to. (Not because I particularly think he isn’t, but because I have no idea whether he is and had no idea that that was the question that was meant to be at issue.)
I had a look through some of his writing, and he doesn’t spend much of his time defending anyone by name. He spends much more attacking large-scale phenomena. I don’t see any obvious reason why this indicates either cluelessness or hypocrisy. But that’s kinda irrelevant; I never claimed that Chu is a great defender of oppressed people, and I have no idea how “you’re being one notch too cynical” turned into “Arthur Chu is a great defender of the oppressed”.
I have not verified it personally, but it is believed among Gamergate fans that Feminist Frequency is a project of Jonathan McIntosh. If that is true, then it was a strategic move to use Anita Sarkeesian as a public face of the project, because McIntosh himself could not use the “damsel in distress” effect to generate as much money.
Analogically, the correct way to make money using Arthur Chu would be to somehow make him a part of a project focused on white women. He would officially be a mere sidekick of a female protagonist. Then he could write many articles attacking everyone who gets in the way of his project.
(Oh damn, now I am in a full political mode. Well, I tried to explain what I meant.)
The fact that he didn’t do this, I process as an evidence for (a) sincerity of his beliefs, and (b) obliviousness about the rules of the game.
You didn’t. The Kickstarter project called him “a spokesperson for social justice”.
It appears to me that all kinds of things are believed among people highly invested in one side or other of the “Gamergate” flap, and that being so believed is not very strong evidence for the truth of anything.
(The people producing those videos say he’s “producer and co-writer”. Cynical-me suspects that “Gamergate fans” think he must be the real driving force because Anita Sarkeesian is a girl and therefore not to be taken seriously. I do hope cynical-me is wrong. Not-so-cynical me thinks Sarkeesian is more likely to be the real driving force because, other things being equal, a woman is more likely to feel strongly about this stuff than a man.)
No, the correct way to make money using Arthur Chu is to have him play Jeopardy!. That’s been done and it seems to have worked pretty well.
I’m having trouble figuring out what you think is actually going on here. It seems to be something like this: some unscrupulous person decides that their goal is “to make money using Arthur Chu” (why?) and then decides that the best way to do that is via a focus on social justice (why??) but then fails to include a high-status-looking white girl as Viliam’s Guide To Exploiting Social Justice People would have told him to and therefore fails, whereas if they had had a high-status-looking white girl as central character the Kickstarter would have made a load of money.
But that doesn’t make a bit of sense to me, so probably my different political/social/psychological assumptions are stopping me working out what scenario you have in mind.
(The more likely scenario seems to me to be this, obtained by taking things more or less at face value. Scott Drucker sees that Arthur Chu has raised a bit of a ruckus, and been somewhat successful, by playing Jeopardy! in an unorthodox way; maybe he also thinks Chu is an interesting guy. So he decides to make a little documentary about Chu and his Jeopardy! playing. He contacts Chu. Chu is prepared to play along, but he has got very much into social justice and wants that front and centre in the documentary. Drucker is willing to go along with this because “Chu gets angry about stuff” fits his narrative pretty well, and also because he can’t make the documentary without Chu’s cooperation. They put up their Kickstarter page, and it turns out that actually the internet has mostly forgotten about Chu and people who are interested in unorthodox Jeopardy! tactics mostly aren’t very interested in social justice. To first order, no one wants to back the project. The Kickstarter fails. The end. In my version of the scenario, making a cute rich white girl the central character would have made it no longer a documentary about Chu, hence uninteresting to Scott Drucker; would have been unacceptable to Chu for all kinds of reasons; and would have made little difference to the success of the Kickstarter unless it happened to get noticed by a lot of people who enjoy looking at cute white girls so much they’ll fund anything with one in it. That audience might overlap somewhat with the Jeopardy! fans; maybe not so much with the social justice warriors.)
OK. So what conclusion am I supposed to draw from that plus the fact (assuming it is one) that he never happens to have defended a poor black woman by name in his writings online? I’d have thought it might be “Chu is insincere and isn’t really interested in social justice”, except that you have said several times that you think he is sincere.
True for many political debates in general. Both sides start with different sets of “facts”. In worse case, some of those “facts” are factually wrong. In better case, those facts are true, but were selected from the set of all possible facts to support a specific conclusion.
Thus a rational debate would have to start by establishing a base of mutually accepted facts. If you skip this step and go ahead, it will catch you later at some moment.
(For example, we might agree that Jonathan McIntosh is involved in Feminist Frequency, and that his name is usually not mentioned; someone who does not do a background research might easily come to a conclusion that Anita Sarkeesian is doing this alone. -- Of course whether this is a trivial technical detail or a damning evidence, that depends on many other assumptions.)
I think (p = 0.9) that McIntosh and Sarkeesian are following the “Guide To Exploiting Social Justice People”. I think (p = 0.6) that Chu is not aware of this, and that he believes they are simply doing the right thing. And, being a good person, he wants to do the right thing, too. (But he fails precisely because he is not following the Guide.) I do not have an opinion on Drucker yet, as I have almost no data about him.
It’s not about cuteness and enjoying, but about saving the damsel in distress (but of course if the damsel is white and high-status, saving her is a higher priority). The cute central character would be described as struggling with barbaric hordes of low-status men in STEM fields. Arthur Chu would pose as an expert on STEM fields and on nerds, using Jeopardy as credentials. He would also profess that the damsel is at least 10× smarter than him; she just didn’t have a chance to prove it (because we all know how the society oppresses women). Chu would be the knight defending the damsel. But the real hero who can fix the world by the power of her awesomeness, that would be the damsel. Next step is to generate a controversy, and use the backlash as a proof that the forces of evil have united against this awesome damsel, but you can still send your money to make the good side win. Also, it will serve as a convenient excuse if the project fails.
This is what my Guide To Exploiting Social Justice People would recommend. It also requires having allies in media, who will cover the story from the correct angle, and will refuse to give a platform to opponents or competing projects.
My guess (p = 0.6) is that Arthur Chu is trying to do the right thing, but by being mindkilled he sacrificed his ability to notice that he may be doing it wrong.
What is the base probability that if one tries to become “a spokesperson for social justice”, their best cause will be publicly defending an abusive rich white American woman with powerful friends? So if you happen to find yourself in such situation, you may want to slow down and reflect on what happened. You probably didn’t plan it this way, but your brain had an evolutionary adaptation to do it for you.
Since it’s been brought up...
As far as I can tell the best evidence they have for this is a widely circulated video (from before FemFreq) in which she says she’s “not a fan of videogames”.
And Mcintosh clearly “feels strongly about this”, as much as any woman I’ve seen. The Gamergate people created a whole hashtag to display his tweets (#FullMcintosh), which also became, incidentally, what they use to indicate that they think someone has gone particularly far down the SJ rabbit hole.
Personally, I think the conclusion Viliam mentions doesn’t rest in very solid evidence, but it’s not far-fetched either. (meanwhile, the “because she’s a girl” hypothesis looks very unlikely to me)
I’m not sure how familiar you are with videogames, or which of her videos you’ve seen. But I can’t imagine how some of the ones I’ve seen could possibly have been made without outright dishonesty.
And some Feminist Frequency tweets repeating what McIntosh posted before: 1, 2, I think there are more but I cannot find them now. (Memetic hazard: here is the “argument” in a form of a youtube video.)
By the way Feminist Frequency is a project account, not Sarkeesian’s private account (although it uses her photo), so it wouldn’t be a damning evidence even if McIntosh would really sometimes use it. Also, when two people cooperate and have similar opinions, it would not be so unlikely to use the same words. = this is just a weak evidence