The social justice movement, as aptly said at the end of the article, is a profoundly rational, radically rational movement.
For which value of the word “rational”?
Overcoming bias is a strong goal in SJ.
Nope. Reallocating power between social groups is a strong goal in SJ. Egalitarianism is not the same thing as overcoming bias. Besides, by “bias” LW means things like bugs in mental processing and SJ means things like harmful stereotypes. They are not at all the same.
the mass of morons they face
That’s the same mass of morons that everyone faces, right?
Which means that when someone in the SJM says “rationalism is bad”, us radical rationlist should automatically translate it as “the moronic attitude against overcoming bias that I face and is labelled by morons as rationalism is bad”.
Ah, good old doublethink. “War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength”.
For a Bayesian rationality which doesn’t allow you to use previously computed priors. This is equivalent to ordinary Bayesianism, as long as you have unlimited memory and computational power.
Where do you think priors come from? Okay, some come from your evolutionary heritage. But most come from experience. If you save all your experiences, you can always recompute all your priors from scratch, given enough time.
Clearly in social justice theory, you’re not allowed to use priors, because priors are prejudice. But nothing says you’re not allowed to examine all your past experience during each encounter, and reconstruct those same priors.
Technically, the priors are the sum of the previously available information relevant to the topic.
you can always recompute all your priors from scratch
No, I can’t. I’m human. What you are saying is theoretically possible in the sense that a full AIXI machine is theoretically possible, but I fail to see any relevance to real life.
Clearly in social justice theory, you’re not allowed to use priors
On the contrary, you are expected to use very strong priors, it’s just that they have to be particular priors and derive not necessarily from previous information but rather from what you ought to believe. I haven’t noticed SJ being particularly interested in evidence.
For which value of the word “rational”?
Nope. Reallocating power between social groups is a strong goal in SJ. Egalitarianism is not the same thing as overcoming bias. Besides, by “bias” LW means things like bugs in mental processing and SJ means things like harmful stereotypes. They are not at all the same.
That’s the same mass of morons that everyone faces, right?
Ah, good old doublethink. “War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength”.
For a Bayesian rationality which doesn’t allow you to use previously computed priors. This is equivalent to ordinary Bayesianism, as long as you have unlimited memory and computational power.
Whaaaat?
Does not compute.
Where do you think priors come from? Okay, some come from your evolutionary heritage. But most come from experience. If you save all your experiences, you can always recompute all your priors from scratch, given enough time.
Clearly in social justice theory, you’re not allowed to use priors, because priors are prejudice. But nothing says you’re not allowed to examine all your past experience during each encounter, and reconstruct those same priors.
Technically, the priors are the sum of the previously available information relevant to the topic.
No, I can’t. I’m human. What you are saying is theoretically possible in the sense that a full AIXI machine is theoretically possible, but I fail to see any relevance to real life.
On the contrary, you are expected to use very strong priors, it’s just that they have to be particular priors and derive not necessarily from previous information but rather from what you ought to believe. I haven’t noticed SJ being particularly interested in evidence.
That wouldn’t statisfy them, since the recomputed priors would be the same as the “racist” priors they want to get rid off.