an unbelievably accurate guess from a guy who has shown a constant shortcoming in this arena! hat's off to david. made even better by the whole "i realize you are saying i'm guilty of what i brought up, but I'm really not" thing.

david, let me take this moment to call you very smart. you certainly are. you got a perfect score on the SAT math section. genius. brilliant.

however, despite your intellect, you have made so so so many posts in politics over the years, demonstrating on the whole that you have a disconnect with most people, both those smarter as well as dumber than yourself - a disconnect that you seem psychologically unable to overcome.

which explains why, after so many people have told you before, you are literally clueless on the topic we are discussing. maybe it's time for a little bit of self-reflection.

Not willing to discuss myself on this thread. Can I assume though that you agree with the point that people who find a true fact obvious usually underestimate the chances of persuading others who haven't come to the correct conclusion?

Yes, of course. What keeps getting lost is "how you present the goals" isn't the goals. It's a means, one of many. This propensity of "getting lost" is, I *feel*, an manifestation of a flaw in our wetware. I *feel*, this flaw causes all sorts of havoc just in our day-2-day lives. I'm always sensitive regarding this *feeling* I have.

You already know when we are yapping about the r-word, that there is a pre-existing propaganda war being actively waged between the two <definitions>: "secret heart" (aka thoughts) -vs- "institutional" (aka actions). You already know that the new flanged "secret heart" <definition> was coined by the 1960s US segregations, and popularized by G.Wallace. You already know what the propagandic payload of this new-fangled "secret heart" definition is: "it's all character flaw, the status-quo works".

Given that you know all of the above, and that you seems to care deeply about the optic/etc... it really seems to me you should reflexively push back at this new-fangled "secret heart" <definition>, at all times and in all contexts, in a very systematic manner. That's the advice I'd give you.

That sounds highly counter-intuitive to me.

If we got two buncha peeps: (A) peeps who understand deeply why running it twice is a goof, and (B) peeps who don't really understand why. Then we had the peeps in both bunches estimate their success rate of convincing test subjects of the fact at hand. Then had them try to actually do so. I'd guess that bunch A would overestimate -vs- bunch B.

i agree that, based on your years of posting here, when david sklansky finds a "true fact" to be "obvious," he usually underestimates the chances of persuading a person who has come to a different conclusion, which is virtually nonexistent.

this generally has less to do with the truth or falsity of the matter, and more to do with your inability 1. to understand what true facts are obvious, and 2. to express yourself clearly.

People are persuadable, but logic is never persuasive.

Look at the examples given: the AM radio junior phenom at a liberal school, and the mosque vandal. Neither was moved by logic. They got themselves into vulnerable positions and were shown mercy by people they thought were enemies. That mercy triggered the human emotional need for reciprocation. The rationalizations of positions gets worked out afterwards. As is typical with humans, emotions rule.

British America, 1600s, white people were not white yet. Court records identified people by origin (Angola, Germany, etc.) and religion, but not by race. Slaves and indentured servants led the same lives on tobacco plantations -- same lodgings and food, beaten, bought and sold. They intermarried and escaped together. Some Africans were actually indentures who eventually achieved freedom.

Bacon's Rebellion, 1676, was a multi-racial uprising against Virginia planters. Escaped slaves and white indentures together burned down the capital.

After Bacon's Rebellion, there was an abrupt change. Planters moved to exclusively slave labor while giving more privileges to poor whites. White identity became a reward for siding with land owners against Africans. As people became fixated on race as a thing, court records reflected that in the way people were identified. Poor whites became very invested in being white. It's what kept them from being slaves.

Bacon's Rebellion is a good entry point if you want to study the invention of race. By 1700, slavery is firmly racialized in law. But in the 1500s, travelogues were naive about race. Visitors to Africa would note the clothing, the architecture, mention skin was dark, describe the food, etc. Race was not a thing, they talked about skin color in passing, like farming methods. Africans were condemned for being heathen, but race was not fully elaborated until later.

Your "new-fangled" definition was around far before Wallace. It just didn't have a name.

The thing that is mostly different nowadays is that we've knocked down a bunch of systemic walls (at least legally knocked them down). "Well, redlining is now illegal, so our problems are fixed," is something that no one has ever said ever.

I'll reiterate that our discussion here doesn't actually count as doing anything, but discussing it does actually matter to me on how I spend time actually doing stuff and encouraging other people to actually do stuff.

There is research that bears out that experts overestimate the abilities of novices. If none of you can use google, I can provide links when I get a chance if you ask.

That doesn't refute my point. In fact it sort of makes it. If it is easy for you to see that it is wrong to be racist than you assume that most people would see it and that therefore those that don't have something wrong with them.

At the very least it is when someone of reasonable intelligence comes to a conclusion mainly via faulty logic. (Of course as I believe Shame Trolly points out, the saying that it is hard to persuade someone as to what is right if his income depends on being wrong, makes logic a weak tool in those situations.)

If you see a kid who thinks that 2+2=5, you think, "I can teach this kid a thing or two. Perhaps, with a bit of training at my side, he might learn calculus. It ain't that hard. The kid just been taught wrong." You even have some threads where you said that you could teach the mental equivalent a piece of driftwood the quadratic equation. When you show a kid a quadratic equation and he says, "I think it is equal to either a cat or a dog," you wouldn't change your mind too much other than to think, "I've got to teach this kid that numbers are not pets."

I will grant you that my immediate thought when I encounter a racist is "this mofo is dumber than a box of rocks," but that has nothing to do with whether they have the intellectual capacity to use a broom or learn to not hate the Jews. It just means that they've been trained wrong. Sort of like Wimp Lo:

As usual I am not quite sure what you are saying. But as to me personally as regards math tutoring I am not in the category I was speaking about even though the quadratic equation is obvious to me. Buts that is because of the unusual circumstance that my father taught me high school math when I was very young so I can both empathize with the math phobic and come up with tricks that will help him that are not in most experts toolbox.

This observation explains much of the bad teaching one encounters in the university (the rest is attributable to professors who don't know what they are talking about).

This feels like a false dichotomy. People were chained to be sex slaves, servants or laborers, AND this could be motivated by a belief that dark skinned folks are somehow lesser which makes their enslavement acceptable practice.

At this point I'd be comfortable going back to lurker status if you'd answer the bolded below. I really only waded in to define terms, as our ideas about strategy / tactics are essentially the same (when responding to racism, focus on behavior change & forget changing belief systems).

This seems contested by Shame's article posted in this post...

No, no, no. When you say "define terms" like this, you are chatting about the-one-true-and-only-official-meaning-of-this-or-that-word. Stop doing that.

You can call anyone a r-word-er, for any reason you like, or no reason at all. So can everyone else. It doesn't matter who gets called a r-word-er, or who does the calling, except, perhaps... and this is the part that's only been hand waved so far... on some second order, and purely propagandic level.

So, let's do a silly hypothetical. Let's say robots allegedly built by lizard creatures arrived from outer space. Using robot powers, woman folk weren't allowed to work gerbs they generally weren't allowed to work pre 1960s CRA. And, just like back then, an unequal pay for equal work situation (a human rights abuse) was the result. So, how about you tell me...

Qs:
Are the robots a buncha sexists?
Are the alleged lizard creatures a buncha sexists?
Are the human owners that profit from this situation sexists?
Is everyone who doesn't boycott these human owners a sexist?
Is everyone who doesn't take NVDA against these human owners a sexists?
Is everyone who doesn't attack these human owners using any means necessary a sexist?

A:

Are you sure the group of people that are racially prejudiced is actually large than the group of people who, through action or inaction, racially discriminate?

This goes along with what ST said about trust, but I also think that you can extend this idea beyond individual interactions. In terms of the framing of social movements, the extension is the idea that it is useful to make (emotional) appeals to shared values. Where "shared" is more a measure of how deeply embedded certain symbolic ideas and values are in a culture, rather than how deeply or authentically held.

So, for example, the idea of universal human rights is a good framing in the US, despite the fact that our commitment as a society to universal human rights has always been deeply problematic. It's useful because we all learn that "all men are created equal" in grade school. Both the importance of shared values and the possible shallowness of those values is important to understanding, for example, why "all lives matter" was an effective counter-frame to BLM despite the fact that it's also complete nonsense as a response. It also explains why Bonilla-Silva arrived at "abstract liberalism" as probably the most important frame of what he called "color-blind racism", or why MRA types call themselves egalitarians and draw distinctions between waves of feminism in order to emphasize that "third wave feminists" are the real sexists, and so on and so forth.

LOL, you shake your finger and 'no no no' me when asked a super basic question ("Are racially prejudiced people who don't discriminate racist?") but then proceed with some wild hypothetical with multiple questions I'm tasked to answer?

I think not, at least not before you stop assuming my motives and hand-waving away an honest attempt to gain an understanding of your perspective.

If I believe black people are inherently dumber than white people but don't actively or passively discriminate based on this belief, am I racist?

In other words, can I be racist simply based on my beliefs, forgetting my behavior?

The parallel I like in this battle is intelligent design vs. evolution. The "color-blind racism" position is unless you can point to the god of racism, there is no racism. OK, they aren't demanding an actual god, but to acknowledge racim they demand a person with complete responsibility for a situation whose decisions were entirely motivated by secret heart racism, and that person can have no mitigating factors (black friends). It's absurd, Satan himself couldn't meet the required standards in his own field. Most slave owners couldn't meet the standard, not even the villains in slavery movies.

I believe in evolution. You have a set of policies. Those that work against white supremacy get filtered out. Those that sustain white supremacy survive and reproduce. There is additional survival value in being apparently neutral. The filter is not neutral though, and that function decides what is "fittest". The filter supports white supremacy because that's where the money and power are.

An example is the latest in AI research. Bots starting with no priors and going around the internet to learn things. They learn racism. They learn white supremacy. Because that's who we are. It's not that the bots are secret heart racists, they are just code and data.

For a more personal anecdote, a recent immigrant who knew me a little had a question for me. He was from India, early 20s, not well educated. He asked me how black people in Oakland paid for their housing. My answer from their paycheck like everybody else didn't satisfy him. He knew all black people were criminals and gang members and didn't work, and my word wasn't convincing. I googled work force participation rates by race and showed him they were practically the same. The point of the story is the myth of black inferiority is strong, widely advertised, widely believed. That it isn't said in polite company doesn't mean it's gone or even that much weaker.

Anyways, evolution not god. Start with white supremacy. Add in random variation and filters that favor white supremacy. The result is white supremacy. How could it be any different? When was it supposed to have ended?

I understand your Q. But I don't think you understand your Q. It's not "super basic"... not at all. And that's both my point, and my perspective.

Your Q, which you helpfully repeat 3x in 3 ways, is of the form "Can peeps who think X, and do Y, be said to be in category Z". And the answer is, of course, trivially "yes". If we define Z'= {peeps who think X} union {peeps who do Y}... /QED.

That's not exactly what you are asking however, now is it? And that is not at all what was being discussed ITT regarding "framing", "SJWers", and this alleged counterproductivity regarding the use of the r-word. What is being discussed ITT is this: the relative expected propagandic payoff when comparing different tactics regarding the use of the the r-word to, among other thingees, label a set Z'.

How to most effectively use (or not to use) the r-word as a rhetorical tool when doing the "therapy" on the interwebs -vs- how I personally use the r-word when chatting mindlessly down at the bar... these are two very distinct and different Qs. That distinct is hardly "super basic".

Does this make any sense at all to you?

It took me a bit but I think I understand the analogy. I like it. I think the comparison to AI projects like Microsoft's twitter bot is a potentially useful way of making clear how the construction of ideology is a social process. Even for chat bots! I think the comparison between the difficulty people have processing institutional racism and difficulty processing evolution without a sentient agent is pretty insightful.

One of the topics of Silva's book is that there being "additional value" in apparent neutrality is a recent phenomena. Hence why he distinguishes between "Jim Crow racism" and "color-blind racism". Of course it's certainly to ST's point that the success of the civil rights era in changing the dominant racial ideology didn't actually put an end to racial discrimination and inequality. You have to change the structures, as he says.

No.

1600s vs. 1700s.

I know you are asking ST but the obvious correct answer is yes. Many racists are super cowardly and would never manifest their hatred on a day-to-day basis.

I am saying that it has nothing to do with their intellect, but only their feelings. In-group loyalty and out-group distaste (us vs. them stuff) isn't a cognitive activity.

Interesting article about the background of a neo-Nazi woman and the events that led to her recanting her beliefs.

Violent white supremacist falls for a black woman.

I think it is only fitting that the person who was the reason why unchained/P7 was created in the first place was the person who started this thread.