So. I've been thinking about the "marketplace of ideas" idea because I've come across disconnected talk about the contagiousness of "bad ideas" and how "good ideas" can't beat "bad ideas" in a fair Darwinian contest. The thing here is that if we're going to go with a Dawkinsian meme framework, then the analogy to evolutionary processes points towards the "fittest" ideas beating out "less fit" ideas, and nothing more.

I think I'd have a much harder time dismissing the argument that the woke nonsense we're fighting against is only relegated to "fringe nutjobs that no one pays attention to" if those people didn't keep ascending unchallenged to influential positions in academia and education. I used to have the same opinion, maybe as recently as six years ago.

But it stopped being "fringe nutjobs" and became concerning when arguments I saw nowhere previously but Tumblr started being advanced as a legitimate theoretical framework.

The presence of people who are against wearing masks, against regulations informed by the latest medical data, is just the most recent manifestation of the politicization of a "belief in science." I don't want to say "I told you so," but this is exactly why I had reservations about getting scientists more involved with politics, and why I disagreed with the idea of a "Science March." See this thread for my thoughts at the time:

https://twitter.com/M_Methuselah/status/925184115686723584

Apropos of nothing, I'm going to write a thread that recounts some of my experiences over the past year as an evolutionary biology master's student, focused on instances that have shaped my understanding of the political climate and biases present in my department. 1. In an ecology class I took in my first semester, one of my professors was vocally anti-Trump during lecture.

Most of the time it was "appropriate," in the sense that it was in the context of general criticism of any Republican administration blocking action on climate change.

There's a concept in evolutionary biology that a population genome will change over time due to stochastic processes, but certain loci will change more or less than this neutral background rate, and you can infer something about these loci from that variance.

https://twitter.com/M_Methuselah/status/1037225533547929602

The loci that differ rapidly can sometimes be inferred to be under selection, and the loci that are more conserved can sometimes be inferred to be important for regulatory or developmental processes.

The reason why identity politics is so powerful is because we naturally ascribe great power and exception to the state of being a victim. Behavior which would otherwise be inexcusable is excused, such as violence, if it is understood to be enacted in the service of self defense. This is why "speech is violence" is such a pernicious idea. Why the victimology of identity politics is such a pernicious idea. It reframes every scenario such that you are a perpetual victim, and therefore otherwise inexcusable behavior on your part is perpetually justified.

As bad as it would be if you were lying, it would be worse if you weren't.

It would demonstrate that you punish behavioral signifiers like regularly interacting with people who disagree, and appearing on mass blocklists, and claiming that these are politically neutral measures.

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1022196722905296896

You can claim that you only sanction people who rock the boat, regardless of which direction, but it's more than apparent that the systems in place to judge what constitutes boat rocking has wildly varying sensitivity dependant upon what political affiliation someone has.

I think Peterson's point is that there's examples in nature where hierarchical systems exist due to bottom-up, emergent, biological reasons.

Therefore, you cannot assert that human "Patriarchy" is a top-down, aggregate, and entirely socially constructed system without evidence.

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Since many parts of human society parallel parts of social organization in other species, it's a reasonable hypothesis that our social organization was shaped by similar forces.

If you want to change it, you have to properly understand it first. Denying reality doesn't help.

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the evolutionary origins of religious thinking, after having some nagging issues with Jordan Peterson's evolutionary arguments for a religious framework that I haven't been able to properly articulate to myself until now. It's no secret that I'm an atheist, though it isn't part of my active identity. It mostly just manifests in the sense that I operate under a non-religious metaphysics.

This is a terrible way to frame this.

First, we shouldn't reduce caring about a species to a question of direct empathy, because then we ignore non-mammals.

Second, the real issue is that this is the direct result of human action. Extinction in the abstract isn't a moral wrong.

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When taking the long view of evolutionary history, you realize that what really matters isn't individual species, but rather ecosystem stability. Extinction is always happening. Our problem is that the rate of extinction we're causing is far exceeding the normal background rate.

Something that most people don't seem to understand is that the hatred of Nazis based on their ideology was almost entirely a post-hoc justification for WWII. The original hatred was based on standard wartime propaganda, but it stuck around because the ideology was so heinous. During the actual war, most people didn't know about the actual atrocities in great detail. Partly because international wartime reporting was (and is) difficult, and partly because German atrocities were largely falsely/over-reported during WWI (because, again, propaganda).

So let me get this straight. You can point out that men and women are different and have different proclivities when making a point about how violence against men is most often perpetrated by men, but if you point out those differences in other contexts then you're a misogynist? Apparently it's fine to assert that we don't need International Men's Day because "men" cause most of men's problems (due to these differences), yet if you argue that we aren't helping women as much as we can because we're assuming that they're identical to men... you get fired.

I understand the indignant sentiment to the flyer based on the people who are supposedly posting these things, but technically speaking there isn't anything inherently wrong with the statement as it is written. Rather, if your problems are with the supposed implications of the statement, and the supposed actions and beliefs of the group of people behind the statement, then perhaps you might empathize with those who distrust "Black Lives Matter" despite how true that statement also is.