Cite? You and the guy in the video say this. But I’ve yet to see a proponent of CRT agree.
Same with the Jewish thing. Do you have any cite of a CRT proponent saying “this is what we believe”, or just right wing “intellectuals” debunking it?
Modhat: Now back to your regular programming, sock removed.
It isn’t the scientific method that is at issue. It is the unquestioned biases of many scientists over many years on how they apply the method. It is ignored confounding factors, or unexamined assumptions. Here are two that really brought it home to me:
In a college class on psychology and the brain, we watched video summaries of two studies about infant response. The two studies were extremely similar. Babies (around 6 months in one, and around 9 in another) were separated from something they wanted. They timed how long it took for them to give up trying to get it and start crying. In both cases the data was very similar. The female infants would stop trying and start crying sooner than the male babies. But the conclusions of the two researchers were very different. One said it demonstrate that male babies developed persistence and focus before female babies. The other said it showed that female babies developed judgement and the ability to recognize a useless tactic and switch to new one earlier. Try and guess the gender of the two researchers.
The second and more damaging one is the marshmallow test. For years people felt it clearly showed that poor, mostly minority children were doomed to failure because they lacked self control. In reality, these children failed the test because they didn’t trust the system. The original researchers never even though of this, probably because like vast majority of academics in the 1960, being a poor minority child was completely foreign to them.
Yes, he is, as the many responses to your OP have explained. I mean, I’m sure that some “woke” person somewhere has espoused any one of the particular positions he points to as irrational extreme excesses, but that doesn’t mean that irrational extreme excesses are what “wokeness”, or social-justice advocacy or Critical Race Theory or any of a bunch of loosely related ideological positions that their opponents tend to regard as interchangeable, is all about.
Similarly, there are doubtless some people in today’s Republican Party who are consciously endorsing actual fascism, and there are ways in which the GOP as an entity is not being sufficiently energetic in its repudiation of fascism-friendly ideas and policies. But if I extrapolate from that to claim that “Republicans are fascists” tout court, I’m exaggerating to the point of outright falsity.
In the same way, when Lindsay or any of his followers claim that “woke” advocates as a group “reject objective reality, or at least they reject any truth claims about reality, and that only power relations matter to them”, they are exaggerating to the point of outright falsity.
There are doubtless always going to be celebrity scientists courting the self-perceived “skeptical” cohort among popular audiences with exaggerated accounts of vaguely defined “leftist” thinking posing existential threats to science and rationality and freedom and so forth. It’s a popular schtick, and public attention is what they’re after, not any serious investigation of challenges to rationalism or scientific rigor.
This was pointed up recently by the well-known biologist and atheist-humanist blogger PZ Myers, who noted that Lindsay and some of his fellow “anti-woke” pundits have organizational ties to conservative Christian funders:
If that’s all you want to know, then yes he is.
I don’t want to start a new thread on this and it looks like this thread is the right place for it:
Can anyone tell me whether ‘Critical Race Theory’ and/or ‘Critical Social Justice’ are actual concepts being developed and taught by the “left” school of sociopolitical thought, or whether these are boogieman theories contrived and foisted on the left by the “right”. To go deeper into this rabbit hole - are “Neo-Marxist” and “Post-Modernist” labels used by anyone other than the likes of Peterson, Lindsay, etc. ? Which legitimate school of philosophy actually applies these labels to current socio-political trends other than the aforementioned right leaning circle-jerks?
Thank you for the time you put into your the response. I read it but I don’t see how it fits in with the Lindsay’s talk about critical social justice.
I don’t see anything particularly woke here. your example is just about getting something to work properly. A KKK computer programmer writing facial recognition software would still want it to be accurate with black people.
And yet even non-KKK computer programmers have messed this up.
Except, if your idea of what is “woke” is based on Lindsay’s description, which you’ve been told is wrong, maybe your idea of what is “woke” is in error.
True. I have White Fragility on hold at the library. I will report back here later on how it compares to Lindsay’s talk.
The aspect discussed by Lindsay that I find most troubling is the claim that Woke intellectuals reject any truth claims about the real world. Or maybe it is that they reject the notion that very different people can arrive at a mutual agreement about reality in spite of their different points of view? Anyway, Lindsay says that they don’t even care about that. They are only interested in power relations.
My own experience with talking with some young people is that they seem to be working from an unconscious assumption that truth claims espoused by others are not the result of an honest attempt to map thoughts to reality, but rather they are adopted because that person is on some particular side of a multi-axis moral polygon. They reject any notion of objectivity. “IS” statements take on a moral value the way “OUGHT” statements typically do.
So for example, if I were to make the claim that the facts of the Michael Brown case support that the shooting was in self-defense, they would conclude (somehow) that I am a white person that thinks that is ok for cops to shoot unarmed black men who don’t pose a threat. That is, believing that a particular event is NOT an instance of police brutality is somehow equated with being in favor of police brutality.
They (I mean the particular people have interacted with) seem to have a theory of mind which assumes that other people do not themselves believe in objective reality and those other people are choosing their IS statements – not the OUGHT statements – to fit their own narrative, and not simply making an honest attempt to map their thoughts to reality. So IS statements become a source of moral outrage … even between two people who fully agree on their goals and values. That is, two people can agree in their OUGHT statements and then have a falling out because one person made an IS statement-- a statement about the facts of the world out there, not about their own values – to which the other replies, “How can you say that? You’re a horrible person!”
So when I came across Lindsay talking about wokesters rejecting truth, that seemed to fit with my own experience.
This is the case. The video has absolutely nothing to do with what “woke” actually is.
Note the example of “ethnomathematics”. The snowflake 
in the linked video was whining about how we are wasting time teaching kids about the racism of math. But that is not at all what ethnomathematics is! Ethnomathematics is the study of how different cultures came up with different types of math. For example, the ancient Hebrews didn’t have Arabic numerals, like we do today. They used letters for numbers instead, and they assigned meaning tow odds whose numerical interpretation matched up. If you are studying Hebrew culture as an anthropologist, it helps to understand this.
Meanwhile, if you are studying a tribal society that counts “one, two, many” and yet can predict astronomical events years in advance, you might be curious about how they calculate this. Our culture uses complex formulas to figure out these patterns, yet they seemingly have a different method. I’m not saying they know some powerful secret knowledge us westerners are blind to; that’s ridiculous. But their methods, even if more complicated and pointlessly difficult compared to our method, still might teach us something about how the human mind works, which is useful for psychology, AI development, economics, and a million and one other things.
It bears no resemblance whatsoever to the strawman caricature depicted in the video, of “the racism of math”.
This claim is 100% false.
That’s not the objection of anyone I’ve met. The objection to this statement is that the facts do not line up with it.
Taking a step back for a moment – do you think that Lindsay has constructed a steelman or strawman argument of left intellectualism, what he call “Woke intellectualism”?
Here’s my “woke” truth claim: this is false, and should be obviously false.
The fact that you find it “most troubling” indicates you’re not thinking critically about what he’s spoon-feeding you.
That’s what I am wondering myself.
For my part, if Lindsay’s description of critical social justice is accurate, then his reaction to it is reasonable and I share his alarm.
Based on the responses, his description is NOT accurate. He is either misunderstanding them, or misrepresenting them.
I opened this thread because I didn’t want to have to go read Lindsay’s sources myself. If enough people replied, “yep, he’s right. they’re nuts!” then … well I don’t know what comes next. But I’m on the side of reason, fairness, and liberalism, and if that’s being attacked we have to do something.
But at this point, it looks like I have some reading to do.
Here’s what I think folks get confused about: antiracist folks tend to suggest that different life experiences influence the way people evaluate new information, and that broad social dynamics can influence these life experiences, and that being aware of how social dynamics influence your experiences and therefore your evaluation of information is a good thing.
I knew someone once who grew up in the Pacific Northwest. When I lived out west and mentioned that I missed seeing fireflies in the summer, she gave me a “Quit messing around” look and said, “Fireflies aren’t real. Are they?”
She wasn’t stupid. But she hadn’t grown up around fireflies, had only encountered them in picture books, and had figured that they were like fairies, gentle lovely creatures to spark children’s imaginations.
When I mentioned this bit of homesickness to my other NC expat friends, they nodded, immediately getting what I was saying and showing not the tiniest sign of skepticism. When I mentioned it to my Northwest friend, she tried to figure out why I’d tell her such an obvious lie. Her different life experience caused her to evaluate the information differently.
This is human.
Knowing this happens with fireflies, isn’t it likely to happen with other things? I’m a dude, and I rarely get sexually harassed by dudes. When women tell me about their experiences, I may have a “Fireflies aren’t real” emotional reaction, because they’re describing a common occurrence that’s outside of my experience. Knowing about this human dynamic–about how people tend to evaluate information more skeptically when it’s outside of their own experience–allows me to check myself and to listen more carefully and openly to what people are telling me.
It doesn’t mean I accept everything uncritically, any more than my Pacific Northwest friend needed to accept that fireflies were real on my say-so. But it does mean that, knowing about this human reaction, I can be skeptical of my skepticism. I can give real weight to what other folks are telling me, even when it’s outside of my own experience.
The fireflies I’ve never seen are often real.
Yep. The world is enormous, and our time is short. Think of the blind men describing an elephant. One touches the trunk, and says “an elephant is like a thick rope”. Another touches the leg and says “an elephant is like a tree trunk”. A third touches the ear and says “an elephant is like a curtain”.
All that being “woke” is is realizing that society is huge in this way too, far too huge for one person to understand. It’s understanding that a black person grows up a totally different way and so looks at the world differently, and so does a rural white person vs an urban white person, or someone whose parents are college educated vs not.
Education has definitely allowed us to widen our view. You and I see much more of the elephant than a medieval peasant who never left his village. But that can be a form of blindness too. You look at someone who is exposed to a much smaller chunk of the elephant and scoff because they think it just looks like a rope. But from where they’re standing, it DOES look like a trunk. Being Woke doesn’t mean you say “they are correct; an elephant is a rope”. But it DOES ask that if a group in the population keeps behaving in counterproductive ways, you don’t just say “those damn fools don’t WANT to succeed! They should just pull themselves up by the bootstraps!”. Instead, you realize:
- that if the elephant was a rope, their behavior would be rational
- that from their perspective, they can’t see that an elephant is NOT a rope
- that expecting them to act according to information they do not have is counterproductive
- that you may see more of the elephant than they do, but you aren’t seeing the whole thing either; and the section they DO see may be one you are blind to
- this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t continue to expand your knowledge based on what you can see. It means you should be trying to see more, and trying to light up more of the elephant for everyone
And if poverty is a dark pair of sunglasses, you have to realize that what you can see from your position may not be what they can see from theirs.