#RICHARDDAWKINS #WHINES #ABOUT "#WOKE"

#amazingatheist #jordanbpeterson #jordanpeterson #bigots #hypocrites #rightwingers #nazis #neonazis #farright #ausgov #politas

https://youtu.be/wCfYD1Xc_6A?feature=shared

Yeah, this is gonna last about as long as #Trump university...

#JordanBPeterson #AreYouEffingKiddingMe

«The collapse of our values is a greater threat than climate change» #JordanBPeterson Dire que ce charlatan est promu par The Daily Telegraph et Sky News... J'ai honte pour le 🇨🇦

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4zZ2ker1iI

I hate Chesterton's Fence.

It's a perfect encapsulation of the philosophical basis for all conservative arguments everywhere, from #jordanbpeterson and your average internet conservative to #Hayek's arguments in Law, Legislation, and Liberty. And it's a perfect encapsulation of all of the unique flaws, fallacies, specious reasoning, and presumptive #paternalism of #conservative thought.

Chesterton's Fence, and by extension all these other conservative arguments, make roughly speaking one fundamental point: whatever is traditional in institutions and culture must be beneficial, because it has "stood the test of time," and must have been put there (or developed) for a reason. So we should pretty much avoid change (they usually give the impression of being conceptually open to change, but when you look at their reasoning it fundamentally MUST shut down all change at all) because while the traditions that have existed for so long must be beneficial — else they wouldn't have developed and then survived so long — and have a proven track record, anything new we do has no such track record, and so could be disastrous and dysfunctional, and we would have no way of knowing.

This is the argument underneath Peterson hemming and hawing about how "we don't know the rules yet, we don't know all of the effects" of women being in the workplace, for instance, when anyone brings up workplace harassment, why he insinuates that the problem is women being there (or being too immodest) in the first place.

The problem with this argument is several fold. First let's deal with the whole "if it stood the test of time, it must be beneficial."

They argue that if a tradition is old and yet still common today, then it must have guided the people who followed it well in order to survive so long, engaging in a kind of natural selection of ideas. What they forget is that natural selection is not teleology, it's machine learning. If ideas develop according to evolutionary dynamics, ideas can also fall prey to suboptimal equilibria and all sorts of other evolutionary weirdness and badness.

Moreover, the success of an idea is not directly related to how good the idea actually is for the people that follow it at all. An idea can leap from head to head, abandoning hosts, and it doesn't actually care about us, so its evolutionary function is a parasite, a virus. It only needs its hosts to survive long enough to spread — as long as it isn't bad enough to kill off all its followers, it can spread by many other means than being better to live with. Maybe it's better at spreading, through appealing to our baser natures or cognitive biases, maybe it's good at locking itself in through thought stopping cliches and fear like Pascal's Wager/Roko's Basilisk. Or maybe it's really good at setting up interlocking peer pressure and network effects and social enforcement of continuing to believe it. Or maybe it's better at suppressing other ideas enough that it doesn't have to compete with them evolutionarily. Or maybe it's better at creating a group geared toward conquest or evangelism, but actually living under it sucks otherwise. Maybe it's just really beneficial to a small group of people in power, or appeals to the ignorance and prejudices of the time, and so they work really hard to spread it, but the civilization is successful for unrelated reasons. Maybe it's a fluke of history, there are so many of those and the butterfly effect is real (what if Christianity hadn't become the official Roman religion?). Maybe a tradition is wrong and bad but not bad enough to cause civilizational collapse, and better ideas simply weren't around or strong enough at the time, so the traditions got to be a suboptimal equilibria for a long time because nothing came along for it to compete against till now, instead of it actually being the product of an ironically progressive Hegelian narrative of history.

The second problem is that it assumes that the current system is *largely fine*, that there aren't any significant, weighty problems with it to motivate change, that people just want change for change's sake.

But that's not true. They worry so much about the possible unknown dysfunctions of new ideas and ignore those of the older traditions, which manifestly have horrible dysfunctions and consequences for a lot of people in a lot of areas. People suffer death, poverty, homelessness, bigotry, injustice, lack of autonomy every day under current systems, and it was far worse (if more well hidden) in the sort of "traditional" world conservatives pine for. The possible unknown bad outcomes that may result from change are worth it to actually try to improve this fucked up system, these traditions that we KNOW are deeply harmful and function in all these horrible ways, many of them intentional.

Why would we weigh a possible, unknown, unproven bad outcome more heavily than real concrete present suffering? Something matters LESS the more uncertain it is, so isn't it basic decision theory to try to fix the problems we see right in front of our eyes instead of spending all our time cowering before the visage of an unknown future?

But conservatives get around this point by making the stakes of every cultural and institutional change wholesale civilizational destruction. They tell us that any change we make could cause our entire civilization to crumble, that we won't have time to try things and undo them if they don't work, or to learn how to live in the future we've created. That's how they overcome the fact that the bad outcomes they claim change may bring are nebulous, uncertain, unproven, unlikely — by ramping up the possible consequences to such a grand scale that just the sheer *conceptual* possibility that because we don't know the outcomes of a change it might conceivably somehow lead to civilizational collapse forces us to turn away from any change at all. But are the stakes of every cultural change actually civilization collapse? Even if they can cause it, is it likely enough to actually worry about enough to ignore the real suffering and injustice we see around us and want to fix? No. Until there is actual evidence that a change will or even practically could have such terrible consequences, actually solid reasoning or sociology or historical points, there's no reason to think in such a hyperbolic way. It's just catastrophizing to manipulate people, because the only way to get possible unknown unlikely horrible results from benign changes to outweigh real suffering and injustice is to cast it in such stark terms. We can look at the nature of the changes we are making and predict what the consequences will be, and that won't be perfect, but it can guide us away from that thinking. But they want us to view every change as having a real, substantial, imminent chance of destroying everything, when it's only a vague, far-fetched conceivability, and to simultaneously ignore the real suffering and injustice caused by tradition, so that we never decide the risks are worth it to make society better.

Finally, the last problem with Chesterton's Fence: the assumption that the person who wants change, wants to undo some tradition, doesn't understand why the tradition is there, what purpose it serves, what effects it has. They have to assume that to explain to themselves why people want to upend traditions, because truly accepting the alternative — that we actually do understand the nature of what we are changing deeply, but sometimes even because of that think they must be changed — would be to admit to themselves they might be wrong. And yet, we manifestly DO understand what we are trying to change, often far better than those who are trying to prevent the change. This kind of thing can be seen with the conflict over "wokism" and Critical Race Theory and the statues; it is the progressives who have investigated deeply into the things they want to change, come to a rich and complex and penetrating understanding of the reasons why these traditions are in place, how they were put there, what functions they serve, and what effects they have, and it is the people fighting to keep these traditions in place that simply don't understand anything about the what they're defending and are fighting to keep people ignorant. So in reality it is the progressive that could say to the conservative what Chesterton says: "go away and consider why this might be here and what purpose it might serve and only when you have considered that long and hard come back to me."

So yes, here in this argument we find all of the primary features of conservatism:

- the belief that antiquity grants traditions legitimacy and goodness through a blindness to the complex workings of actual history, how societies and ideas actually gain power and spread, in favor of a sort of abstracted ideological narrative about how history works
- the dread of the unknown, the future, out of all proportion or evidence, and blindness to present suffering
- a paternalistic, patronizing assumption that their opponents must be ignorant teenage children blindly revelling against authorities for no reason, while they themselves are the ones ignorant of the details and nuances of actual history in favor of their abstract ideological narrative of history

@pzmyers@octodon.social

The biggest failure of the so-called skeptical/rational community was that they never put JBP to the test, but embraced and pushed him.

On his website, for example, he still sells these dubious self-help seminars, which he was even able to promote for free on FOX in front of an audience of millions. So far, this has never been seriously checked, although he probably made millions from this alone.

#JordanBPeterson #SnakeOilSales