I wonder how much of this is measuring not people's beliefs, but how they approach surveys? For almost all of these the more interesting/outrageous/trolly/"lol teehee" answer is the Factor 1 side. "I am currently answering this survey" seems like the clearest instance of this - it has no political valence at all, but someone trying to be cheeky would answer "no." (This would also apply to people who are answering at random/without paying much attention.)
The "Lizardman's constant" may relate to this, although empirically people who really actively believe in Lizardmen seem like they hold the other actual psychological factors as well. Maybe both effects are at play.
There also seems to be a certain amount of slippage between saying things "for the lulz", and starting to kind of believe them, or at least to engage in behavior that is what one would predict about somebody who believes those things. And then when somebody calls the troll on their behavior, they slide back to, "Oh, I was just doing that to troll you, because I knew it would make you think I really believed it, hahaha."
If somebody play-acts being a Nazi to the point that reasonable people conclude he's a Nazi, does it _matter_ if he's actually only play-acting Nazism? If it honks like a goose, and steps like a goose...
(This also is somewhat related to the way the alt-right uses Freeze Peach rhetoric to recruit young men who find transgression humorous, and then gradually encourage them to slide over that line from posturing to actual belief or at least its pragmatic equivalent. They start out by telling people: You should be able to say outrageous things, and face no consequence for it; people who say mean things to you, or even just express that they're disappointed in you for using slurs, are the enemies of free speech, you should come over to our private forums, where true free-thinkers can say whatever they want...)
> (This also is somewhat related to the way the alt-right uses Freeze Peach rhetoric to recruit young men who find transgression humorous, and then gradually encourage them to slide over that line from posturing to actual belief or at least its pragmatic equivalent. They start out by telling people: You should be able to say outrageous things, and face no consequence for it; people who say mean things to you, or even just express that they're disappointed in you for using slurs, are the enemies of free speech, you should come over to our private forums, where true free-thinkers can say whatever they want...)
This seems like an *extremely* uncharitable characterisation of pro free-speech arguments. Perhaps to be expected from someone who uses the phrase 'freeze peach' (have you read Scott Alexander's 'The Cowpox of Doubt'? This practice of referring to ideological opponents by a mocking nickname seems like a way people give themselves booster to their inoculation, and it's very soldier-mindset to say the least), but I still think it's worth challenging.
Do you really think that this sentence represents the view of anyone:
> You should be able to say outrageous things, and face no consequence for it; people who say mean things to you, or even just express that they're disappointed in you for using slurs, are the enemies of free speech
I'm very much in favor of _actual_ free speech. "Freeze Peach" is intended to mock people who misappropriate the term "free speech" to complain about people not _actually censoring them_, but just saying, "Sure you have the right to say whatever you're saying, but also if you say that we will say back to you that you suck and you should go say it somewhere else." People need to accept that when they _act like assholes_, there may be consequences for that. Nobody has the right to, say, participate in somebody else's private message board. Or to write for a privately owned magazine. Or to have a TV show on a privately-owned channel/service. Or be invited to do comedy at a private club.
And yes, absolutely, there are quite a LOT of people who engage in the dance of: Say stuff that is offensive; when called on it, say, "Well I was only joking, why are you so sensitive?" and then when called on _that_ they go off to sulk about how everyone's _so easily offended_, all these pathetic snowflakes! Ignoring the fact that just gratuitously using offensive language isn't actually funny in the first place.
(I'll also add that there absolutely can be material that threads through offensive language in a way that has some subtlety and makes you think about what the source of offense is. Louis CK had some early material like that.)
Nope, I think Singal is just wrong here, for reasons described in Will Wilkinson's longer piece.
As Singal puts it: "Do we want a world in which I can get fired for saying something 50% of my countrypeople agree with? Or 40% or 30%?"
And as Wilkinson counters:
<blockquote>
Let's put it this way. Bad judgment doesn't call into question good judgment. The prevalence of unjust and unmerited censure, sanction, and ostracism should not suggest to us that censure, sanction and ostracism, as such, need a hard second look. The problem is the imposition of undeserved or disproportionate penalties. Penalizing people for flouting rules, norms or the terms of agreements is no more worrying than rewarding those who faithfully hew to them. Without the distribution of approbation and disapprobation, without a functioning economy of esteem, human civilization would crumble to dust and blow away.
People should get what they deserve. Duh. But what do people deserve? We will always disagree about the bounds of acceptable speech and behavior. Even when we can manage to agree that somebody's crossed what we agree is the line, we may nevertheless differ sharply about the gravity of the transgression and the price they ought to pay for it. Pluralism is hard. But we should steer into these disagreements, the real ones, and not evade them by fighting over the application of a dumb catchy term somebody made up six months ago to shut down constructive debate about whether the social opprobrium they’re trying to shield themselves and their friends from is deserved.
</blockquote>
There are people who over-react to stuff and impose "consequences" that other people (including me) would say were unwarranted. But it was ever thus. The push and pull about what's acceptable to say in public isn't something new. It's not "cancel culture". It's just _culture_. Invoking "free speech" about that is a category error.
One can _separately_ talk about things like academic traditions of free inquiry, and I'd agree that there are cases where we should be careful of cutting off "unpopular" avenues of research, and I think there is some element of truth to the idea that students are being encouraged to cast themselves as victims in order to win arguments, and to equate "being made to feel uncomfortable" with actual violence.
But then you also end up with certain figures who are "just asking questions!" about things where actually there is a large body of research already that discredits their views, and they've repeatedly been offered explanations on that, and yet they continue to "just ask questions!" in a way that sure seems like it's Frankfurtian bullshit, or propaganda. They'e saying stuff because they think it will help effect their preferred outcomes, without any care for whether what they're saying is true.
> The push and pull about what's acceptable to say in public isn't something new. It's not "cancel culture". It's just _culture_. Invoking "free speech" about that is a category error.
Your argument is that "the push and pull of what's acceptable to say in public" is... not about free speech? That that's a category error? Are you sure?
As far as the relation to cancel culture, it's only you making this "category error". I don't know why a piece about cancel culture was even cited here, let alone quoted at length, and I don't see a single sentence in said quotation that actually "counters" the question you've framed it as countering.
To address the quotation, the first paragraph mostly seems to *agree* with Singal, that there is a question to be answered about where the boundaries are, even if Singal's implication is that our answer should be conservative, and as far as I can tell Wilkinson's is a handwave.
The second paragraph seems ironic to me, given that he advocates "steering into these disagreements" *in the midst of* mocking people for thinking this is something worth talking about.
Further, you yourself are doing exactly what he cautions against! I disagree with you on a substantive question on the limits of free speech, and instead of responding to those concerns you link me an essay about how the concept of cancel culture is stupid. I might describe that as "evading real disagreement by fighting over the application of a dumb catchy term somebody made up six months ago to shut down constructive debate about whether the social opprobrium ... is deserved".
Do you see how, here, I'm trying to talk about whether there is justification for the social opprobrium, and you're trying to steer the discussion towards the dumb catchy term?
I don't see, in your comment or the essay posted, a response to the fundamental objection posed by the essay, that while the First Amendment is about governmental interference, the *principle underpinning it* is that freedom of expression is an important value to be preserved, and therefore we should protect it from its suppression by other means than direct state intervention. Because if your life can be destroyed for expressing the wrong beliefs, your freedom of expression is effectively just as limited as if it was the state directly punishing you for it. It doesn't matter what term we call it, and in fact it's you and Wilkinson who seem unduly focused on that. Neither is it relevant that it has always been that way, if indeed that is the case; is does not imply ought. Can you explain why it *should* be that way? And if not, why are you so determined to shut down any criticism of that current reality with pithy, sneering comics about how dumb assholes are misunderstanding the First Amendment?
A lot of these questions seem oriented towards sociopathy or psychopathy as opposed to some 'rich people of the right' kind of category. As I read through them I also thought that some seem maliciously worded. Perhaps that was the goal.
Oh they're not rich people, for the most part, I would guess. I said they were rich in factor 1.
If your point about extremely high psychopathy is that they are different to most right-wingers I agree. The high psychoticism right is a subpopulation.
(Interlocutor): "But the fact remains, Soviet psychology is the best in the world."
Foucault: "Yes, that is precisely what I hold against it."
From his 1976 College de France lectures, "Society Must Be Defended"
What Foucault and Heidgger (whom he admitted, on his deathbed in an interview, was a thinker in whose terms he thought most resonantly) ultimately arrived at was the conclusion that it isn't a matter of political divide and framing with which we ought to occupy ourselves; rather, it is simply a divide between what is human and forces that actively seek to subvert what is human. Foucault, of course, took psychology to be one of these forces, or rather a tool of such forces.
Newsflash: all evil in the world isn't traceable to conservatives or wealthy individuals. Nor is it traceable to left-wing individuals.
You might try to be less disparaging and politically "Rah-rah! The right!" It's myopic and, frankly, sophomoric.
I wonder how much of this is measuring not people's beliefs, but how they approach surveys? For almost all of these the more interesting/outrageous/trolly/"lol teehee" answer is the Factor 1 side. "I am currently answering this survey" seems like the clearest instance of this - it has no political valence at all, but someone trying to be cheeky would answer "no." (This would also apply to people who are answering at random/without paying much attention.)
The "Lizardman's constant" may relate to this, although empirically people who really actively believe in Lizardmen seem like they hold the other actual psychological factors as well. Maybe both effects are at play.
There also seems to be a certain amount of slippage between saying things "for the lulz", and starting to kind of believe them, or at least to engage in behavior that is what one would predict about somebody who believes those things. And then when somebody calls the troll on their behavior, they slide back to, "Oh, I was just doing that to troll you, because I knew it would make you think I really believed it, hahaha."
If somebody play-acts being a Nazi to the point that reasonable people conclude he's a Nazi, does it _matter_ if he's actually only play-acting Nazism? If it honks like a goose, and steps like a goose...
(This also is somewhat related to the way the alt-right uses Freeze Peach rhetoric to recruit young men who find transgression humorous, and then gradually encourage them to slide over that line from posturing to actual belief or at least its pragmatic equivalent. They start out by telling people: You should be able to say outrageous things, and face no consequence for it; people who say mean things to you, or even just express that they're disappointed in you for using slurs, are the enemies of free speech, you should come over to our private forums, where true free-thinkers can say whatever they want...)
> (This also is somewhat related to the way the alt-right uses Freeze Peach rhetoric to recruit young men who find transgression humorous, and then gradually encourage them to slide over that line from posturing to actual belief or at least its pragmatic equivalent. They start out by telling people: You should be able to say outrageous things, and face no consequence for it; people who say mean things to you, or even just express that they're disappointed in you for using slurs, are the enemies of free speech, you should come over to our private forums, where true free-thinkers can say whatever they want...)
This seems like an *extremely* uncharitable characterisation of pro free-speech arguments. Perhaps to be expected from someone who uses the phrase 'freeze peach' (have you read Scott Alexander's 'The Cowpox of Doubt'? This practice of referring to ideological opponents by a mocking nickname seems like a way people give themselves booster to their inoculation, and it's very soldier-mindset to say the least), but I still think it's worth challenging.
Do you really think that this sentence represents the view of anyone:
> You should be able to say outrageous things, and face no consequence for it; people who say mean things to you, or even just express that they're disappointed in you for using slurs, are the enemies of free speech
I'm very much in favor of _actual_ free speech. "Freeze Peach" is intended to mock people who misappropriate the term "free speech" to complain about people not _actually censoring them_, but just saying, "Sure you have the right to say whatever you're saying, but also if you say that we will say back to you that you suck and you should go say it somewhere else." People need to accept that when they _act like assholes_, there may be consequences for that. Nobody has the right to, say, participate in somebody else's private message board. Or to write for a privately owned magazine. Or to have a TV show on a privately-owned channel/service. Or be invited to do comedy at a private club.
And yes, absolutely, there are quite a LOT of people who engage in the dance of: Say stuff that is offensive; when called on it, say, "Well I was only joking, why are you so sensitive?" and then when called on _that_ they go off to sulk about how everyone's _so easily offended_, all these pathetic snowflakes! Ignoring the fact that just gratuitously using offensive language isn't actually funny in the first place.
(I'll also add that there absolutely can be material that threads through offensive language in a way that has some subtlety and makes you think about what the source of offense is. Louis CK had some early material like that.)
Other folks making similar points:
https://xkcd.com/1357/
https://modelcitizen.substack.com/p/undefined-cancel-game
Yeah, the xkcd in question bizarrely misunderstands the principle of free speech.
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/please-stop-sharing-this-viral-but-754?utm_source=publication-search
Nope, I think Singal is just wrong here, for reasons described in Will Wilkinson's longer piece.
As Singal puts it: "Do we want a world in which I can get fired for saying something 50% of my countrypeople agree with? Or 40% or 30%?"
And as Wilkinson counters:
<blockquote>
Let's put it this way. Bad judgment doesn't call into question good judgment. The prevalence of unjust and unmerited censure, sanction, and ostracism should not suggest to us that censure, sanction and ostracism, as such, need a hard second look. The problem is the imposition of undeserved or disproportionate penalties. Penalizing people for flouting rules, norms or the terms of agreements is no more worrying than rewarding those who faithfully hew to them. Without the distribution of approbation and disapprobation, without a functioning economy of esteem, human civilization would crumble to dust and blow away.
People should get what they deserve. Duh. But what do people deserve? We will always disagree about the bounds of acceptable speech and behavior. Even when we can manage to agree that somebody's crossed what we agree is the line, we may nevertheless differ sharply about the gravity of the transgression and the price they ought to pay for it. Pluralism is hard. But we should steer into these disagreements, the real ones, and not evade them by fighting over the application of a dumb catchy term somebody made up six months ago to shut down constructive debate about whether the social opprobrium they’re trying to shield themselves and their friends from is deserved.
</blockquote>
There are people who over-react to stuff and impose "consequences" that other people (including me) would say were unwarranted. But it was ever thus. The push and pull about what's acceptable to say in public isn't something new. It's not "cancel culture". It's just _culture_. Invoking "free speech" about that is a category error.
One can _separately_ talk about things like academic traditions of free inquiry, and I'd agree that there are cases where we should be careful of cutting off "unpopular" avenues of research, and I think there is some element of truth to the idea that students are being encouraged to cast themselves as victims in order to win arguments, and to equate "being made to feel uncomfortable" with actual violence.
But then you also end up with certain figures who are "just asking questions!" about things where actually there is a large body of research already that discredits their views, and they've repeatedly been offered explanations on that, and yet they continue to "just ask questions!" in a way that sure seems like it's Frankfurtian bullshit, or propaganda. They'e saying stuff because they think it will help effect their preferred outcomes, without any care for whether what they're saying is true.
> The push and pull about what's acceptable to say in public isn't something new. It's not "cancel culture". It's just _culture_. Invoking "free speech" about that is a category error.
Your argument is that "the push and pull of what's acceptable to say in public" is... not about free speech? That that's a category error? Are you sure?
As far as the relation to cancel culture, it's only you making this "category error". I don't know why a piece about cancel culture was even cited here, let alone quoted at length, and I don't see a single sentence in said quotation that actually "counters" the question you've framed it as countering.
To address the quotation, the first paragraph mostly seems to *agree* with Singal, that there is a question to be answered about where the boundaries are, even if Singal's implication is that our answer should be conservative, and as far as I can tell Wilkinson's is a handwave.
The second paragraph seems ironic to me, given that he advocates "steering into these disagreements" *in the midst of* mocking people for thinking this is something worth talking about.
Further, you yourself are doing exactly what he cautions against! I disagree with you on a substantive question on the limits of free speech, and instead of responding to those concerns you link me an essay about how the concept of cancel culture is stupid. I might describe that as "evading real disagreement by fighting over the application of a dumb catchy term somebody made up six months ago to shut down constructive debate about whether the social opprobrium ... is deserved".
Do you see how, here, I'm trying to talk about whether there is justification for the social opprobrium, and you're trying to steer the discussion towards the dumb catchy term?
I don't see, in your comment or the essay posted, a response to the fundamental objection posed by the essay, that while the First Amendment is about governmental interference, the *principle underpinning it* is that freedom of expression is an important value to be preserved, and therefore we should protect it from its suppression by other means than direct state intervention. Because if your life can be destroyed for expressing the wrong beliefs, your freedom of expression is effectively just as limited as if it was the state directly punishing you for it. It doesn't matter what term we call it, and in fact it's you and Wilkinson who seem unduly focused on that. Neither is it relevant that it has always been that way, if indeed that is the case; is does not imply ought. Can you explain why it *should* be that way? And if not, why are you so determined to shut down any criticism of that current reality with pithy, sneering comics about how dumb assholes are misunderstanding the First Amendment?
A lot of these questions seem oriented towards sociopathy or psychopathy as opposed to some 'rich people of the right' kind of category. As I read through them I also thought that some seem maliciously worded. Perhaps that was the goal.
Oh they're not rich people, for the most part, I would guess. I said they were rich in factor 1.
If your point about extremely high psychopathy is that they are different to most right-wingers I agree. The high psychoticism right is a subpopulation.
AH.....I see my mistake now. Like vitamin rich bread.
(Interlocutor): "But the fact remains, Soviet psychology is the best in the world."
Foucault: "Yes, that is precisely what I hold against it."
From his 1976 College de France lectures, "Society Must Be Defended"
What Foucault and Heidgger (whom he admitted, on his deathbed in an interview, was a thinker in whose terms he thought most resonantly) ultimately arrived at was the conclusion that it isn't a matter of political divide and framing with which we ought to occupy ourselves; rather, it is simply a divide between what is human and forces that actively seek to subvert what is human. Foucault, of course, took psychology to be one of these forces, or rather a tool of such forces.
Newsflash: all evil in the world isn't traceable to conservatives or wealthy individuals. Nor is it traceable to left-wing individuals.
You might try to be less disparaging and politically "Rah-rah! The right!" It's myopic and, frankly, sophomoric.