Eric Weinstein's Tweet isn't really about the "race" of this perpetrator and the "race" of this victim. Tomorrow there will be another incident in which the "races" will be reversed and then that news coverage (and lack thereof) will also be reversed. THAT is what is tragic. We are now divided so sharply that we refuse to see the humanity in members of outgroups.
To satisfy our selectively-blinded morality and to sell commercials, our respective teams of "news" media now look only for facts that fit predetermined narratives, ignoring everything that doesn't fit. In other words, our "news" stories are pre-written nuance free, with a few blanks left open for tonight's names and tonight's minor details. And since there is so much going on, they will easily find the stories they seek, the kinds of stories that are guaranteed to make us nod, then clench our fists, then vomit our anger at the opposing team on social media.
We and our teams of "news" media have trained each other so very well that these insane battle lines now seem inevitable. So much so that if Jesus, The Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King all suddenly appeared and earnestly reminded us to love both our neighbors and our enemies, it would would unite us, if only for a moment. We would tell them all to go fuck off.
Using a novel technique known as network meta-analysis, we synthesized evidence from 492 studies (87,418 participants) to investigate the effectiveness of procedures in changing implicit measures, which we define as response biases on implicit tasks. We also evaluated these procedures' effects on explicit and behavioral measures. We found that implicit measures can be changed, but effects are often relatively weak (|ds| < .30). Most studies focused on producing short-term changes with brief, single-session manipulations. Procedures that associate sets of concepts, invoke goals or motivations, or tax mental resources changed implicit measures the most, whereas procedures that induced threat, affirmation, or specific moods/emotions changed implicit measures the least. Bias tests suggested that implicit effects could be inflated relative to their true population values. Procedures changed explicit measures less consistently and to a smaller degree than implicit measures and generally produced trivial changes in behavior. Finally, changes in implicit measures did not mediate changes in explicit measures or behavior. Our findings suggest that changes in implicit measures are possible, but those changes do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit measures or behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
Compelled speech is increasingly being portrayed as "education." A recent illustration has come to light. Last year, Sandia National Laboratories sent its executives to reeducation camp: The training materials and the context for the training were reported by Christopher Rufo, a filmmaker, writer, and policy researcher. On his website, Rufo states (and I agree):
It’s time to expose this taxpayer-funded pseudoscience and rally the White House and legislators to stop these deeply divisive training sessions. My goal is simple: we must pass legislation to “abolish critical race theory” in the federal government. Let’s push as far as we can.
Under economic threat (the potential threat to employment that would be felt by any employee asked to attend), this camp required the employees to listen to, and in many cases publicly acknowledge, racist and sexist absurdities, including the following:
I've followed Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt closely for many years (as you can see by searching for his name at DI). He is the author of several excellent books, including The Happiness Hypothesis, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Coddling of the American Mind. Haidt's thought process crosscuts the prevailing two wings of political thought in the United States. In this extended interview with Joe Rogan, Haidt dissects many topics, including identity politics. He urges that this phrase encompasses two separate approaches, "Common Enemy Politics" and "Common Humanity."
Haidt also distinguishes between two prevalent types of conversations, two types of "games" being played that often make conversations frustrating. Many of us insist upon playing the "truth seeking game," while others play a game that assumes a Manichean battle where A) no one gains except at the expense of someone else, B) where people are not seen as individuals but a members of groups, and C) you can tell who someone is merely by their appearance. Much of the fruitless dialogue on social media and elsewhere makes a lot more sense once we realize that these two approaches have virtually nothing in common--they serve entirely different purposes. Just because we exchange words does not mean we are, in any meaningful way, communicating.
In addition to embedding the video of the interview, I invested some time to create a transcript of several sections of this interview, from about Min. 33 - 55. I have cleaned up the wording to omit throat-clearings and false starts, but I have worked hard to be true to the substance of the conversation.
33:18
JH: You have to look at different games being played. Yale was a place that taught me to think in lots of different ways and it was constantly blowing my mind when I took my first economics course. It was like wow, here's a new pair of spectacles that I can put on and suddenly I see all these prices and supply. I never learned to think that way, where I learned about Freud in psychology or sociology. A good education is one that lets you look at our complicated world through multiple perspectives. That makes you smart. That's what a liberal arts education should do. But what I see increasingly happening, especially at elite schools, is the dominance of a single story, and that single story is life is a battle between good people and evil people, or rather good groups and evil groups, and it's a zero-sum game. So if the bad groups have more, it's because they took it from the good groups, so the point of everything is to fight the bad groups. Bring them down create equality and this is a terrible way to think in a free society. That might have worked you know in biblical days when you got the Moabites killing the Jebusites or whatever, but you know we live in an era in which we've discovered that that the pie can be grown a million-fold. So to teach students to see society as a zero-sum competition between groups is primitive and destructive.
34:22
JR: In your book, you actually identify the moment where these micro aggressions made their appearance and they were initially a racist thing.
JH: Yeah. The idea of a micro aggression really becomes popular in a 2007 article by Derald Wing Sue at Teachers College. He talks about this concept of microaggressions. There are two things that are good about the concept, that are useful. One is that explicit racism has clearly gone down--by any measure explicit racism is plummeted in American across the West—but there could still be subtle or veiled a racism.
37:27
JR It's ultimately for everyone's sake, I mean, even for the sake of the people that are embroiled in all this controversy and chaos. It would be fantastic across the board if there was no more sexism, there was no more racism, there was no more any of these things. It would be wonderful. Then we could just start treating humans as just humans. Like this is just who you are you're just a person. No one cares. What a wonderful world we would live in if this was no longer an issue at all.
JH: Beautifully put.
JR: How does that get through?
38:01
JH: We were getting there, okay? That's what the twentieth century was. We were shaped by the late 20th century. The late 20th century was a time in America in which, you know, earlier on there was all kinds of prejudice. I mean, when I was born, just right before you were born, it was legal to say you can't eat here because you're Black and so that changed in 1964-65. But it used to be that we had legal differentiations by race and then those were knocked down. But we still had social [discrimination] and it used to be that if you were gay that was something humiliating. It had to be hidden. If you look at where we were in 1960 or ’63, when I was born and then you look at where we got by 2000, the progress is fantastic on every front, so that's all I mean when I say we were moving in that direction.
I first encountered Zuby on Twitter, where I was intrigued by his upbeat mini-prose. Zuby says that his race is the most uninteresting thing about himself. If I told you that Zuby currently lives on the southern coast of England, you probably wouldn’t guess that he spent much of his life in Saudi Arabia. If I told you that Zuby was an up and coming rap artist, you probably wouldn’t guess that also graduated from Oxford, with a degree in computer science or that he spent several years of his life as a business consultant. In addition to creating music, Zuby is now an author, podcaster, public speaker, fitness expert and life coach. Zuby refuses to allow his do not fall into any predictable silo. To make a political point that trans women should not be allowed to participate in women’s sports, he posted a video in which he claimed to have broken the British Women's deadlift record of 238kg (528 pounds). Zuby claimed that he "identified as a woman whilst lifting the weight."
On July 24, 2020, Zuby joined Brett Weinstein on the DarkHorse podcast. I took the Youtube transcript, edited it for clarity and present it here as an introduction to Zuby.
Zuby - Min 74:53
There are certain games you win by just not playing. Just don't play that game. Don't get dragged into this thing. It's something I experience. I always feel like I've often got people, especially nowadays, trying to drag me into things that I don't want to get involved with. I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think it helps.
My worldview is really simple when it comes to stuff like this. It is the Martin Luther King, Jr. vision. The way I was raised from when I was a child growing up in Saudi Arabia . . . from the beginning I've been surrounded by all types of different people, different religions different colors, different ethnicities, different nationalities, whatever. That's just been the norm for me forever, so the whole idea of viewing people through this very narrow lens, from being a child I've always thought, it's silly and it's asinine. It makes me somewhat upset when I see that now day in and day out. It's white this and black that. Can we can we stop?
So much of this is just unnecessary and it's antagonizing and it forces people to keep viewing the world that way. That's the least interesting thing. It's such an uninteresting thing about someone. That's the thing. The fact that I'm a black male is one of the least interesting things about me. It certainly doesn't say anything about my personality or my character or my beliefs or my abilities or anything. Yeah, it's observable and, cool, okay. But if someone is talking to me, I don't want that to be the thing that's in their head and that they're obsessing over. I'd like them just to talk to me. I'm Zuby. Just talk to me and we'll be cool. We can be friends. All that stuff is details.
There is a growing tent of people who are politically sort of in the center left and center right who are sort of uniting and recognizing that they're tired of the extremism and they don't like cancel culture and they don't like this super identity politics thing on any side, and they don't want to destroy the whole system and they don't think the country is terrible. I think there's that there's that growing group of people Who I think are slowly gaining a bit more and more courage. I think that they're sort of seeing podcasts like this. What I'm doing with my podcast and you know whether it's Joe Rogan or Dave Rubin, etc. like all these guys, they're sort of saying okay, cool.
People are talking about this and there's a range of people here who are sensible and don't want to scream at each other and call each other racist every three seconds. There's that growing group, so I do hope that that swells and gains enough courage and momentum for people to eventually just be like, okay, look, like we're going to stop entertaining the crazies and we're going to stop letting them sort of determine everything and set all the rules and control everybody and cancel everybody. I think once enough once there's enough critical mass there, then you can get back to a sort of stage of normalcy where people are being reasonable again. And we can actually solve some of the problems because we can talk.
Zuby - Min 29:20
In the in the USA, you guys say Black American, African-American, Latino, American, white American etc. Here (in Great Britain) we just say “British.” Right! There you go. So it's not common to hear that this person is white British or this person is a Black Brit.
Zuby - Min 12:12
Last week I spent two days just getting attacked for the fact that I said that it's bad to be racist to white people. I was getting emails, DMs like, all kinds of horrible stuff, for me saying no, this is bad. This isn't good. I don't think we should judge people based on the color of their skin or call people inferior or do any of this and then I start getting attacked. What kind of what is this world that we're living in that that is considered? It's a strange thing.
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