The article reads to me as straightforwardly saying “I know [wokeness] is nowhere near the most important issue I could be focusing on [but I find myself doing it anyways]” and reflecting on why he (and others) feel so much more passionate and outraged about topics like pronouns (for him) and racial slurs (for people on the left), when there are so many things that from a system 2 perspective are much bigger deals that he and others feel much less passionate about when they come up (like genocide).
This feels like an interesting point (though I have disagreements with some of the writing in the essay). I have failed to find a literal sentence with “I think genocide is more important than X”, since he mostly invokes the term when talking about how he is surprised how dispassionate other people are about that topic, but the overall content of the post is the opposite of what I thought he was going to say when Peter linked to it.
It agree he also says it might be in the top 5-10, which I agree seems somewhat incongruent, though like, the whole point of the post is to explore internal cognitive dissonance in him and others, so some inconsistency doesn’t seem inappropriate (though yeah, I think it makes the post worse and the meaning less clear, which is still bad).
Eh, I personally think of some things in the top 10 as “nowhere near” the most important issues, because of how heavy-tailed cause prioritization tends to be.
That’s reasonable. My point is that it’s much less clear and open to contestation that Hanania’s article says the opposite of what the headline is, but given the example is ~retracted anyway my point is not important
The article reads to me as straightforwardly saying “I know [wokeness] is nowhere near the most important issue I could be focusing on [but I find myself doing it anyways]” and reflecting on why he (and others) feel so much more passionate and outraged about topics like pronouns (for him) and racial slurs (for people on the left), when there are so many things that from a system 2 perspective are much bigger deals that he and others feel much less passionate about when they come up (like genocide).
This feels like an interesting point (though I have disagreements with some of the writing in the essay). I have failed to find a literal sentence with “I think genocide is more important than X”, since he mostly invokes the term when talking about how he is surprised how dispassionate other people are about that topic, but the overall content of the post is the opposite of what I thought he was going to say when Peter linked to it.
He says wokeness is in the “top 5-10, depending how you count”. That doesn’t seem to be ‘nowhere near’?
The text in quotes is a quote:
It agree he also says it might be in the top 5-10, which I agree seems somewhat incongruent, though like, the whole point of the post is to explore internal cognitive dissonance in him and others, so some inconsistency doesn’t seem inappropriate (though yeah, I think it makes the post worse and the meaning less clear, which is still bad).
Eh, I personally think of some things in the top 10 as “nowhere near” the most important issues, because of how heavy-tailed cause prioritization tends to be.
Yeah, I was thinking about that as well. Seems plausible for something to be top 5-10 and also “nowhere near”.
That’s reasonable. My point is that it’s much less clear and open to contestation that Hanania’s article says the opposite of what the headline is, but given the example is ~retracted anyway my point is not important