Every time I’ve seen someone make this same point on the forum about Emile Torres’ use of the “white supremacy” label they get net downvoted. A bit off topic, and I hesitate to bring it up because it’s not clear who specifically is implicated in inconsistency here, but I do notice a bias in the voting on comments like this in the different contexts that I think is worth pointing out. For my own part I guess I think the distinction matters denotationally at least but comes with costs in misleading connotation that usually makes it better to phrase things differently.
A key difference is that there is strong evidence that Émile P. Torres is an intellectually dishonest critic. By contrast, when a typical EA Forum user draws a distinction between e.g. “bigoted” and “bigot”, there is no reason to suppose they are exploiting the difference to make toxic insinuations about other people.
(Posted under an anonymous account because I don’t want Torres to harass me, as he has done previously when I posted under my real name.)
I looked back at the specific instances I remembered of this, and they weren’t quite how I remembered. There were more instances that I don’t remember specific enough information about to find again, which makes linking to a source for my impression hard, but given how I misremembered the instances I could check up on specifically, I’m more generally suspicious of how well grounded my impression actually was. I still think a tendency of this sort exists to some extent, but I’m tentatively unendorsing my original comment.
Every time I’ve seen someone make this same point on the forum about Emile Torres’ use of the “white supremacy” label they get net downvoted. A bit off topic, and I hesitate to bring it up because it’s not clear who specifically is implicated in inconsistency here, but I do notice a bias in the voting on comments like this in the different contexts that I think is worth pointing out. For my own part I guess I think the distinction matters denotationally at least but comes with costs in misleading connotation that usually makes it better to phrase things differently.
A key difference is that there is strong evidence that Émile P. Torres is an intellectually dishonest critic. By contrast, when a typical EA Forum user draws a distinction between e.g. “bigoted” and “bigot”, there is no reason to suppose they are exploiting the difference to make toxic insinuations about other people.
(Posted under an anonymous account because I don’t want Torres to harass me, as he has done previously when I posted under my real name.)
FYI, pretty sure Torres uses ‘they’: https://twitter.com/xriskology
Link?
I looked back at the specific instances I remembered of this, and they weren’t quite how I remembered. There were more instances that I don’t remember specific enough information about to find again, which makes linking to a source for my impression hard, but given how I misremembered the instances I could check up on specifically, I’m more generally suspicious of how well grounded my impression actually was. I still think a tendency of this sort exists to some extent, but I’m tentatively unendorsing my original comment.
That’s really impressive, love seeing people update their beliefs in real time