A Criticism of The First Quillette Wrongspeak Podcast on "James Damore's Inconvenient Brain"
Glad to see this podcast appear...but I wasn't too psyched about one of the main themes in the first installment. To wit: the defense of Damore on the grounds that he's "on the spectrum," and that such people might be more inclined to speak inconvenient truths that offend people.
Maybe the idea is to run a consistency ad hominem of the form: firing Damore is wrong even according to PC/SJ principles. But it's not represented that way in the podcast--not that I caught, anyway. The strategy, of course, risks defending the lower-order point (Damore shouldn't have been fired) at the cost of (seemingly) supporting the higher-order point to the effect that such decisions should be made (largely? solely?) on the basis of the participants' position in the "progressive stack." Truth-seeking isn't confined to people who are "on the spectrum," and it needn't (shouldn't!) be defended in such terms. What Damore wrote was reasonable, and his alleged "neuroatypicality" is of secondary--if that--importance.
It's tempting to use their own arguments against them. But it's suboptimal, since it risks endorsing / strengthening those higher-order views / inferences / strategies.
Maybe the idea is to run a consistency ad hominem of the form: firing Damore is wrong even according to PC/SJ principles. But it's not represented that way in the podcast--not that I caught, anyway. The strategy, of course, risks defending the lower-order point (Damore shouldn't have been fired) at the cost of (seemingly) supporting the higher-order point to the effect that such decisions should be made (largely? solely?) on the basis of the participants' position in the "progressive stack." Truth-seeking isn't confined to people who are "on the spectrum," and it needn't (shouldn't!) be defended in such terms. What Damore wrote was reasonable, and his alleged "neuroatypicality" is of secondary--if that--importance.
It's tempting to use their own arguments against them. But it's suboptimal, since it risks endorsing / strengthening those higher-order views / inferences / strategies.
posted by Winston Smith at
9:02 AM
1 Comments:
Your assessment reminds me of my thoughts on the Lindsay Shepherd episode. That one had a lot more "It was okay because she didn't say she agreed with Jordan Peterson" instead of "Jordan Peterson's views aren't anything even remotely in the ballpark of something you have to be afraid to agree with, let alone play in a classroom". They didn't defend the mischaracterization of the JP argument which was being against compelled speech, not transgendered people.
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