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Comment by tnzm | Hacker News Reader

Fair enough. I still believe that tiptoeing around these issues gives power to those who consciously perpetrate and benefit from institutionalized violence.

Like another commenter said, operating with a comfortably skewed mental model doesn't help resolve the actual socioeconomic issues.

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I was a little hyperbolic in my original answer. In all honesty, I think it's probably best to continue research in this area. However, in the current state of the world I don't see how that research is especially beneficial. Every finding would have to be taken with such a massive grain of salt that I have a hard time imagining we would find practical applications for it.

In the current state of the world, most scientific research will be co-opted by some violent apparatus or another. Does that mean we should lose hope and stop doing any research altogether?

By current state of the world, I mean that any research into this topic can't control for all the possible variables. That's why we'd have to take it with such a large grain of salt.

Good try at the "gotcha" though ;D

That's why I brought up metaphysics and e-prime actually. We can't resolve societal contradictions in a fundamental way if we do not have the tools to reason about them, and the main tool we have for that, human language, can at times be pitifully inconsistent and ambiguous - even if one does, in fact, control for people's automatic emotional reactions to controversial subjects.

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