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Comment by b215826 | Hacker News Reader

I really don't understand the psychology of the woke who seem to like punishment more than dialogue and I don't see anything particularly troubling in the letter published in the Listener [1]. What's even more shocking is that Prof. Cooper is of Maori descent himself [2][3].

[1]: https://www.fsu.nz/in_defence_of_science_article

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garth_Cooper

[3]: https://www.fsu.nz/m_ori_professor_under_investigation_for_v...

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Social media has turned everyone into a politician. People like it when other people they dislike get punished. By being punishing, people become more popular, and gain social power. Truth is irrelevant, because politicians don't become popular and powerful by being truthful.

This is a fundamental sickness that social media creates. It is not just the "woke", it is basically everyone attached to non-anonymous social media.

My theory is that the 'woke' have trouble distinguishing between the legitimately intolerant folks they oppose, who are not looking for any good faith expression of free speech, and other people who don't agree with them but are in fact making a good faith attempt to discuss it.

The situation isn't helped by the continued existence of bad faith 'free speech' trolls. That's probably by design.

I wouldn't assume good faith. There have been psych studies on virtue signallers and victim signallers, and they found much higher levels of narcissism and psychopathy than in the general population.

Sure, but I think assuming bad faith is a big contributor to how we ended up in this mess to begin with. So I assume good faith as much as I can, until I have a convincing reason to believe otherwise.

The study is convincing reason to believe otherwise. Not in any one specific case, but in terms of understanding where the phenomenon comes from in general.

And a response from one of the authors of the government working group material (see my other post ITT): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2021.1...

edit: the user above has made significant changes to their post since I replied initially; at first, the post above only contained a single link to the letter...

One somewhat cynical way of describing the mentality at play in more militant wokeism is to recognize that a lot of people consider social capital to be a zero sum game. A power struggle. In order for one faction to make advancement, another faction must be weakened. Dialogue from this perspective is not going to be productive if there is no common interest. This perspective on social power is by no means a recent invention. Even within science itself it's undeniable that there are power struggles. Plank famously said that "science advances one funeral at a time".

It's very jarring to find yourself on the receiving end of something that appears to be an unprovoked attack. And you might be totally justified in that belief. But it's worth considering for a moment if there might be some amount of truth in what they are saying. If you are living your whole life inside an exclusionary fortress of social power, you might be totally unaware of the battles happening outside the walls.

You don't understand it because you bring a scientific argument to a political fight for power.

I believe there's an easy explanation. The "woke" are usually thise nonconformant personalities who got ignored, mocked and often bullied in schools. They couldn't fight back, so they had to bottle up their anger and this anger has disfigured their personalities. They hate the archetype of their school bullies - conformant, often good looking and smart, but cruel white males. They can't reliably distinguish their bullies from an average white male, so they hate them all equally. Some people at the top have realised that if the woke's anger is released, it can be directed against political enemies. This is why they've been putting the woke in administrative positions and giving them some protection and publicity. So they are just a tool in a power struggle.

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