Truth vs Practicality in the "Woke" Mind
Sorry for the delay.
You may consider my outgroup to be the "woke" writ large. I assume Scott's writing is to convince liberals and the left to push back against growing online censorship. To convince people, you need to understand their internal thought process and feelings. And I'm concerned because I don't think Scott's article here fully address their internal thought process.
I've deviated off the racial violence example because, well, it's very CW and that tends to make discussion difficult. Instead, I'm trying to find examples where Maxwell or you could feel something similar to what liberals and leftists feel. So, for example, when Maxwell responds that they're "assuming the question", imagine we're working in a factory where one person dies every day from a mechanical failure. We're confident that we've found the problem but when we take it to upper management to get approval to fix it, there's some guy who keeps saying that the evidence isn't conclusive enough, we need to gather more data. That's defensible for awhile but at some point the additional data isn't really telling us anything and we just need to implement the fix.
I think this is how the "woke" would view this. The advantage of open debate is it's ability to determine the truth but at some point all "reasonable" people know what needs to be done and further debate is detrimental to the actual task of solving the problem.
Which, to be clear, I sympathize with. The goal of public policy isn't to have interesting debates, it's to improve society. An 80% solution implemented today is better than a 90% solution a year from now. I get this vibe and I think anyone who has done practical work gets it as well.
So, generally, I think the "woke" view racial policing this way. All "reasonable" people know what the problem is, "racism", and know the solution, "awareness and broad cultural anti-racism", backed up by legal and administrative penalties as necessary. Every day this is delayed equals dead black people.
And I think Maxwell and/or you and/or others could get this. I'm not saying it's correct, I'm extremely confident the "woke" are wrong, but I do think this is how the woke internally perceive it. If you want to persuade people, as I "think" Scott was trying, you need to correctly model their internal mind. I don't think Scott did, I think he's making an appeal to truth discovery which the "woke" will perceive as nitpicking while real people are dying.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies/comment/11395144