The Self-Satisfaction of the Epistemically Broken

[erudito]

Over forty years ago, in 1965, a case pursuing social justice for indigenous Australia was underway. It was the The Northern Territory Cattle Industry Case of 1965-6. The simple proposition, and surely unimpeachable, principle of equality before the law was to be applied to Aboriginal workers in the pastoral industry

Comments

The Saddest Bit Of All...

[bar_barra]

... is when leftish young men and women actually go and found out what it's really like up there. I am not talking about the smug, the self-satisfied and the Worldly Wisemans of fashionable society either. I have a friend who did 3 years of Obst & Gyn in Darwin Hospital. I do not think she has entirely recovered from the experience.

[paradigmshifty]

Up front - I'm not disagreeing with you, more just pondering aloud.

How can evidence be 'wrong'? It can be irrelevant, or false. But I can't see how it can be wrong, unless you're meaning in a mindset or crusader-ish way? (Which is what I suspect.)

As you say

[erudito]

I do mean in a mindset or crusader-ish way. As you say, evidence cannot be "wrong" in a moral sense unless you are doing, as Matt Ridley perceptively put it, the pc thing of having ought imply is so that what empirical data one cites becomes itself a moral issue, all factual issue become moral issues.

Re: As you say

[paradigmshifty]

Evidence can't be wrong unless one has already made up one's mind on what should be the correct answer, regardless of the evidence.

Kind of like fundamentalist religions, as a case in point.

Re: As you say

[erudito]

Quite. And a terrible basis for policy. Like, for example, fundamentalist religion.

Blind Groupthink

[jordan179]

Yet if evidence is no basis for critical comment, and consequences are no basis for critical comment, that only leaves motive as the criteria for judgement. But raising problems of evidence implies a lack of appropriate motive, raising problems of consequences implies a lack of appropriate motive, so such critique fails the motive test. A self-insulating circularity.

This is also why ad hominem attacks, if originating from "virtuous" persons, have become seen as rational and acceptable practice in the current Left. Obviously, if motive is the only remaining source of criticism, then all criticisms must be on motive, and hence "to the man."

So we have a mindset which demonstrably dismissive of inconvenient evidence, dismissive of inconvenient worries about consequences, dismissive of those deemed to be the “wrong” voices: a self-referential mindset listening to its own echoes. One that acknowledges no authority, or possible authority, outside itself. It is epistemically broken.This could be extended to all PC, or even groupthink, in