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In the same way that Spark turns a program into a plan for cluster computation, there's some sort of process by which an idea and a bunch of talking points gets

In the same way that Spark turns a program into a plan for cluster computation, there's some sort of process by which an idea and a bunch of talking points gets compiled into a big distributed staged media campaign through all channels and institutions that forces culture change that no one asked for. The canonical and somewhat "innocent" example of this is a major advertising campaign for a new pharmaceutical like Prozac for example, where the company pushing it has to explain it through ads, articles, movies (Prozac Diary) and so forth to the general public over a number of years so that people get it as a new element of the social landscape. Related to this is a question that has bugging me is how is the social justice "ideological pipeline" constructed and operated? How does an idea, become an obscure scientific journal article, become a slew of newspaper editorials and human interest stories, which forms a twitter mob, in which the ideological program has been installed on all the "beef only" thinker nodes, then it's own Netflix show, and super hero movie and then becomes a law where you get put in prison for using the wrong pronoun.

pjc50 7y ago
> then becomes a law where you get put in prison for using the wrong pronoun You were going so well until this point, because I guarantee you won't be able to find the story to back this up; it will turn out that the "wrong pronoun" was part of a sustained campaign of harassment or part of a death threat or suchlike. > how is the social justice "ideological pipeline" constructed and operated? I could talk about how this works, but only if you're genuinely interested and willing to take it seriously. And not as part of a beef.
- narrator 7y ago
  You're beefing right now. I will try to explain it to you another way. Maybe you'll get it. See, this is why we can't have nice things. I put that in there to purposefully trigger any beefers and you popped off like a firework. I could have changed it to "... and then Trump becomes president" and you would have smiled approvingly like a good mook. Unfortunately, you're just another robot. Heck, an AI can just play madlibs with you for days and hit all your buttons because you can't think deeper than identity the opponents argument and pick an associated emotion to feel. You throw out the whole rest of the argument and focus on the emotion producing sentence fragment because you got triggered. This is the problem with online social discourse in the 21st century.
- justAnotherNET 7y ago
  Not yet, but the slippery slope turned out to not be a fallacy after all.
opwieurposiu 7y ago
The "ideological pipeline" is a ratchet effect caused by virtue signaling. A group starts with a baseline ideology. This baseline is the minimum set of ideas you must believe in to stay in the group. A new idea comes along, some group members discover they can earn in-group virtue points by espousing this idea. Eventually enough group members espouse this idea that it gets added to the baseline set. A new-new idea is now required for signaling. Thus the ratchet effect.
- narrator 7y ago
  There's got to be some ideological gatekeeper giving out virtue points somewhere though. I like the example of coffee being introduced into the west. Nobody knew what to make of it and eventually the pope was asked to make a decision and he said Coffee is a good thing, and then everybody started drinking coffee all over the west. Where's the "X is a good thing" in the ideological pipeline? So often new ideas bounce around and nobody knows what to make of them and all of a sudden a "strong" argument comes along through multiple channels and then everyone starts lining up.
djannzjkzxn 7y ago
One of the main ways Facebook succeeded was that it started at Harvard and expanded to other elite schools, then gradually opened to more people. The platform was rationed such that it was something you just got access to, that the cool kids were already using. I’d argue that social justice organically grew through a similar pathway. Top schools are full of high class young adults. That includes wealthy kids and lower-income kids who nevertheless have high status in their own communities. Many thousand such people studied social justice in humanities classes in the 90’s. They spread those ideas to their classmates, and after graduating, moved on to lead successful careers in law, education, politics etc. where they spread those ideas to more people until they filtered out to society at large. The missing link you are asking about between academic papers and mass media articles is that the journalists who wrote the mass media articles studied the academic articles in college. I know this firsthand, I went to college with some of these people. For me personally, a big part of the appeal of the social justice mindset is that it helps me feel like I’m on the good team while earning gobs of money for doing easy work in the tech industry while a lot of others are working hard and struggling. I imagine it’s similar to the popularity of communism in intellectual circles many decades ago, before that ideology was discredited by practical failures.

pjc50 7y ago

> then becomes a law where you get put in prison for using the wrong pronoun You were going so well until this point, because I guarantee you won't be able to find the story to back this up; it will turn out that the "wrong pronoun" was part of a sustained campaign of harassment or part of a death threat or suchlike. > how is the social justice "ideological pipeline" constructed and operated? I could talk about how this works, but only if you're genuinely interested and willing to take it seriously. And not as part of a beef.

narrator 7y ago
You're beefing right now. I will try to explain it to you another way. Maybe you'll get it. See, this is why we can't have nice things. I put that in there to purposefully trigger any beefers and you popped off like a firework. I could have changed it to "... and then Trump becomes president" and you would have smiled approvingly like a good mook. Unfortunately, you're just another robot. Heck, an AI can just play madlibs with you for days and hit all your buttons because you can't think deeper than identity the opponents argument and pick an associated emotion to feel. You throw out the whole rest of the argument and focus on the emotion producing sentence fragment because you got triggered. This is the problem with online social discourse in the 21st century.
justAnotherNET 7y ago
Not yet, but the slippery slope turned out to not be a fallacy after all.

opwieurposiu 7y ago

The "ideological pipeline" is a ratchet effect caused by virtue signaling. A group starts with a baseline ideology. This baseline is the minimum set of ideas you must believe in to stay in the group. A new idea comes along, some group members discover they can earn in-group virtue points by espousing this idea. Eventually enough group members espouse this idea that it gets added to the baseline set. A new-new idea is now required for signaling. Thus the ratchet effect.

narrator 7y ago
There's got to be some ideological gatekeeper giving out virtue points somewhere though. I like the example of coffee being introduced into the west. Nobody knew what to make of it and eventually the pope was asked to make a decision and he said Coffee is a good thing, and then everybody started drinking coffee all over the west. Where's the "X is a good thing" in the ideological pipeline? So often new ideas bounce around and nobody knows what to make of them and all of a sudden a "strong" argument comes along through multiple channels and then everyone starts lining up.

djannzjkzxn 7y ago

One of the main ways Facebook succeeded was that it started at Harvard and expanded to other elite schools, then gradually opened to more people. The platform was rationed such that it was something you just got access to, that the cool kids were already using. I’d argue that social justice organically grew through a similar pathway. Top schools are full of high class young adults. That includes wealthy kids and lower-income kids who nevertheless have high status in their own communities. Many thousand such people studied social justice in humanities classes in the 90’s. They spread those ideas to their classmates, and after graduating, moved on to lead successful careers in law, education, politics etc. where they spread those ideas to more people until they filtered out to society at large. The missing link you are asking about between academic papers and mass media articles is that the journalists who wrote the mass media articles studied the academic articles in college. I know this firsthand, I went to college with some of these people. For me personally, a big part of the appeal of the social justice mindset is that it helps me feel like I’m on the good team while earning gobs of money for doing easy work in the tech industry while a lot of others are working hard and struggling. I imagine it’s similar to the popularity of communism in intellectual circles many decades ago, before that ideology was discredited by practical failures.