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#standpoint epistemology
thosearentcrimes · 5 months
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I know that kind of person generally isn't into standpoint epistemology type stuff, but I am, so personally I really hope that when worldoptimization gets back she does some posts about the prisoner's dilemma
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pratchettquotes · 2 years
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Would eternity feel like a long time, or were all lives--from a personal viewpoint--entirely the same length?
Terry Pratchett, Mort
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"'Fact' is not anybody’s experience; it states the experience of no one in particular. When the police detective says, “Just the facts please, ma’am,” he is asking, What would I have seen—what would anyone have seen, what would no one in particular have seen—at the scene of the crime?
By definition, then, if we take the empirical rule (no personal authority) seriously, revelation cannot be the basis for fact, because it is not publicly available. Similarly, attempts to claim a special kind of experience or checking for any particular person or kind of person—male or female, black or white, tall or short—are strictly illicit.
After a woman was raped by a gang of teenagers in New York City, the Reverend Al Sharpton said that there was no proof that a rape had occurred, because the victim was being attended by white doctors. In other words, white checkers’ findings do not count. That is illicit; if you make different rules for black and white checkers, you are not doing science.
Paranormalists who claim to have verified psychic phenomena often rely upon single experiments; later, when some other investigator fails to find the claimed effect, they reply (for instance) that the necessary psychic energy was blocked by the presence of a skeptic. That also is illicit; if the way you are checking works only for people with a sympathetic attitude, or if your results are not replicable by others in a reasonably regular fashion, you are not doing science.
The same applies to Christian Scientists and others who believe in faith healing but say that attempts to check it work only for the faithful. Believers in miracles argue that miraculous events can be witnessed and understood properly only by those to whom God chooses to reveal himself. That also is illicit. If the way you are seeing and explaining works only for the religious, you are breaking the rules."
-- Jonathan Rauch, "Kindly Inquisitors"
Rejecting divine revelation but not standpoint epistemology (or vice versa), makes you inconsistent.
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metamatar · 1 year
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Broader cultural norms – the sort set in motion by prefacing statements with “As a Black man…” – cued up a set of standpoint-respecting practices that many of us know consciously or unconsciously by rote. However, the forms of deference that often follow are ultimately self-undermining and only reliably serve “elite capture”: the control over political agendas and resources by a group’s most advantaged people. If we want to use standpoint epistemology to challenge unjust power arrangements, it’s hard to imagine how we could do worse.
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Doing better than the epistemic norms we’ve inherited from a history of explicit global apartheid is an awfully low bar to set. The facts that explain who ends up in which room shape our world much more powerfully than the squabbles for comparative prestige between people who have already made it into the rooms. And when the conversation is about social justice, the mechanisms of the social system that determine who gets into which room often just are the parts of society we aim to address.
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Elites from marginalized groups can benefit from this arrangement in ways that are compatible with social progress. But treating group elites’ interests as necessarily or even presumptively aligned with full group interests involves a political naiveté we cannot afford. Such treatment of elite interests functions as a racial Reaganomics: a strategy reliant on fantasies about the exchange rate between the attention economy and the material economy.
Perhaps the lucky few who get jobs finding the most culturally authentic and cosmetically radical description of the continuing carnage are really winning one for the culture. Then, after we in the chattering class get the clout we deserve and secure the bag, its contents will eventually trickle down to the workers who clean up after our conferences, to slums of the Global South’s megacities, to its countryside.
But probably not.
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How would a constructive approach to putting standpoint epistemology into practice differ from a deferential approach? A constructive approach would focus on the pursuit of specific goals or end results rather than avoiding “complicity” in injustice or adhering to moral principles. It would be concerned primarily with building institutions and cultivating practices of information-gathering rather than helping. It would focus on accountability rather than conformity. It would calibrate itself directly to the task of redistributing social resources and power rather than to intermediary goals cashed out in terms of pedestals or symbolism. It would focus on building and rebuilding rooms, not regulating traffic within and between them – it would be a world-making project: aimed at building and rebuilding actual structures of social connection and movement, rather than mere critique of the ones we already have.
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The constructive approach to standpoint epistemology is demanding. It asks that we swim upstream: to be accountable and responsive to people who aren’t yet in the room, to build the kinds of rooms we could sit in together, rather than merely judiciously navigating the rooms history has built for us. But this weighty demand is par for the course when it comes to the politics of knowledge: the American philosopher Sandra Harding famously pointed out that standpoint epistemology, properly understood, demands more rigour from science and knowledge production processes generally, not less.
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference
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thearbourist · 2 years
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How Can this Be University - A Thought Experiment
How Can this Be University – A Thought Experiment
  This is what we are going up against.  The primacy of stand-point epistemology(1) versus the common reality we all share is huge barrier to overcome as any sort of argument of discussion can be had.  I think this is the situation that we have to prepare for when dealing with people who have been knowingly or unknowingly indoctrinated into a Critical Theory (2) mind-set.   The ‘social workers’…
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yuri-alexseygaybitch · 8 months
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One of the cringiest flavors of Canada's faux-progressive hasbara bullshit is the sheer amount of publically-funded art and media "acknowledging" " "bringing awareness to" "holding space for" etc. some shitty thing that happened in Canada or is happening right now instead of, you know, actually trying to fix those things. Oh the NFB funded another documentary about indigenous land rights while the government is trying to get rid of them? Canada helped fund an art installation about how unaffordable housing in Vancouver is instead of doing literally anything to actual fix that problem? How fucking helpful
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isomorbism · 1 month
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anyway you do not need to share any information such as your sexuality, gender, agab, nationality, race, ethnicity, disability status, or anything else online unless you want to (or you need to because you want to discuss your personal experience with a type of bigotry or something). how is this a hot take lmfaooo
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poetickrogan · 10 months
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just saw a blatantly homophobic post, but they put 'white' in front of gays to cover it, so we are officially back in pride season
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caesarsaladinn · 1 year
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why would the developers (or Ocelot) give Snake binoculars when he, well, isn’t? save some weight and cut them in half.
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chicago-geniza · 1 year
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immediate echolalic template - inverted commas, like vogel's white words, to denote/demarcate a purely utilitarian phrase, so overused as a cliche or discursively circumscribed it had become wholly instrumental and voided of meaning!!! - '"as a survivor" of actual child abuse i have the moral and epistemic authority to tell you to shut the fuck up'
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quelliee · 3 months
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there's a big difference between standpoint epistemology, the observation that marginalized people are better positioned to understand certain social processes, and "the only way to understand anything is through first hand experience"
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jamuqa · 9 months
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obsessed with an anon i just saw who implied that only teenage girls can understand danaerys targaryen, a character famously written by an old man
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Blonde sounds awful, the abortion stuff holy shit🤮
even with all of the controversy, I was still curious about it and even willing to give it the benefit of the doubt but from what I’ve read it sounds sexist and lurid to me. I’ll probably still watch it at some point cause I’m a film buff but idk…
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By: Jesse Singal
Published: Oct 7, 2021
Recently, the Urban Institute, a highly respected think tank, published an article online headlined “Equitable Research Requires Questioning the Status Quo.” The article argues that “long-standing values and practices rooted in racism, ableism, and classism are ingrained in the fabric of research, leaving many researchers unaware of the harm they are causing. Researchers can counteract harmful aspects of these practices by sharing power with the people and communities they study.”
To help researchers do better, the post lists three “Harmful Research Practices.” Two of them are ‘objectivity’ and ‘rigor.’ This seems strange. Aren’t objectivity and rigor the hallmarks of any decent knowledge-producing body? The Urban Institute, after all, touts itself as “a nonprofit research organization that believes decisions shaped by facts, rather than ideology, have the power to improve public policy and practice, strengthen communities, and transform people’s lives for the better.” It’s unclear what the words ‘unbiased’ and ‘authoritative’ and ‘facts’ could possibly mean in the absence of ideals like objectivity and rigor, even if, as is true of literally every human ideal, these concepts can be abused to justify malevolent acts or beliefs.
(To be clear, the post explicitly calls objectivity and rigor “Harmful research practices.” It does not say something like “they are generally good things that can be abused.” If the post did say that, there would be no reason for it to exist, because this is a very obvious point. But whenever these sorts of arguments arise, someone pops up to say, “Well, really what they’re saying is…” No! That’s a motte-and-bailey tactic and it’s annoying and we should glide on right past it.)
This explicit denunciation of objectivity and rigor and other crucial intellectual concepts isn’t new, unfortunately. It’s been percolating in liberal spaces for a while — particularly in education. Back in 2019, for example, I wrote about a slide from a training given to administrators in the New York City public school system which described ‘Individualism,’ “Worship of the Written Word,” and, yes, ‘Objectivity,’ among other things, as elements of “White Supremacy Culture.” (The New York Post originally broke that story, reporting that some administrators, unsurprisingly, were not happy with the training.)
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https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/equitable-research-requires-questioning-status-quo
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The idea that the people with “lived experience” are just as qualified as those studying a subject objectively is like saying that you know your cancer better than the oncologist with 16 years of medical training on the subject. It couldn’t, for example, be that a community has accepted and stuck to an answer or solution entirely through tradition or authority? What was their methodology? Because if you’re going to be suspicious of one methodology, then you need to be suspicious of them all, for consistency’s sake. (”Consistency” probably falls under the white supremacy of “rigor” though, huh?)
And it means deciding consciously and right up front, that the truth, no matter what it might be, is not the priority. That sensitivities and feelings supersede the pursuit of knowledge, and certain answers are presumed to be unacceptable. Which is no better than presupposing the answers, as any religious apologist does.
It’s particularly gross, in a “Noble Savage” fetish kind of way, to assume that such a community’s “ways of knowing” don’t stand up to objective and rational scrutiny, or that they aren’t based on those same principles in the first place. There’s a built-in assumption that they don’t stand up, but it’s wrong to look too closely.
The Urban Institute’s process is reliable and repeatable: Find things that undermine your ideology and activism. Label and associate them with something bad to demonize them and create alarm. Redefine the bad thing. Repeatedly call people the bad thing to discourage them from doing the undermining things -- until the bad thing becomes watered down and meaningless.
It worked for Xians. They made rock music and science tool of the Devil, and therefore musicians and people who want to teach science are evil and to be opposed. So many things are now the work of the Devil that not only can any Xian claim anything to be the work of the Devil, but nobody actually cares.
You know you’re through the looking glass when you have to ask “real white supremacy, or the imaginary objectivity-is-white-supremacy kind?” As with calling everything “trauma,” this obscures identifying and tackling - not to mention, provides cover for - actual white supremacy, instead of obsessively piddling around with the imaginary kind.
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metamatar · 3 months
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But antara you work with computers. Your livelihood isn't dependent on art. People whose livelihood depend on making artwork are saying that this is bad for business. Shouldn't their voice matter here? They aren't imperialists for not wanting corporates to train softwares on their stolen art. And how long till artists contribution are curtailed even more. It is a competitive market. This will jack the competition level upto a thousand + level!
I never called them imperialists. The art is not stolen from them. They still have the original copies. Intellectual property theft is a genuinely meaningless concept. I understand that they're worried, and I have sympathy. But the problem is in their fear they're getting in bed with reactionary forces. That will hurt more than artists, it hurts everyone in the way it makes copyright enforcement more draconian. I highlighted what that looked like in the last reblog of this.
sure, you can standpoint epistemology me into a heartless techbro – but I find this insistence on the special position of artists to be considered for protection from technological forces frankly self invested too. we didn't get this hysteria when grocery store cashiers got replaced by self checkout machines or skilled assembly line workers got replaced by KUKA industrial arms or bookkeepers by accounting software – is it because some workers and their work involve intrinsically more valuable skills than others? if not, shouldn't we ban any technology that can potentially replace a worker? protein folding and drug discovery by AI may save lives, but its taking jobs away from older researchers who did traditional work. should we all burn down washing machines so we can have laundrywomen again? or should we argue for stronger social security and reorganise our society to enjoy reduced working hours when jobs are automated and let people pursue work that they want without market pressures?
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thearbourist · 2 years
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Feminist Standpoint Epistemology - Playing with Fire
Feminist Standpoint Epistemology – Playing with Fire
What it is – “Feminist standpoint theorists make three principal claims: (1) Knowledge is socially situated. (2) Marginalized groups are socially situated in ways that make it more possible for them to be aware of things and ask questions than it is for the non-marginalized. (3) Research, particularly that focused on power relations, should begin with the lives of the marginalized. Feminist…
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