Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Separation Of (Secular) Church & State

Now that more people are coming to see zealous intersectionality / Social Justice as a de facto new religion, the obvious question is, "what implication does this have for America's tradition of the separation between church and state."

See 1:39:09 in this video for a question
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AvyqUOKhGA&feature=youtu.be





Implications
  1. Universities are supporting the promulgation of a specific religion.
  2. Human resource and Diversity offices should be very careful about whether their actions are de facto proselytization's of a specific religion.
  3. Government and private business are, in many cases, explicitly prioritizing a specific religion, albeit for "good ends".
  4. Some Critical Theory departments may best be integrated into Religious Studies departments.
  5. There should be clear distinctions between the study of certain topics and activism on those topics.
  6. How do you accommodate physical "safe spaces" (physical churches) into public post-secondary campuses?
  7. Can current Religious accommodation laws accommodate the needs / interests of this new religion.
  8. Religious and indigenous perspectives should be elevated in value.




Incorporation
I think the major issue is going to be how Universities use the insights from this class of de facto "religions". For instance, religious studies produce unique and valuable perspectives on ethical topics. Whitehead, one of the major proponents of this perspective was clearly influenced by religion. Modern process philosophy emerged.

Also, religious perspectives can, and often do, fertilize the contemplation of ethical questions about theory and practice.  

Similarly, arguments can be made that the quasi-factual nature of religious thinking can loosen system levels constraints which inhibit creative thinking (see Eric Weinstein's arguments in his discussion with Sam Harris). Basically, the allowance for crazy hypothetical holistically biased ideas ensures that systems don't become so oppressively rigid that they stifle idea generation & development.

This also relates to current foci on native knowledge traditions. Objective truth is objective truth, but different perspectives illuminate different aspects and questions. This process engenders greater creativity. It also has the potential to ground things differently. This is especially true around applicational aspects (which almost always intersect socially constructed considerations).



Activism
I can't see activism as being overly tenable in state sponsored post secondary institutions. To see this, ask yourself what level of Catholic activism you would be comfortable with from a Religious Studies department? Should these professors be encouraging students to protest Planned Parenthood? Should they be staging protests on campus which push people to follow Catholic specific teachings such as no artificial birth control?

While Critical Theory is fundamentally tied to action, I suspect religious categorization will force some hard exploration of what is and what is not acceptable for a religion to do when many of its priests/professors are directly supported by state funds.


Physical Accommodations
One sore spot with respect to intersectional religion is its racist tendencies. Safe spaces require both ideological purity (no offensive ideas or symbols) and racial/sexual purity (you should be of a non-offensive race, sex or gender construct).  Race and sex purity can, of course be mitigated by correct compensators: wokeness, virtue signalling and appropriate physical/behavioural markers (say the right clothes, piercings, hair colour etc.).  But, generally "safe spaces" seem slightly less publicly welcoming than most churches.  While churches can't discriminate based upon race, it seems safe spaces can.

To see how this might work in practice, imagine if an alpha looking male wanted to attend a "female survivors" of sex assault workshop. Many people would suggest this might not be appropriate. However, this is a clear case of sexual discrimination. Unless you carve out "religious" exemptions, it wouldn't stand fair application of law.

But in post-secondary space, religious exemptions for discrimination are few and far between. The space is public, not self-selected and private.  Thus I suspect safe spaces will not survive separation of (secular) church and state.



Conclusion
Personally, this is partly why I see one-directional oppression logic as all but inevitable. Without it, I suspect these nascent religious movements may find growth problematic. Opponents can easily challenge their dynamics by profaning their sacred tenets via free speech and physical inclusion rights. Thus I'm empathetic to these groups needs for protection (free speech limits, one-dimensional racism, safe spaces, etc.). I just don't think these stand up without purposeful state-sponsorship. The problem is that, from many angles, the state is sponsoring a de facto religion, not a simple social grouping.

Because many people consider the growth of these movements as inherently beneficial to historically marginalized groups, I think the state is willing to overlook the destructive & corrosive hypocrisy that comes from non-uniform rule application.  After all, the intentions are good.....

Unfortunately this is a good recipe for social disaster. As can be seen in the UK and Sweden, it requires increasing levels of "double downing". This inspires ever increasing levels of backlash.







Friday, March 9, 2018

The Supernatural Problem in Quasi-Religion

One of the critiques that occurs when applying a religious or quasi-religious lens to modern secular cult like groups is the absence of supernatural agents.  

But, as I've said before, this problem usually comes from trying to generate one-to-one superficial maps onto questions that are best addressed via dynamical similarities. For instance if you focus on modern shirts, what happens when you run into a toga? The superficial features don't match. But the functional features do.  From another perspective, the level of precision used in defining shirts was too great.


ATRAN, NORENZAYAN & THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION

In his classic In Gods We Trust, Atran used the term Moral Big Brothers rather than Gods.  While religions often have supernatural Big Brothers, supernaturalism is a sub-set rather than supra-set. Norenzayan has expanded this idea more fully than Atran.


The basic idea is that what matters is what effect an imagined Big Brother has on people.  Embodiment, such as occurs in paganism, simply makes the Big Brother seem more real, facilitating guesses about what they may like or value in any given situation. Similarly, supernaturalism, simply serves to increase the potential punishment and rewards a Big Brother can provide. Plus, it adds a bit of counter-factuality to increase memetic fitness (see this post of mine)



THE GROUP AGENT SOLUTION

List & Pettit (2011) have done some really good work on Group Agents.  Here's a quote:
Individuals may form a group agent in virtue of evolutionary selection or cleverly designed incentives to act as required for group agency, perhaps within independent cells.  here the individuals contribute to the group agent's performance, but do not explicitly authorize the group agent, the need not even be aware of its existence. (p. 36)
One of the challenges is how to make a Turing machine aggregator "rational".  They take a fairly generous approach here simply saying that the aggregate needs to :
  1. respond to its surroundings (be rational & responsive), and
  2. rationalize its positions (beliefs & desires)
They also add in the need for binary attitudes (but that is more to tie up details associated with a rigorous formal logical approach).

On a whole, this boils down to something like the Turing test.  The aggregator is rational if people ascribe intentionality to it.

While their work has tonnes of depth and fascinating detail,  I'll resist tangent-temptations and pull another quote.
The supervenient relation between the members' attitudes and actions and those of the group can be so complex that the group agent may sometimes think or do something that few, if any, members individually support.  And secondly, the supervenient of the group's attitudes and actions on those of its members is entirely consistent with some individuals being systematically overruled on issues that matter to them a lot.  Accordingly, the kind of control that individual members must be able to exercise in order to enjoy effective protection has to be stronger.  It is not enough for individuals to be able to contribute to what the group thinks or does on the issues that particularly matter to them.  They must be individually decisive on those issues.  Roughly speaking, we say that an individual is 'decisive' on a particular issue if he or she is able to determine fully -  and not merely in conjunction with other individuals - how this issue is to be settled. (p. 130)

This leads to a very interesting (and rigorously argued) conclusion: group agents 'control' individual actors via attitude biasing.  This is in stark contrast to usual definitions of control which assume the application or threat of application of formal power.  Here's another quote on this:

Since our definition of control has taken the group's attitudes, rather than its actions themselves, to be the targets of the individuals' control - the reason being that the group's actions are usually mediated by its attitudes - we can focus, once more on the part of the organizational structure that is easiest to model theoretically: its underlying aggregation function. (p. 136)
As mentioned the aggregation function is based in attitude biasing.  More specially it is a type of espoused, and complexly aggregated, morality.  Here are a few more quotes to take us to the end.
To be a person is to have the capacity to perform as a person.  An to perform as a person is to be party to a system of accepted conventions, such as a system of law, under which one contracts obligations to others... In particular it is to be a knowledgeable and competent party to such a system of obligations.  One knows what is owed to one, and what one owes to others, and one is able and willing to pay one's debts or to recognize that censure and sanction are reasonable in cases of failure... But non-persons cannot be moved by being made aware of obligations they owe to others. (p. 173)
and
To be sure, group agents are not flesh-and-blood persons.  They are pachydermic and inflexible in various ways, and lack the perceptions and emotions of human individuals.  But they nonetheless have the basic prerequisites of personhood.  Not only do they form and enact a single mind, displaying beliefs and acting on their basis.  They can speak for that mind in a way that enables them to function within the space of mutual recognized obligations. (p.176)


IMPLICATIONS

List & Petti's work make no requirement for the degree of bias a Group Agent has on an individual.  It just needs to have some effect.  An inference from this, based on Atran's later work in Identity Fusion, and from the literature on moral groups, is that the degree of identification with a group's morality strongly influences the degree of bias a Group Agent (Moral Big Brother) has on the individual.

For example, highly moral groups usually have more influential Group Agents (Moral Big Brothers) than weakly moral or a-moral groups. It is the dynamics that matter.

In terms of modern secular quasi religions this means its the dynamics of the feedback from the Group Agent to the individual that matter.  Groups that have significant Group Agent feedback combined with sacred values, ritual, costly commitment displays, and steep in-group out-group gradients are highly likely to be "religious".

Is Everything A Religion?

I just ran into an old SlateStarCodex post by Scott Alexander which argues that framing any highly-groupish social systems as religions is problematic, obfuscationalist and pointlessly broad.  Well, maybe he only really said pointlessly broad, but you don't need divine wisdom to get his gist!

Academic definition disagreements in the social sciences often follow some general patterns.  This usually boils down to the following range of options:

  1. Definitions mainly based on a single factor (like supernaturalism),
  2. Definitions based on a couple of clear cut factors (ie. supernaturalism, costly commitment display, group influence on individuals, etc.)
  3.  Definitions based on non-simplistic factor probability mash-ups (ie. 7/10 things from a factor list...)

Scott seem to take the first track (but also seems amenable to 2).  I think religion is definitely a 3.

VERIFYING SOLUTION SPACE

When you look at religion from a scientific perspective there are a couple of things which make this approach different from conventional religious or sociological perspectives.  For me, its religion's evolutionary history; particular for its (evolutionary) recent disentanglement from culture.

I'd wager that more than a few people assume religion has always had a communicable explicit theology.  It hasn't.  Tribal religion was often highly implicit. While it certainly facilitated out-group relations (Norezayan, 2013), tribal religions didn't tend to have the universalist assumptions nor universal intentions of today's world religions.

Modern world religions tend toward disentangleable (and universalaizeable) theologies.  Some religions, like Islam have minimal cultural-theology separations.  Other religions, like Christianity have fairly strong separations. Tribal religions, like those of the Blackfeet, tend to have minimal to no cultrual-theological distinctions.

Ancient religions (pre-7th century BCE) tend to have theologies which are not designed for rational exposition and immigrant conversion.  Without this bit of background people often interpret religion as an overly-simplistic set of abstract beliefs re-enforced by orthopraxy & ritual.  This naivety leads to interpretations of religion as simple uber-culture (with self-sustaining memetic practices).  However, this approach doesn't capture the whole picture of religion.  Religion has functioned as a steady state solution to a complex Darwinian multi-level selection game (Norezayan 2013, Wilson 2003).  Religion is an optimal solution to group-level competition.

Scott gets the basics* of the religion-culture interface but, like most, misses the Darwinian, multi-level selection component.

The difference between “religion” and “culture” has always been pretty vague. Shinto is the best example; it’s less a coherent metaphysical narrative than a bunch of things Japanese people do and a repository for Japanese traditions and rituals. A quick look at Hinduism reveals that they have no idea what gods they believe in, it’s a bunch of different religions stuck together under one umbrella, but the point is that it’s the sort of thing Indian people do and a repository of Indian traditions. Even though Jews have a pretty coherent religion, the line between “Jewish culture” and “Jewish religion” is equally fuzzy. Religion as distinct from culture seems like a pretty Western phenomenon, the result of a triumphant Christianity colonizing cultures it never originated from, ending out with the modern conception of culture as ethnic food + silly costumes.

Scott's argument is that overly broad conceptions of religions confound culture/community with religion.  Religious-like aspects then get applied to things they shouldn't.  Thus the false application of religious categorization falls somewhere between purposeful obfuscation and academic malpractice.

But I still think it’s unfair to call these communities/cultures “religions”. “Religion” is too easy to use as the Worst Argument In The World here. It’s supposed to imply all of these other connotations of “religion” like “their beliefs are based on magical thinking” and “they use blind faith instead of reason” and “instead of coming up with a world-view based on evidence they just played Bible Mad Libs.” If those are the connotations you’ve got with “religion”, then I think the word “religion” is actively doing harm here, and you should just use “belief-based community” or “movement” or whatever.
When things are defined by their properties, you can never be sure that a list of properties will produce a 1-to-1 map back onto the thing you want.  For instance a cow may have four legs and go moo, but not everything with four legs that moo's is a cow.  Additionally factor combinations tend to fairly subjective: while they are better than pure opinions, final determinations tend to get made by appeals to expert authorities.  This is problematic.  To get around this you can:

  1. Stipulate uni-directionality (But this largely prevents falsification. This makes things VERY unscientific.)
  2. Assume a process philosophy stance: viewing everything as nexus of multiple processes, each of which ebbs and flows over time.  Steady state solutions are possible but function complexly. Properties are the steady state nexuses. (Process philosophy's radical functionalism meshes poorly with scientific methogies and falsification criteria)
  3. Objectify state descriptions by plotting phase change curves (ie. differential effects)


Some science of religion folk, like me, tend to sociophysical approaches. Rather than leaving factor calculus vague and probabilistic (and hence error prone), sociophysical approaches look for phase change signals.  Surprisingly enough, simple tools, like the web-based identity fusion tool (see here for some theoretical background), do a decent job picking up phase changes (although current analysis levels seem to be of the overly simplistic linear correlational type).

So this puts us looking for social/psychological phase changes within a religious/communal/cultural sphere.  In terms of Scott's arguments, religion is characterized by supernaturalism.

Unfortunately supernaturalism, while reasonably good for creating fences, just isn't that good for detecting meaningful social/psychological phase changes.

For example, while 2000's era evangelical new-atheism is certainly a-supernatural, it had a heck of a lot of the social factors people normally associate with religion (including high identity fusion).  Of course many disagree, considering it at best, a community.  This takes us back to Scott's false-positive false-negative quandary from which narrow supernaturalism was supposed to save us!

Unfortunately the supernatural fence is further confounded by the role Moral Big Brother's.  In very groupish secular communities, moral big brothers can play the role of unembodied supernatural agents. For example radical human-right's epistemology has huge levels of moral fusion that clearly exceed what a rational actor's best-world optimization solution would warrant. Many radical human-righter's allude to ideas like Karma or new-age spirituality to defend the arbitrariness of their ethics. Utopian ideas and states are, for all practical purposes, akin to the unembodied supernaturalism of soft Deists. Differences largely reside at the individual level: at the nexus of language, personal meaning and personal influence.

Thus I could be a Deist who's

  • comfortable with supernatural language, 
  • only gets a vague sense of meaning from a weakly embodied Deity and 
  • is not at all influenced by its Moral Big Brother role.  

Or, I could be a human-right's based secularist who

  • rejects supernatural language, 
  • gets a large sense of meaning from a new-age like interpretation of Karma, and 
  • is highly influenced by its Moral Big Brother role.  


Abstractly, the Deist is more supernatural, but practically the secularist is more supernatural! Supernatural exclusivity is a false boundary.  It is not binary!  Supernaturalism is convenient because we're familiar with it and it makes a "good-enough" heuristic.






Notes
*While I suspect the distinction between religion and culture probably started with (or was seeded by) Cyrus the Great's  forays into religious and cultural pluralism, Christianity's expanse into multiple cultures was certainly an important decanter.  The Protestant reformation was another major decant.  In America, the 1730's and 1820's religious awakenings and their pluralistic successes further separated the religion-culture interface. In fact, it's probably best to say that the religion-culture interface follows a punctuated evolutionary separation pattern.  Further, I'd suggest that our current progressive culture wars tend to reveal our presence smack dab in the middle/end of another major punctuation.  Current dynamics seem to follow the pattern of prior religious pluralism awakenings.  In our case, the pluralistic part involves the broad acceptance of atheism.

Tuesday, March 6, 2018

Privilege Fish

From what I understand, privilege is defined in Social Justice / Intersectionality as "advantage(s) conferred on someone due to their phenotype (race, sex, gender expression, etc.)".  Accommodation is also made for physical disabilities, say like accident caused amputations.  Privilege is also situational.  A phenotype which is privileged in one context (say North America) may not be privileged in another context (say China).




LOGICAL EXTREME TEST
Mathematicians and physicists usually test ideas by exploring boundary conditions - what happens at extreme values.

So, let's imagine a white male who is privileged because of race, sex, gender, and able-bodiness.  This is the epitome of privilege. Now let's take a look at an extreme set of experiences for such an individual. To keep things grounded I'll use an example of someone I grew up with.

This white individual of privilege had a lot of negative life experiences.

  • As a child and youth he was continually pimped out to the local police chief and his Hell's Angel's business partners. He was continually abused at home.
  • His attempts to report this information were continually thwarted. In some instances, where things did move slightly ahead, they were met by short periods of punishment/torture as the "system" took care of its own to ensure nothing was exposed.
  • Several of his junior high teachers explicitly denied the possibility of this abuse because "boys can't be raped. Only girls can."
  • He sister committed suicide when he was about 10.  He was the one who found her in a bath tub.
  • He experienced the trauma produced by repeated suicide attempts by his mother.
  • He was repeatedly sexually assaulted as a young teen while living on the street.
  • His family heritage was the Armenian genocide. His specific family stories centred around the Armenian "Trail of Tears".
  • This genocide was and still is denied by his own Government.  It was derided by almost all the people he grew up with.  When his family's genocide was brought up in school it was continually denied by teachers.
  • He eventually committed suicide. My inference is that he had started to propagate this cycle of abuse onto others and couldn't live with himself anymore.
So, because of his skin colour, sex and gender he is more "privileged" than an upper class women of colour with no history of abuse.



Confounding Group Statistics with Individual Implications

One explanation of privilege I have heard centres on the statistical benefits that come with certain phenotypically determined groups. So, for instance, my abused friend will have a (statistically) easier time getting a job, or being respected than other phenotypically determined groups.

One major issue with this line of thinking is how it confounds group based probabilities with what might be true at the individual level.  Statistical benefits may occur due to group stereotypes. But as any population biologist or anthropologist knows, this does not mean any individual necessarily receives those benefits.  For instance, just because men are on average taller than women does not mean any man is taller than any women. That is patently false. Statistical based privilege is similarly false when applied to any single individual.

Application of statistical based privilege is false when applied to any individual. The degree of error  (or accuracy) is described by statistical probabilities.



Parsing Problems
In the case of my friend the white male privilege of having your "opinion respected" did not occur for his most essential item - others belief in his abuse. Statistically speaking a case can be made that his opinion was, however respected (privileged) in other areas.

In the case of privilege however, it is not the individual (the target of privilege) who determines benefit, it is the accuser (the external interpreter of privilege). This is an ironic switch for Social Justice.

This leads to a very significant parsing problem. If a single instance of "opinion respect" can be found, then it is technically accurate to say that individual has the privilege of "opinion respect". There is no net aggregation. This leads to some rather nasty displays.

Thus, there is no escape from privilege. Just like original sin, one can always be found guilty of something.  This then justifies application of the term. Application of the term then enables sociopathic people to leverage the connotations of net aggregation. In you have one instant of "opinion respect" privilege, then, regardless of actual percentage of occurrence or severity of non-occurrence, the label remains technically valid. You are "privileged".

The parsing problem creates an ideal weaponized rhetorical tool.


Singular Positives vs. Net Positives
Net positive conflation is probably one of the reasons many people get so mad at the term. It connotes "net", but is technically limited only to positive "singular" benefits.  Thus if being purple has 99 negatives associated with it and 1 positive, it is still "privilege".  This is sort of like how a number of world religions assume it is not the net sum of your good and bad actions that determine eternal rewards, but the mere presence of one wrong thing.

From this perspective, my friend had lots of privileges. His many life negatives do not negate any of his privileges. This directly counters the way people typically use and understand language.

Further, only the wokest individuals can talk about black privilege or trans privilege, etc.  This is because in most usages privilege is uni-directional. Privilege usually only applied to individuals who hold power intersections (i.e. white cis-gendered males). Objective application across all people is discouraged/anathema.

The dynamical problem with singular privilege is that it can be incredibly rude. For example, imagine telling a Native American, say a male southern Pikani Blackfoot, that colonialism has confirmed upon them privilege. Their entire tribe save one or two individuals were killed. Their matriarchal culture switched to a patriarchy because of "colonialism". And yet, they are privileged because their matriarchy was was forcibly colonized and they now accrue statistical benefits from their "maleness".

Such racial or sex based bigotry is unconscionable. And yet, according to privilege theory, it is technically true.

Privilege can turn some of the most catastrophic events a person experiences and call them "a positive benefit".  For instance, an individual, like my friend, may have been assaulted precisely because of their maleness, but technically the same phenotypical characteristic that led to such pain is properly called "privilege". This is very much like calling Native colonization a "privilege". This isn't to say some good eventually came out of the experience at a statistical level. It is to say your skin colour makes it a benefit for you regardless of anything you have individually experienced.

Of course this is how many people feel about "objective" facts about colonization, race, and sex. Objectivity seeks degree. Privilege, in my opinion, does not.  It seeks taboo (anything that might possibly be "wrong").

My suspicion is that the taboo approach provides marginalized feeling bigots a chance to get even with people they see as powerful. It doesn't matter if that individual has 99 things against them. That 1 target will do just fine...

Needless to say, this isn't a good strategy for anyone worried about societal cohesion....



The Two Fish Problem
I think the most pernicious aspect of privilege is best analogized by Bret Weinstein's whale-fish or two-fish problem. 

Is a whale a fish? A couple of centuries ago fisherman probably would have said, "yes". It's a big animal that swims in the ocean. But most people today know that a whale is actually a mammal.  It is not part of one of the four classes containing fish. But a really dry-witted erudite might say, "yes". The whale has a common ancestor with fish. So if you go back to this division point, fish and mammals converge. So a whale is phylogenetically a fish.

This is where "privilege"can and does produce significant pain, significant societal strain, and righteous-based back lash.

For instance, my friend, an Armenian with white skin was, by most functional definitions, a "minority". He (or rather his lineage) had experienced cultural and physical genocide. This included significant persecution and marginalization. I would suggest the severity of these events was similar to that experienced by many Native Americans. And yet, because of his skin colour, he is denied any recognition of his individual experiences. He is simply judged by his phenotype.

I think the Sami people face a similar burden. This northern Scandinavian indigenous group has faced   similar "colonial" issues other aboriginal groups across the world have. The main difference is that their skin is white.  Thus they are "privileged".

Doesn't this just throw salt into their wounds? They have all the negatives of other groups but are told, by virtue signallers, that they are a "swimming fish" (privileged because of skin colour) rather than a "phylogenetic fish" (marginalized because of their experiences). The technical definition of privilege is strained to accommodate double layered issues.



FATAL FLAW
This is the fatal flaw that singular rather than net definitions of privilege face.

Patent racism and sexism throws salt into the wounds of those, who like my friend have suffered specifically because of the phenotype group they belong to.

By ignoring the 99 things that are punitive so you can decry 1 thing that may be "beneficial", you do a world of harm. Traumatized individuals who are told that their source of trauma is a "privilege" generally don't respond well. Did my friend kill himself over this? Do some white school shooters kill because of this type of salt-in-the-wound dissonance?

Justification that "the privilege lens leads to good ends because it fights the patriarchy and rebalances things" is horrible Maoist reasoning.  It is why the dynamics of "privilege" engender such harsh reactions. It is an utterly sociopathic position that purposively buries individual experience for the sake of blanket generalizations.

It is like walking up to a homeless man who has suffered unbelievable crap and focussing on one good thing he has and then decrying him for that very thing. How contemptible. And yet this is the message that many Aspergery people are taking from this "fight they system" movement.

Why not just treat people as individuals.  Racism of any type is not good... even if it can appeal to "good intentions" and utopian "re-balancing".

Like many people, I hope this cancerous, weaponized rhetorical meme dies before its dynamics destroys what little social asabiyah and good will is left within Western countries.






OTHER PERSPECTIVES
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/opinion/19douthat.html

http://www.wpcjournal.com/article/view/15773

Is Everyone Really Equal

Intersectionality is not the problem

Sunday, March 4, 2018

Charter Schools: The Small Group Orientation

This post is a follow-up from a previous through experiment applying education as an adaptive group theory to charter schools.

Part 1 - Framing the situation
Part 2 - Large group orientation
Part 3 - Small group orientation
Part 4 - Evaluating other approaches


REVIEW

This post has been sitting in the editing pile for a while. It followed up on a discussions about how charter school scenarios can be framed in terms of Education as an Adaptive Group theory. The gist of this theory involves interpreting charter school tensions via multi-level selection theory and it's large-group vs. small-group orientations.

Advantages of this perspective are:
  • It is based on an underlying causative structure that is empirically verifiable (in principle).  Standard educational perspectives rely on descriptive analysis which suffer many of the dogmatic problems associated with soft social sciences.
  • It elevates the role of dynamic tension.  In doing so it provides a causative model for education's inferred complex orientation behaviour.
  • It makes falsifiable predictions about charter school evolution patterns.
  • It provides a full explanation of why (and when) a charter school can be considered a rational agent rather than just an amalgamation of individuals.

Large Group Orientation Review

My last post on this subject flushed out the large group orientation.  This involved charter school orientation to large-group (i.e. public education) moral mission.  While public education's moral mission resists precise description, it may be reasonable to speculate that it encompasses something touching on social equity.

Large group orientation means a charter school does not engage in nor justify niche focussed behaviour at the general population's expense.  Innovation may stretch the bounds of acceptable large-group sacrifice, but, in vernacular terms, a large-group oriented school won't say "we have no duty to worry about your type here".  A large-group oriented charter school may certainly say, "you may be better off elsewhere,".  However, even this type of response is unlikely.

Large group orientations are represented by behaviour which is generally fitness enhancing for the large group.  This occurs either by maximizing average individual fitnesses (MLS2), or by maximizing the fitness of the group itself (MLS1).  While nested groupings are possible (and likely), this post will try to keep things as simple as possible.


SMALL GROUP ORIENTATION

Small-group (individualistic) orientation in charter schools seems to have two modes of expression:

  1. A focus on the school's fitness.
  2. A focus on individual teachers' fitness.  
For simplicity I won't delve into individual teachers' fitness: the extra nesting just makes discussion longer. The school itself is the unit of analysis (just like last post). Therefore, small-group orientation is characterized by doing what is best for the school with minimal regard to (institutionalized) education as a whole.




FREELOADING
Freeloading therefore involves superficial compliance with public education's boundaries.  This enables large-group benefits to continue accruing (e.g. funding, accreditation, etc.).

These actions need not be purposefully deceitful.  Indeed, self-rationalization has been shown to be a good tool to prevent freeloader detection. However, self-deceptive rationalization also tends to create background anxiety and guilt (at least if you're not a sociopath).  There are a couple of steady state solutions to this tension:

  • Rationalize away freeloading effects by minimizing their severity on others (downloading that torrent really doesn't affect the movie company because I was going to wait till it came on TV anyway).
  • Devalue the targets of freeloading (The people in my church are so lame. They're lucky to have me. Too bad for them if I don't contribute to any church funds.).  Self separation from a group minimizes the chances you'll get caught freeloading

What We'd See


GOING-IT-ALONE
Going-it-alone for a charter school would involve antipathy to the constraining norms and taboos of traditional public education practice (the large-group).  As norm deviation increases, freeloading is challenged and intentions are tested for moral mission compliance.  Ultimately large-group benefits are revoked.  Revocation might include public funding losses, accreditation losses, or simple ostricization.  Going-it-alone increases selective pressure on the charter school (small-group).  Under high selective forces, adaptation is required.  This might involve niche specialization or direct competition.  Direct competition at the group levels specified involves competition for followers.
    1. Niche specialization means that the charter school isn't seen as a real competitor for the resources sought by the large group.  An example might be a madrassah.  Madrassah practices and memberships doesn't seem to be of much interest to North American institutionalized education.
    2. Direct competition would mean the charter school must be able to offer a product which is of equal or greater value than that offered by the large-group (or in this particular case, a product which is similar but significantly "cheaper").  The competing product may be an alternative accreditation similar in value to that offered by public schools. It could also involve providing their membership with an equal chance of getting into post-secondary school or getting a job.  It should be noted, if norm deviation is large enough, or large-group vs. small-group competition is fierce enough, institutionalized education can curtail alternative post-secondary entrance paths and many job paths from small-groups with devastating effectiveness.
    3. The selective pressures associated with going-it-alone suggests that if small-group amalgamation is possible, it is likely to be favourable.  Thus one would expect to see charter schools which forgo niche specialization bubbling together.  The process need not be fast.  It could simply involve greater levels of interaction between schools, followed by strategic partnerships, followed by small collective action,... until formal or practical unification occurs.





Extra notes

List & Pettit address the locus of responsibility argument by saying that though actions are committed by individuals within the group, not by the group agent itself, the group agent is responsible for biasing certain eventualities, increasing the probability that its intentions get carried out.  An easy analogy is the extent to which Hezbollah is responsible for any single terrorist bombing.  The group has a clear moral mission which is certainly biased toward such acts.  Leadership may facilitate such acts without ever having to ever pull them pin themselves or do all the planning.

Therefore, in terms of a charter school, emotional and cognitive turmoil could be expressed by the charter school's behaviour (if it is an adaptive group).  According to List & Pettit's exegesis, a group agent's behaviour is mainly centered on a single moral mission formed by its laity.  Actions

List & Pettit argue that group agents are rational, seek information,  distinguish right and wrong, and they can and should be held morally responsible for their actions.  In effect, they see rational group agents as a semi-intoxicated dullard who may be slow on the up-take but ultimately knows what is happening and can distinguish right from wrong (based on its own values and in terms of the social environment in which it acts).

Charter Schools: The Equivalent Focus Case

Part 1 - Framing the situation
Part 2 - Large group orientation
Part 3 - Small group orientation
Part 4 - Equivalent orientations
Part 5 - Evaluating other approaches



MINIMAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN LARGE-GROUP ORIENTATION & SMALL-GROUP ORIENTATION

If there is minimal difference between a large group orientation in Education and a small group orientation in Education, one would expect to see complex cycling between these two orientations.  Neither one is deterministic.

This might involve self-doubt about how far to push innovation or how deep to streamline membership within an orientationally defined sub-group.

Is Intersectionality a Religion

Over this last year I've been quite happy to see more and more people and academics addressing intersectionality as a religion.  Recently James Lindsay, Helen Puckrose and Peter Boghossian have even held public lectures on this question. The analogy is apt.  More than this though, I think this approach gives the movement space to exist and flourish based on its own merits.

Here's my quick take on why identifying intersectionality as a religion is apt.


It's the Dynamics
How is religion different from traditional political belief (say liberalism)? From position based beliefs (say gun rights)? From weakly moral based belief systems (environmentalism)?

The difference is mainly the level of feedback the group has on the individual. This is largely expressed through

  1. norm and boundary enforcement, 
  2. Moral Big Brother (group agent) roles, and, 
  3. fervency around utopian social states.


Of course lots of other dynamics and behaviours emerge from these big three factors. But they are usually sub-sets.  For example, identity fusion is usually stronger in religious groups than in other groups. But this is probably an emergent property of "big three" interaction.  Ritual is probably a behavioural solution because of how it resonates with these "big three".


It's Not Supernaturalism
Supernaturalism emerges from slight preferences for counter-intuitiveness and Moral Big Brothers.  Supernaturalism mainly makes it easier to learn, understand, predict and enforce group values. The physical embodiment of Moral Big Brothers is one solution to group coherence, moral prediction, and transmission.  And while it may a near inescapable well over long time periods, over shorter time periods strong fervency and norm enforcement may offset the value gained from Big Brother embodiment & visibly wielded supernatural power.

For instance, the New Atheism of the late 2000's was most certainly mimicking the dynamics of evangelical religion. Once it pulled back from zealous proselytizing its utopian state and dropped its polarizing moral judgments, it stopped being religious.  It turned into a weakly moral system.  The dynamics had changed.


Intersectionality
Judged on the big three, intersectionality is definitely a religion.

1: Norm Enforcement
Norm enforcement is incredibly high. The demonization of non-intersectionalists is very strong. Over the last year we've seen non-supporters go from being merely naive to being privileged and systemically racist to being white supremacists to being full on nazi's.  Judgements have moved from sins of "commission" (you did something wrong) to sins of "omission" (you didn't support something enough). This is a big change. It also reflects not just simple religious dynamics, but cultish dynamics.

For example, if you fail to acknowledge God at the start of a speech, does that mean you are Godless? Probably not. But for some radical religions, perhaps Islam, it certainly might. Cults typically require frequent admissions of the group's uniqueness and/or key beliefs. Intersectionality falls into the cult spectrum here (as do many new religious movements....)

Another point to look for with norm enforcement is how they treat apostates. Intersectionality is pretty nasty here. You typically lose your "race card" (or sex, gender, etc.) when holding the wrong political/moral positions.


2: Moral Big Brother
Intersectionality definitely nails moral big brother dynamics. No expansion seems necessary.


3: Utopian Fervency
Intersectionality definitely nails this too. There is a definite expectation that past balances need to be offset. A focus on equality of outcomes over equality of opportunity is most definitely classical utopianism. The transformational change assumptions of the movement also clearly reflect classical utopianism. Speaker de-platforming, mob-like marches & protests reflect fervency.

Costly sacrifices, often in the form of "virtue signals" clearly reflect high levels of fervency.




OTHER TAKES

Sullivan
Andrew Sullivan has a popular, but definitely non-academic take on the topic.


Nelson
Lauren Nelson takes the opposite view of Sullivan. 

Her critique mainly centres around a tight interpretation of intersectionality rather than the broader moral movement circumscribed by adherence to intersectional dogma. Thus her rejoinder is mostly moot and largely a strawman. It is also interesting to note that her major foci seem to be on intention, and supernaturalism.  Just because you don't want something to operate a certain way doesn't mean it does not.  She omits any real discussion of dynamics. This is the real crux. Antifa as an non-aligned outlier.  Ironically though, she ends with an accusation of taboo and blasphemy. This is probably more telling that her fairly weak arguments.

At best she is arguing necessary and sufficient definitions of religions (it must have all these factors) rather than the more appropriate necessary but not sufficient definition (it should have a number of these factors). Of course I, like I suspect Lindsay, take a dynamical rather than factor approach. Religion is anything which has certain dynamics which clearly emerge from the "big three".


Brydum & Derkacz
An even weaker critique by Brydum and Derkacz is here.  Here is an example

"But after taking stock of one’s privilege and identifying the ways it functions in day-to-day life, intersectionality challenges us to find ways to leverage that privilege in the pursuit of greater social justice and not, as Sullivan seems to believe, to simply feel badly about it or to self flagellate. " 

So you see, intersectionality can't be a religion because it has good intentions....

It also can't be a religion because it makes "factually correct" statements against Charles Murray's Bell Curve....

Liccione
A quick summary of some of Haidt's points which tend to focus on dynamical similarities

Cox
A very good analysis at, MTV of all places.  The main point is to think about intersectionality's/social justice's desire to do good and serve just as much as you worry about tight norm enforcement.

Fringe Moderate
From the twitter thread.  This is obviously very superficial stuff...

[1] Original sin - privilege/whiteness Haram/sin - "problematic" Fatwas/disfellowships - public shaming campaigns Special revelation - standpoint theory, "listen & believe" Blasphemy - unPC words, cultural appropriation Caste system - progressive stack or "Oppression Olympics"


[2] Asceticism/legalism - constant reflection on privilege, "everything is sexist, racist...", the "personal is political" The Devil - The Patriarchy, white cis men Holy/sacred place - safe spaces High priests - diversity officers, media personalities, activists, academics

[3] Proselytizing - infiltration in institutions, subcultures Born again - "woke" Self flagellation - whiteness & privilege workshops for "allies" Heaven on earth - Brave New World-esque anarchic utopia Public expression of piety - virtue signaling Infidel - problematic person

[4] Crusade/holy war/jihad - campus protests, Antifa riots Theology - critical race theory Antiscience/creationism - postmodern rejections of empiricism Hypocrisy of thought leaders (Jimmy Swaggart) - prominent male feminists caught in sexual harassment/misconduct scandals

[5] That's all I can think of for now. Perhaps we'll see new parallels in future SJW generations. Maybe they'll appoint a Supreme Matriarch (like a Caliph or Pope) from someone high on the progressive stack to arbitrate disputes or dictate norms or something...