The RAW Semantics blog has a new post up, "Hardcore kindness semantics," that discusses the semantics of unfair generalizations about groups, and how to replace those generalizations with kindness.
"Some of the worst cases, for me, of the unfortunate habit of over-generalising on abstract groups (eg “The Media”, “The Establishment”, “The Elite”… or insert your favourite scapegoat group: “shitlibs”, “woketards”, “Tory scum”, etc) ironically came from people whose political views I otherwise agreed with on many issues. Cue the classic Monty Python scene, which illustrates what I’m thinking of here better than any number of long-winded blog posts."
The clip Brian references (from the Life of Brian) is above.
1 comment:
Thanks for the mention! I'd add that the post goes into Korzybskian extensional methods (as kindness devices), as recommended by RAW and other popularisers of General Semantics (Wendell Johnson, S.I. Hayakawa), for those interested. Also ties together "inductive reasoning" with RAW's takes on generalising/abstracting (as nicely written about by Kathryn Schulz in her book, 'Being Wrong'). Plus a whole bunch of other fun stuff.
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