The thing is it's not a trap. You're describing it as though it is, but we must recall that we have actual proof, via things like the Daily Stormer Style Guide, that show that groups of people violate social convention consciously and in bad faith. The assumption of bad faith does not lead, inevitably, to mocking and discriminating against people. While you might mock a bad-faith actor, discrimination is certainly an interesting term to apply.
The problem is that this strategy wouldn't work if it really were the case that just about everyone is 'typical' and shares exactly the same attitudes towards things like "should we use explicit reasoning to figure out what to do in social situations or just rely on our natural intuition." Then the bad-faith renegades would stand out like a sore thumb.
The strategy relies on the fact that ten thousand Internet neo-Nazis can pretty easily conceal themselves against the background of literally millions of Internet nerds and others who seek from the demanding social world of real life. Millions of people whose varying degrees of dorkiness include just about every kind of social maladjustment known to humankind.
But nerds, misfits, and people who are painfully rationalist about social situations have existed for a long time. They predate Naziism. They are not an artifact
of Naziism. Treating them like they exist as some sort of plausible-deniability cover for Naziism does them a gross disservice, and also has the side effect of radicalizing them for the same reason that bombing a wedding to get a terrorist radicalizes the populace of Third World countries.
...
The entire reason that the strategy of bad-faith feigning of "I don't understand these social conventions"
works is that the individuals doing it are fishes in a sea of people who, well... don't understand these social conventions.
Throwing grenades of "fuck 'em if they don't understand social conventions" into that sea may occasionally blow up one of the elusive fishes. It will assuredly also blow up a great many people who are in fact socially maladjusted, or who just plain like arguing about things and questioning things, or who have weird ideas with nothing to do with the far right.
And
that is the part I consider to have discriminatory potential.
...
So
yes I consider it discriminatory when someone starts mocking people who like to explicitly reason out their social worldview. Or who don't agree with all the things that most of us accept without question because we learned it when we were ten and they were curled up with a stack of science books when they were ten. Or who shows every sign of
actually thinking it's important to have a truth-centric worldview and taking that dead seriously.
It's not purely discrimination against some single easily named group like 'autism spectrum people.' But it's discrimination, aimed at certain combinations of culture and psychological makeup that are chronically unpopular. The people so nerdy, even SV can safely make fun of them.
It's discrimination you may have justifications for, based on "well what about this group over here" and "well there are criminal people hiding among this group" and so on. But I think those justifications should be placed under the same level of scrutiny we'd use about arguments for, say, racial profiling.
...you have demonstrated enough social convention understanding and intelligence in other posts to understand that the natural escalation from a good-faith effort failing is not "someone is going to assume they are autistic or something and mock them after a good-faith effort"; they are going to assume the person is being deliberately obtuse.
Except that when we talk about places where people I've been talking about congregate (e.g. the rationalist community),
they're getting mocked.
It's like, they're tolerable as long as they don't have a subculture. As long as they don't flaunt the fact that they really do believe in XYZ by living that way and having blogs and get-togethers about it.
But if they do start doing that, it takes like five seconds before people on
a fucking science fiction discussion forum start calling them "a bunch of arrogant clueless nerds who don't know any better than to reinvent the wheel" or something.
Seriously, look at the tenor of some of the discussion we've had in the threads on the rationalist movement. There is
way more sneering than can reasonably be explained without some frank talk about how discriminatory impulses and the desire to designate out-groups that can be safely demoted to pariah status work.
