Being Offensive and Being Right

by David Sims

MOST OF the statements that are considered to be “racist” don’t assert that members of a different race are inherently bad, or inherently wrong. Rather, they assert that the other race is, generally speaking, inherently (via genetics) inferior.

The most important quality of an assertion isn’t whether or not it is nice. The most important quality is whether or not it is true. How do you know when something is true? You don’t judge truth by whether or not it is offensive.

In the set of offensive statements, some are false and some are true. Since “racist” and “false” don’t mean the same thing, it is possible for some statements to be both racist and true. Likewise, and for the same reason, it is possible for such a thing as a true anti-Semitic statement to exist.

Except for the survival of the practitioner group, the next highest value in a proper moral system is truth.

Value Hierarchy for Proper Moral Systems:

1. Survival for the practitioner group (alone on the first tier)
2. Truth and a reliable method for finding truth (alone on the second tier)
3. Freedom, justice, etc. (many on this third tier)
4. Politeness, generosity, etc. (many on this fourth tier)

You discriminate among statements, sorting them as best you can (or, if you aren’t quite that honest, as best as you wish to) into “true” and “false” categories. You then proceed to believe the statements in your true category and disbelieve statements in your false category.

So the question to ask, now, is: How do you know when you are using a method for seeking the truth that actually does succeed in finding it?

You know that your method for seeking truth works when, in the past, it has enabled people to acquire information that was afterward used to give those people powers that they did not have before. The discovery of the nature of electricity enabled the building of the flashlight, which in turn has given people the power to cause a light to spring forth and banish darkness. Immediate light at the flashlight-user’s whim was made possible by the fact that physicists in the 19th and 20th centuries used the empirical method for seeking truth, rather than relying on an idealistic or dogmatic approach. If physicists had proceeded in a dogmatic/idealistic manner, then nobody would have flashlights today, and there would be people breaking their legs after falling in dark places because they didn’t see what they stumbled over.

You can tell that science does epistemology right because it has steadily made people more powerful over time. Valid methods for seeking truth do this because useful truths are a subset of all truths, and it is a subset in which humans have a particular interest and to which they devote a considerable amount of their time.

On the other hand, most religions and most forms of political idealism — including modern liberalism and Marxism — do epistemology poorly by contaminating it with dogmas about people and about human nature, by pretending that people are what people are not, and by forever trying to pound square pegs into round holes — and never succeeding and hurting a lot of people in the process.

Now to do science well, you have to understand deductive logic, to know how to make reasonable inferences, comprehend statistics, and do a lot of hard math. In other words, doing science like an expert requires a lot of intelligence.

Some races are, generally speaking, more intelligent than others. That means some races are better suited for engaging in the pursuit of truth than other races are. Some races really can discover and put to use subtle truths that make them powerful — whereas other races can only fake it, usually in a manner that isn’t convincing to the smarter races.

Compare these two videos — and consider my words.

Life in a Space Colony, ep1, by Isaac Arthur:

Black people are guardians of the galaxy, by Ras Ben:

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