Elon Musk, Standpoint Epistemologist
It’s all the same nonsense
Not the subject of today’s post, but earlier this week I had a column in The New York Times about youth gender medicine and “trust the science” that might be of interest to some of you.
Elon Musk got a lot of attention for a recent exchange he had with the philosopher Amanda Askell, who works at Anthropic and whose job is to help determine the “values” of that company’s AI’s programs (to anthropomorphize a bit).
Responding to a WSJ profile of Askell and her efforts, Musk — singing a familiar tune — said “Those without children lack a stake in the future,” sparking the rest of the exchange:
Askell: I think it depends on how much you care about people in general vs. your own kin. I do intend to have kids, but I still feel like I have a strong personal stake in the future because I care a lot about people thriving, even if they’re not related to me.
Musk: You cannot understand my point until you have a child, anymore than someone who has never experienced true love can understand love.
Musk is engaging in a very stereotypically “woke” pastime known as standpoint epistemology. Standpoint epistemology came out of feminist philosophy. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science” is authored by Elizabeth Anderson, one of the most highly regarded public-intellectual philosophers alive today. According to Anderson, this field “identifies how dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge attribution, acquisition, and justification disadvantage women and other subordinated groups, and strives to reform them to serve the interests of these groups.”
At some point I want to better understand this area of philosophy. My sense is there’s a lot of rigorous, legitimate material here worth exploring (philosophers, email me to tell me what you think). I don’t know enough about this subfield to criticize it, so that’s not what this article is about.
Rather, it’s undeniable that legitimate ideas from academia sometimes trickle down to the public internet and get bastardized and adulterated and ruined. Standpoint epistemology (or SE, as I’ll call it) is a particularly annoying example, because, as practiced by people arguing online, it is irredeemably dumb.
*** Traditionally, it was “woke” people who wielded this in the most annoying and anti-intellectual manner, particularly (but not exclusively) online. From, I dunno, call it 2015 to 2021, a stultifying culture of identitarian deference infested many (most?) progressive spaces. That is, it was considered normal and legitimate to defer to the more “marginalized” person in a given conversation, no real argument needed
“Marginalized” usually meant “has an identity label that is historically associated with oppression,” and as result — and I know this is hard to imagine but I promise you it was routine — you frequently got situations where, like, a financially struggling twentysomething writer type was angrily told that they were required to defer to a tenured professor, because that professor was “marginalized” (often meaning something like “a biracial person with a BA from Wesleyan and a PhD from Stanford”). Of course I’m cherry-picking a little here, but my point is the idea of being “marginalized” became completely untethered from anything reasonable, and even if it hadn’t, of course this sort of deference is silly and condescending. You don’t say, “Okay, okay, if you say so! Sorry for disagreeing!” to someone you actually respect.
Identitarian deference created a great deal of annoyance online in the form of countless cartoonishly idiotic exchanges where some person would politely disagree with (for example) a particular black woman about a particular question, and then would get dogpiled by people lecturing them about how morally grotesque it was for them to “not listen to black women,” “talk over black women,” and on and on and on. It was just this constant abstracting of specific conversations, a process where everyone got into a hot-air balloon and took it up to 40,000 feet and looked down and could only see the colors of the characters involved — none of the actual details — and would then evaluate the situation on that basis alone. (Leftists who criticized identitarian deference from early on, like Freddie deBoer in a now-private post (or see his more recent explanation here) and Matt Bruenig as far back as 2013, deserve credit for doing so at a time when this was genuinely risky. Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels are probably the leading old-heads in this camp, and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò wrote the version of the critique that probably made the most headway among the sorts of leftists who dislike deBoer and Bruenig for being “class reductionist” or whatever.
To be clear, this isn’t how the vast majority of normal people of any color think about these issues — most people are normies on race and identity — but online, where there’s a constant battle for attention and influence and prestige, this kind of dysfunction was completely rampant in progressive spaces. Worse, it did real-world damage to real-world progressive institutions. Ryan Grim’s now-classic 2022 Intercept piece about meltdowns in the progressive world involved cases that often came down to this sort of identitarian deference. Within these institutions, you couldn’t really question accusations of bigotry or sexism due to these norms, which naturally empowered the sorts of people who make lots of accusations, which often made it hard to evaluate their accuracy.
***
The basic SE insight that some members of some marginalized groups might, on average, have access (or easier access) to certain types of knowledge than members of more powerful groups seems pretty obviously defensible. But it takes a wild leap to get from there to the setups that solidified in progressive circles. SE, as practiced by progressives in our online and offline communities, first pretends that its wielders can neatly sort the world into “more” versus “less” marginalized people during an age when this is increasingly hard to do, and then commits a strange version of the “noble savage” fallacy, which holds that the “more” marginalized person somehow has unerring insights into even complex policy questions.
