Steve Sailer famously said that “political correctness is a war on noticing”.
There are patterns to reality so stubborn and prevalent that they enable us to make more or less reliable predictions. This is “induction”: reasoning, from accretion of the particular, to general rules that we believe in with increasing confidence as the data accumulate.
When we do this about people, though, we get ourselves in trouble with the guardians of political correctness, even though the regularities are often as persistent as any we find elsewhere in nature. (There are exceptions to this prohibition, of course, as any heterosexual white male can tell you these days).
I thought a little doggerel might help sum things up, so here it is:
“I’m fine with induction,
When it brings me good news –
But I’ll raise quite a ruction
When it breaks my taboos.”
One Comment
I see Berkeley protesters have taken to calling the cops ‘pigs’ as said protesters are arrested. All during the effort to stop a speech by Ann Coulter.
Shades of the late 1960s. What’s next, a “May 4th 1970” Black Swan event?