Should We Cancel Aristotle? - An enlightening analysis of cancel culture by philosopher ⁦ @AgnesCallard⁩. Exposes the tension between truth and politics. Thread. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/opinion/should-we-cancel-aristotle.html

She distinguishes literal speech that seeks truth through logical argument and evidence, and messaging speech that is political in nature and attempts to shift power.

Cancel culture is the consequence of interpreting speech as messaging, when we encouter a foe whose positions we disagree with and who threatens our power (or the power of groups we care about).

@AgnesCallard, who’s an Aristotle expert, thinks we should not cancel him despite his deeply inegalitarian views holding women, slaves and manual workers as inferior. That’s because she sees his argument as truth seeking and not as political messaging.

I think the distinction between truth seeking and political messaging is a very useful one. Yet, unfortunately, in practice it will often be hard to draw a line between the two. Economics is no alien to these issues.

For example, statistical discrimination is a well defined concept in economics, whereby, when we don’t have perfect information, we treat different groups differently on the basis of group averages usinh Bayesian reasoning.

There is a huge empirical literature using this concept. Yet, the concept ends up being a cop out for policy inaction, because it is essentially impossible to prove that disparate outcomes by race are due to good old prejudice rather than statistical discrimination. https://twitter.com/mioana/status/1270744523845496833

So activistis could understandably try to “cancel” statistical discrimination.

Thoughts @itaisher @Econ_Marshall?