The upshot seems to be that determinism is a metaphysical assumption from which the classical determinist view of physics follows, and that this assumption can be removed with suitable mathematical alterations. — Banno

I agree that that conclusion fits with Anscombe's paper.

It ought not to have mattered whether the laws of nature were or were not deterministic. For them to be deterministic is for them, together with the description of the situation, to entail unique results in
situations defined by certain relevant objects and measures, and where no part is played by inconstant factors external to such definition. If that is right, the laws’ being deterministic does not tell us whether ‘determinism’ is true. It is the total coverage of every motion that happens, that is a fanciful claim.

If you write down a bunch of equations involving a time variable, take an initial state at t=0, and evolve the system forward to t=t, determinism there would just be that there is a single state at t=t and that the complete specification of the t=0 state entails that there is a single possible state at t=t. "That" state is logically entailed by "this one".

Determinism as Anscombe seems to characterise has a much broader scope; it doesn't matter whether if a completely specified t=0 state entails a unique t=t state within a model, determinism has to guarantee this complete specification outside the model too. Every state must be completely specified by a trajectory taken in accord with a hypothetical physical law. The determinism spoken about is the panoptic vision of Laplace's demon, if we know all now, then we know all.

We can never be in the position of Laplace's demon; and that's a fact of life. So we can't recourse to Laplace's demon and begin conjuring up hypothetical scenarios that take a hypothetical completely known input state and propagate it through our knowledge to a completely known output state.

Nevertheless, if we have a good model that is deterministic, it works predictively. Such a model doesn't care if reality is watched over by Laplace's demon or not.

Err... Probably metaphysics and epistemology.

The mod @Baden wrote a detailed guide for writing a thread's original post here. It may help. Note that most OPs (original post) are much worse than the examples he gives, and you can still write a good OP without following all of them.

I deleted it.

Your original post was full of mistakes and made little argument. If you work on it a bit, repost it.

Some pointers:

(1) You made a few statements to the effect that everyone should donate 10% of their income to Oxfam, on the basis of it being a good thing to do. There are plenty of good things to do which we are not required to do; why is it necessary to donate, and why is it necessary to donate to Oxfam in particular?

(2) If you intended to leverage a more general obligation to charity - insofar as people are morally obliged to give some of their income to charity - why 10%? Why not 9%? Why Oxfam? A discussion of why 10% to Oxfam would be the least amount to give would've been nice.

If you connected donations to Oxfam to the good deeds it does, then made an argument for why Oxfam was the best charity for achieving those good deeds, then made an argument for why that amount of donation is required of every person - that would be a much better thread starter.

Why I deleted it: the absence of much argument made it simultaneously low quality and indistinguishable from advertising. If you argue more thoroughly and precisely, it would be a fine thread starter.

Patterns are why we can ask why, not the other way around.

"It's okay to discriminate using eugenics so long as you justify it with market logic"

An economic depression doesn't suit the monied class. — ssu

It depends how it's managed. 2008 was a record profit year for many. As is this one.

but I think that's more a function of the human-mind imposing a particular narrative structure on history (as it always does) than a reflection of an absolute shift. — csalisbury

:up:

Just so stories are signposts.

On the whole, Russia has fared less well as a capitalist democracy than it did as a theocracy or communist hellhole. I suspect the poor stayed poor throughout. — Kenosha Kid

I've heard that. It's been a long time since I've read anything about it; perhaps you can critique what I remembered and sythesised.

(1) The communists really did largely industrialise the country eventually.
(2) Resource distribution was very coupled to status in the political hierarchy and extremely coupled to where one lived. It tended to keep the poorest the poorest, but...
(3) It created a network of industrial specialists that flowed freely (with some symbolic protestation from the state) within the state.
(4) Because the Russian economy was still import and export dependent for basic functioning, the state still had to play global capitalist macro policy. It played the resource extraction/subjugation game with other countries in the bloc.
(5) When the Soviet bloc fell, the Russian economy was already prefigured for capital flow, and this created the authoritarian state + oligarchy we all know and love today.

Bolshevism was ultimately another path from peasantry to capitalism.

I don't want to throw all the blame for the destitution on the communists, the trade sanctions had a huge impact. It's still worth considering a failure of communism for economic reasons as the eventual development was to capitalist oligarchy. It's even more worth considering a failure of communism for humanitarian ones (genocide, police state). Stalin was on the cover of Time magazine a lot and seen as a countercultural hero; I imagine it was like a worldwide version of the Jimmy Saville paedophile scandal for the leftist intellectual elite.

Ideology does not suffer relativism, pluralism, or criticism at all. — Kenosha Kid

At the risk of derailing the thread, I think it does now. To quote the Big Lebowski; That's Just Like Your Opinion Man and That's The Stress Talking. Well researched point? Just like your opinion man. Anger at injustice? That's just the stress talking. If we're going to recognize the failure of unifying narratives as a societal feature; that means we emphasise that we already live in a relativistic chaos of filter bubbles. Politics is mostly a spectacle; political representation in its default form is opinion management, how we socialise and are exposed to information is managed by external interests. There's a revolving door between those interests and positions of political power.

Unifying narratives don't hold much weight in a condition where no one trusts who spouts them. Their positive visions of the future are dead before they're even thought. Everything that remains is critique and political negation of manifest injustice; and you don't need a systematic world vision for that, you just need to grasp how a localised injustice is (re)produced. Pay no attention to the capital flow behind the curtain.

This is basically the post-truth movement in a nutshell, a systematic lapse in any kind of logic that itself privileges one binary value over another. Postmodernism is (1) by itself. Post-truth adds (2). — Kenosha Kid

Alan Sokal famously exposed postmodernism as deeply flawed in 1996 by successfully publishing nonsense in a postmodern journal.[10] Since then, postmodernism has largely been considered a laughingstock among all but the most liberal academics. — Wheatley

I think there's a very valuable skill to learn from reading people who focus on the analysis of discourse and how it intersects with politics. Especially when the truth is ambiguous, opinion will be shaped along lines of expressive power.

If you were a Marxist (or left historicist philosopher) in the 60's and 70's you were living in the wake of a failed international project of overthrowing capitalism. A project that believed intimately in the feedback of theory and practice. They liked that intersection very much, "the most advanced Marxist science" (a trope in MLM) was a guarantor that "the revolutionary class" was adapted to the local conditions of the dialectic of capitalism and thus told you what to do to overcome it.

It all failed. Catastrophically or with outstanding banality depending on where you live. Bang or whimper.

One category Marxists really liked was false consciousness; widely held thought patterns and systems of thought that justified the subjugation of the working class. If you have "the most advanced Marxist science", you purport to know the truth that these thought patterns deviate from or work to conceal.

To contextualise it philosophically, there's a quote from Sartre (in his Maoist phase) directed at Foucault; "Foucault is the last barricade the bourgeoise can erect against Marx". That poststructuralist stuff was not popular with the Marxist left. Intellectuals were very happy to call other intellectuals servitors and spokespeople of false consciousness. Debord even viewed intellectuals with a public voice as class traitors; they were consumer subjects living a life of intellectual freedom so that people could see 'em on TV and feel expressed - engendering passive contemplation rather than actually doing anything worthwhile with their critical impulses.

I think the failure of the internationals and the Soviet project hit the collective consciousness of left theory pretty hard - it especially traumatised the transfer of theoretical truth to effective practice. The truth had failed, maybe what was thought was not the truth to begin with? What went wrong? The common assumption that there was a privileged (by truth) model of historical-political development died along with its widespread Marxist examples. The truth of history you say? If true theory and revolutionary political practice were so connected, how could the truth on history's side fail?

Maybe the truth of models of historical development doesn't suffice to explain how they function in society. The truth of any model doesn't describe its societal role. That hits hard; the truth is relatively impotent. The truth about any truth: it underdetermines its own interpretation a lot.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) — SophistiCat

Yes!

To stress the qualities of the philosophical mind — apokrisis

A synthetic perspective is a very courageous thing to generate if done with sufficient care; ultimately the only thing that distinguishes a master discourse and a theory of everything is the truth. Even then radically different conceptualisations of things can be formed from the same evidential basis and predict the same outcomes. Despite all the flux and flexibility of theory, the flux of conceptualisation is dwarfed in magnitude by the flux of the conceptualised. The intellectual boxes of explanation we have are filled with recalcitrant and vibrant exceptions, necessarily limited in scope to sufficiently master the targeted dynamics, and leave their exteriors (conceptually) influenced but (dynamically) underdetermined. If the music of the spheres has a hint of jazz so too will the concepts that ossify through evidence into theory.

Nature unfolds with commonalities and distinctions between its myriad driving principles and lawless irregularities, which requires a necessary variation in principle and methodology to grasp. Therefore the diversity of generating principles engenders a correspondent diversity of theorising practices.

Attempting synthesis on the level of that correspondence (epistemology=ontology) is worthwhile, but totalizing syntheses tend to be very premature and unaware of or indifferent to their limitations and applicability. They leave holes and call it noise, or subordinate every exception to the rule it proves.

Except that no 3D part ever changes its temporal or spatial position. — Luke

That's really interesting!

Do you view it as:

(1) The block has slices.
(2) The slices have temporal (1d) and spatial (3d) parts.
(3) The slices are all distinct. The time index ensures they are.
(4) Objects at t are subsets of a spacetime slice at t.
(5) Objects at t all include the time stamp t. They are space-time objects.
(6) In order for an object to move, they need to move in time.
(7) Objects include the time stamp, so cannot move in time.
(8) Objects cannot move in time.

?

In this block universe view, objects are all spacetime objects, and individuated by both their spatial and temporal parts. Because objects are individuated by their temporal parts, a spacetime object which is characterised as moving from t to t' is actually changing identity over that time period. There's not "a spacetime object in motion".

If you want to define "motion" in terms of an entity's 3d parts changing with respect to time but still hold that objects are spacetime slice subsets that must include time, that actually looks to dodge the issue created by throwing the temporal parts into the individuating conditions of objects.

Sound about right?

What @Pfhorrest said. I don't think any of us really know what we're doing. Any confidence displayed on here is just courage (or arrogance/recklessness) in the face of epistemic uncertainty I suspect.

Fair. Depends on the intended audience.

I guess my main question then is what functionally, do we gain or not gain from Speculative Realism vs. Kantianism? The scientific method works the same under both assumptions. — schopenhauer1

You're right, it does. I think it's more apt to characterise speculative realism by what questions its philosophers ask and how they ask them. I'm under no illusions that scientists in general actually give a damn about this kind of thing unless it's at the margins or very interdisciplinary anyway.

The "how" is characterised by asking questions about how stuff works in the broadest sense and describing abstract structures and commonalities, then speculating about what ties them together/generates 'em. The "what" is about anything as with any philosophy, though they seem interested with inhuman stuff, or seeing humans in more general ways.

I just think this is normal discourse on "emergence" and such that you see all over now.. Information theories, and all that stuff. It's essentially constructing theories on scientific research. I guess it is just an attitude towards the subject at hand. What it pretty much seems to always go back to is philosophy of mind usually. — schopenhauer1

Isn't this just normal social sciences, neurosciences, evolutionary biology and the like? — schopenhauer1

There's a synthetic flavour to it though; an eclectic mix of references dealing with a common theme, taking cues/inspiration from scientific ideas (and probably doing it badly) and philosophical ones (and probably doing it slightly better) together. They use the ideas for philosophical purposes; asking different types of question from the springboard they've bricolaged together.

I'm not certain that speculative realism or speculative materialism is actually a thing. It's probably more an attitude of frustration and a loose collection of similar methodologies/styles.

Much better. Although, if that's your best, I would still not let you anywhere near a novice. — sucking lollipops

I don't know how user friendly a description of speculative realism can be. I don't even really think it's a thing; it's more of a perspective that "science and scientific thinking styles are OK now, and we're gonna use them for ontology and other stuff!" than any doctrine. It's also more of a reaction of otherwise tenuously related philosophers to the excesses of some parts of continental philosophy - and that means describing what positive content there is after the reaction, why the reaction is taken, and what the reaction is to.

In <500 words that's hard.

As an aside, how is the subject/phenomenology not a "part of nature"? I think this is where my characterization might come in handy: — schopenhauer1

For what they're reacting against; nature is claimed to be construed as nature-under-the-aspect-of-the-norms-of-scientific-discourse, with the critical injunction that its concepts are more social construction than true. The conceptions of nature that transcendentally ground scientific discourse are emphasised as a "for us", never approximately true of an "in itself".

Can you provide the context of this? If it is a return, what was the original (I'm thinking Logical Positivism?). If it was a breaking away, then what started it and why? I'm thinking late Wittgenstein and social based philosophers? — schopenhauer1

The "return" is against the heritage of Kant, severing us from the "in itself" despite inhabiting it. The "speculative" part is a return to using what is established scientifically as a fuel for philosophical thought. If you imagine a particularly staunch Wittgensteinian who would see something like "F=ma" and claim that it holds only within a language game rather than approximately reflecting reality under certain contexts, it's close I think. What is "empirically real" is transformed into an "empirically real for us".

It's kind of a straw man enemy created for a certain kind of Continental philosopher perhaps, to then knock down. Who besides these small contingent of post-Kantian philosophers are they addressing it for then? — schopenhauer1

God only knows how that answer would look like if the title of the thread was Philosophical circlejerk instead of The Educational Philosophy Thread. — sucking lollipops

Thank you!

Kant's critical project was to split perception from nature. Things like space and time become part of perception rather than principally parts of the natural world.

Post-Kantian means those who are inspired by Kant and take his themes seriously. Phenomenology, the study of our perceptions and experiences, was inspired in the canon by a reaction to Kant. If you're severed from the reality of the world by the transparent cage of your perceptions, you still have your perceptions to analyze for patterns.

Heidegger fits into that narrative as someone who took the analysis of perceptions and related it to an idea of environment/world. Language use plays a crucial role in constructing the interpretive texture of the world.

After that, there's people who take the interpretive texture of the world very seriously and analyse "discourse", norms of interpretation, principally. Talking about how knowledge is created (Foucault) and how worldviews are generated within the confines of language use. If you're gonna interpret the world in some way, you're going to reach for how you already know to interpret it.

Somewhere along the way, contextualising scientific claims as just statements of norms of interpretation of the world engendered a neglect for scientific content. Science was interpreted as a human affair rather than an investigation into reality (as well as a human affair).

That leads to a kind of skepticism through re-interpretation, something like "The universe is 13.8 billion years old" becomes transformed to "The universe is 13.8 billion years old for our current scientific discourse", the statement is no longer about the reality of nature it's about the reality of our norms of interpretation of it.

That injunction to interpret statements about nature instead as statements about our norms of interpreting nature is an injunction against using statements about nature in the first sense. Thou shalt not speculate, especially philosophically, beyond the boundaries of current discourse.

Hence the "speculative" part. People in the movement affirm some truths and work with them to output statements about reality without worrying about all that "we're really talking about the norms of interpretation" stuff.

One interesting way of doing that, now that you're gonna speculate anyway, is to follow how models of reality work and be inspired by them; those models are now interpreted as being approximately true of the objects they concern. This invites talking about models of reality as well as models of humanity's behaviour and thoughts.

That invites a certain egalitarianism in ontology; removing the implicit "it's about us" from the human norm centered interpretation of the models invites seeing objects as pattern generative; they do stuff in a structured way, there are models of the structure, they can be used to form perspectives on related stuff. Now you can do ontology about patterns in that context, human and inhuman - that's what I think speculative realism is.

I dunno how accurate the story is historically. I just tried to take the shared themes and put them in a narrative.

My take on it:

Post phenomenological realism; a return to emphasising scientific content rather than human discourse. Nature philosophy done by appropriating the material and thinking styles of modern natural science and mathematics (contra strict constructionisms) rather than historical a-priori ratiocination (contra the German idealisms and discourse analysis). Social philosophy done through the lens of modern social science (contra discourse analysis) that leverages neuroscience+psychology (or psychoanalysis) to link it to the part of nature which is us (contra linking discourse to the subject through phenomenology).

({Speculative realism} is to {the various post-Kantian threads}) as ({models of the generative conditions of phenomena} are to {conditions of possibility of their conceptualisation-articulation}). Generativity vs Conceptual possibility.

Where thinkers in the movement I'm somewhat familiar with fit in:

Badiou: return to truth, mathematics as ontology. Linking human life to that ontology through norm-generative/norm-destructive events through psychoanalytic insights. Importantly not a naturalist (natural science is part of a truth procedure rather than ontologically primitive, it reveals the reality of things but only informs what's made of the discoveries)

Bryant: emphasises the autonomy (generativity) of objects; still very sympathetic to Heidegger (invert the canonical example of hammering, the hammer bends the arm in the striking). Stresses the importance of "flat" ontologies (contra anthropocentrism and superveniance style reductionism)

Brassier; nihilism as a speculative opportunity; we're always already dead (contra centralising discourse and human significance in philosophical projects). Truth as "optimally justified assertibility".

Yes. That is true.

In this thread I'm interested to hear if other people have their own core principles that they think entail all of their positions on all of the different philosophical sub-questions, and if they think that there are common errors underlying all of the positions that they think are wrong. — Pfhorrest

I have one? Maybe?

If you put all the ideas and all the logical/evidential/semantic relations between them on a page, you'd have a big network. It'd be a map of all human knowledge, or at least it would purport to be.

One of the amazing things about ideas though, especially philosophical systems, is that they are perspectival; every well thought out idea is a perspective on the world and generates a view on other ideas connected to it. It seems that the global structure of such a network looks to depend upon what subnetwork you inhabit. Under some ideas, phenomenology is first philosophy, under some metaphysics is, under some ethics is, under some politics is. under some logic is, under some theology is, under some epistemology is. Proponents of these theses change the overall connection of the network by characterising the root nodes differently.

I don't believe that a philosophy can ever transcend that variation in connectivity; we'd just end up with the same problem but applied to metaphilosophical theses, and a regress occurs. For that reason, being truthful, honest, precocious, exploratory and recognising limitation and fallibility is much more important than doctrine; care how you generate your perspective and the rest will take care of itself.

The "solve for" operation means you've already put the inverse function of f(y)=k into the mix, its existence is required for that proof to work; that inverse is sqrt(y).

There're two questions there really.

One is: can you define all operations in terms of addition? This is the question of whether you can generate a bunch of operations (like +, -, times, divide, raising to a power, taking a root) with one operation? In other words; can every member of a select collection of operations be defined in terms of one of the operations within it?

For the natural numbers, addition generates (addition, multiplication, raising to a power)

a times b = a + a + ... + a, b times
a^b = a times a times ... times a, b times

Another is: is a mathematical object closed under a select collection of operations?

Closure of an object under an operation is when you can apply the operation to any appropriate collection of its elements and get a result which is still a member of the object. EG, adding two natural numbers {0,1,2,...} will always get you a natural number, so it's closed under them.

In order to define a bunch of operations on a mathematical object, you usually have to insist upon the closure of that object under the operations; you need to make sure you can apply the operation to everything and get something familiar out.

@Pfhorrest's example illustrates that since the natural numbers (or integers, or rationals, or reals) are not closed under the operation sqrt(-x) ( sqrt(--2) isn't rational, i=(sqrt(-1)) isn't real) but they are closed under addition, so addition alone can't generate the operation sqrt(-x) (for every x anyway).

So I'm shaky on the next bit.

If you move to the complex numbers, which is closed under that operation, the answer is more tricky (@jgill would know much better than me). In the complex numbers, you can define any holomorphic function as an infinite sum. Since the sqrt(x) function isn't holomorphic; there's a discontinuity at 0;, but f(a,b)=a+b where a and b are complex looks like it is... And the composition of holomorphic functions is holomorphic, it seems like you can't end up with a non-holomorphic function by arbitrarily composing a finite collection of holomorphic functions. IE, you can't get sqrt(x) defined everywhere in terms of addition alone, even using complex numbers.

No idea. Same thing happens on twitch and reddit.

Invisible lurkers > Registered Lurkers > Posters.

Most community members of most places on the internet are lurkers. This whole site is like a small longform subreddit.

Is the forum just a reflection of the world, that we’ve reached a sort of evolutionary point of weariness without any reason to struggle or make things new? Is there really nothing new to come, is it out there ahead of us or do we have to create it? And what should we create, something that excites us or something that serves us? Do we even know how to create anymore? Has all this questioning and arguing just reduced things to the state of boiled vegetables? — Brett

We tend to talk about the things people are generally talking about. The times are weird; people talk about the times. We talk about the times.

Regarding trust being dead: trust of any authority figure or academic source, yes. Politicians in the political north betrayed the entire world over the last 40 years, they have no adequate response to climate change or increasing inequality (socialism for the rich). That sense of betrayal; everyone realized the emperor had no clothes, so people support those who appear to point it out insofar as they're part of the spectacle. It's not just the forumites who are frustrated rats in transparent cages.

So I take it as hopeful that criticism still exists and that we can shout at each other about it longform, even if it contains no vision of the future. I don't remember a time when the future existed.

but I'm not sure they actively forge the statistics — ssu

I don't think they forge them either. You don't need to forge anything to get true statistics that can spin to what you like. The overall number of cases in the UK is going down in general, BUT since easing the lockdown there's obviously been an uptick in the growth of new cases since the lockdowns were eased. When it was the apocalypse the same newspapers alternatively underplayed it or mined coronavirus for doomy clickbait while presenting it as a force of nature, now it's not the apocalypse everything is fine.

Oi @NOS4A2, have you buggered off because you understood a worked example of systemic racism and now want to forget the fact?

The oxymoron was right wing doing Animal Farm. It's like Marxists privatizing industry, pacifists rearming, etc... — ssu

Except it's not a figure of speech for rhetorical effect, UK Covid statistics are being reported in tabloids in exactly that way and for a clear political agenda. It's not like Bolshevik Russia, or left wing politics in general, has a monopoly on weaponising statistics for a political agenda.

Concerning specific methods used, it is sometimes helpful to picture things as meaning something physical when you're learning, but beyond that short-term utility, it's more misleading than anything. Besides, these things tend to get their own terminology that's abstracted from any interpretation beyond "The Feynman diagram looks like a ladder/bubble/whatever." My particular research tended to live in quite abstract domains. — Kenosha Kid

:up:

Thanks!

:up: That's me! — Kenosha Kid

Do you actually though? I don't mean to say you have a standard philosophical position on the matter, but don't you have conceptual insight/imagination that you apply to the thing to interpret it? Like an imaginative background of the calculation.

Maybe off topic.

especially if it is built into the algorithm, — NOS4A2

That's the crucial thing though, a supposedly race indifferent algorithm does pick up on real correlations (poverty + nonwhite proportion in neighbourhood + crime rate). Those correlations it picks up are manifestations of systemic racism.

You find the same thing when you try making hiring work through a machine learning algorithm for assessing applicant competence, it picks up on systemic effects in the training data and enforces them through its predictions; the algorithm ends up a racist misogynist.

If I understand you correctly it records and discriminates on the basis of race — NOS4A2

It would be doing much the same thing if it didn't record the ethnicity of the people "it" samples. It has a tendency to concentrate policing effort based on race regardless of whether it records ethnicity data. So long as the people "tested" for criminality are black or poor or from neighbourhood X, it allocates police effort more to black neighbourhoods (like or near X) over time. The algorithm "figures out" black=criminal from what it's fed and how it tells police to feed it.

Does the system record and profile on the basis of race, and not some other factor? — NOS4A2

It's mostly other factors. But the sampling effort is race split. So the system is discriminatory.

Is there something in that system that suggests certain racial groups should be policed heavier than others? — NOS4A2

If you're going to trust me on it since I've studied it: yes.

Police go to areas with high crime.
Racial profiling makes them "criminal test" people in the street more often if they're black.
Those show up in the database.
Model sees confirmed crime cases in those areas.
Police effort is reallocated to those areas.
Repeat.

Areas with high crime are nonwhite demographically to begin with. It's a positive feedback loop that reallocates police effort (edit: which in this case is also sampling effort, only sampled stuff will show in the database remember) more and more into nonwhite communities.

In fact I’ve been asking for them. — NOS4A2

Here's a banal and insidious variation on racial profiling. Predictive policing.

It certainly discriminates against a certain group of people while excluding others. — NOS4A2

So even though it doesn't target you by name, it's made explicitly to target you, and then some other people incidentally get effected by it. It is a Nos4a2-ist policy.

Structurally, that's exactly what the Atwater quote describes. Read it again:

You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. — Lee Atwater

Your intuitions are that "Let's ban all Trump supporters with approximately 3.4k posts who believe racism is predominantly propagated by putting people into race boxes who have approximately" explicitly targets you. And is Nos4a2-ist.

But your intuitions for "Let's enact policy that almost exclusively disadvantages blacks" are that it's not racist. Because it's not articulated in those terms.

You are not consistent.

It would still target me and people like me, sure. — NOS4A2

Okay. Now let's say that it's anyone with approximately 3.4k posts who fit the criteria. Still targets you? Still a Nos4a2-ist policy? Even though it's weakened to effect other people incidentally?

I don’t see who else it could refer to. — NOS4A2

If there was another person who fit the criteria who wasn't you, would it cease to be made to target you?

That’s the sort of discrimination I’m talking about and looking for. — NOS4A2

It doesn't even refer to you. How can it target you?

Let's say we started banning Trump supporters with over 3.4k posts who believed that racism is propagated mostly through people categorising others into racial categories...

No, Nos, it's not directed at you. It would be a principle thing.