Jul 122019
 

A blog reader called my attention to this:

Challenges to capture the big five personality traits in non-WEIRD populations

Abstract

Can personality traits be measured and interpreted reliably across the world? While the use of Big Five personality measures is increasingly common across social sciences, their validity outside of western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations is unclear.

And so on and so forth. The point of contention was this:

western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD)

It was pointed out that this could just as easily have been “WIRED” or indeed any of a whole range of other descriptors such as “1st world” or “non-sh!tholes,” etc. But with the current fetish for denigrating western civilization, it’s perhaps unsurprising that less than subtle insults are being inserted even into scientific papers.

But a thought occurs. Rather than being an offenditarian and getting tweaked, I say we run with it. Consider:

1: “Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD)” is indeed a rarity on the world stage. Thus technically being a civilized westerner is indeed “weird” compared to the rest of the world which would happily enslave and slaughter their neighbors while worshipping rocks and disdaining science in favor of witch doctory.

2: Anyone devoted to diversity had damned well better accept and celebrate the weird minorities. Therefore anyone who is opposed to western civilization is anti-weird, and thus a fascist and deserves to be punched, milkshaked, deplatformed, debanked, depersoned, driven from society.

The slogans write themselves:

Keep America WEIRD

Make America WEIRD Again

America: WEIRD It Or Leave It

Build the WEIRD

I *might* suggest a minor modification: “Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic and scientific (WEIRD AS).”

 Posted by at 5:01 pm