Scott Alexander

It just asked about the statement.

And besides, most random Americans don't even know the latest 4chan white supremacist slogans.

At least some of the respondents probably meant it literally.

Scott writes, My opinion, it seems plausible to me that many of the 26% of respondents who said they disagreed meant they disagreed with the 4chan slogan version, and that many of the rest were doing symbolic relief slash emotive responding, such that they interpreted the question as something like, In the history of interactions between the white race and other races, do you believe the white race has behaved in an okay way?

and that some of the ones left over were lizard men.

Link in post.

Adams isn't required to know all of the weird sorts of symbolic belief biases that affect Paul's.

Although, isn't our responses aren't based on factual beliefs, but constantly malleable based on frame and emotion?

Sort of his entire shtick.

But at this point, he had lived in the USA for 60 years at that point.

He had already had many interactions with black people, both personally and through the news.

Given how much other information he had, updating from one ambiguous poll where 26% of people gave an ambiguously bad answer to this entire ethnic group of 30 million people is a hate group and white people should flee them and try to avoid all interaction with them and shouldn't help them in any way,

is exactly the sort of caricatured, exaggerated leaping to conclusions that the word racism means, if it means anything at all.

There's a footnote after exaggerated.

I realise Adams felt like he had the God-given right to exaggerate and caricature anything he wanted because it was a manipulation technique, but one important part of manipulation is that sometimes the people who you're trying to manipulate notice and don't like it and retaliate against you, and would-be manipulators aren't allowed to opt out of that part.

And there's another footnote.

Could whites should flee blacks be operationalised as a statement like black neighbourhoods are bad and whites should be afraid to live in them, which would then be somewhat justifiable?

First, I think this has no relationship to the poll Adams was citing.

So now we're really steelmanning him.

But second, this is still a super low-res caricature.