In an Overcoming Bias post on Gary Taubes’ diet heresy Stuart Buck refers to a “politically incorrect result from a clinical trial in Minnesota (in which 269 mental patients assigned to a cholesterol-lowering diet died, compared to 206 in the control group)”. So is cholestorol-bad an axiom of political correctness? It doesn’t seem that political to me, but most people do believe that cholestorol is bad. Are you considered a bad person if you disagree? What is necessary for a belief to be politically incorrect? It might be offensive to some sort of designated victim group. Smokers seem to be a designated hate-deserving group, and not necessarily because they harm others through second-hand smoke, but simply because we (even Ilkka Kokkarinen) consider them disgusting. The intersection of P.C and religion is especially confusing because some of the most uninfluential, pathetic and disliked minority religions are also the most egregious violators of other P.C (especially with regard to gender or sexuality) tenets. The disjunction between the various axioms makes me believe that those Mencius Moldbug considers Stasi will not be reliable in enforcing orthodoxy on, say, global warming.
On a somewhat related note, Al Roth gets into a discussion of repugnance in this talk about market design.
UPDATE: Via Marginal Revolution, a ranking of academic disciplines by political correctness.
Entitled to an Opinion 
July 26, 2008 at 1:20 pm
[…] Related: The Entitled to An Opinion blog on bad cholesterol and political correctness. […]
July 26, 2008 at 2:42 pm
A statement is politically incorrect if someone with the means to fuck you up will do so for saying it.
July 26, 2008 at 5:21 pm
So then it’s situational. Different things are P.C for different people, and not just the “Why Are They Allowed to Call Each Other Niggers?” thing.
July 26, 2008 at 7:16 pm
You can generalize the concept of politics to who-is-fucking-up-whom anyway, and the definition of political (in)correctness follows naturally.
July 26, 2008 at 10:45 pm
I think a useful, natural definition is where there are social mechanisms to reduce the expression of an idea for reasons other than its utility in creating the most accurate models of reality. It’s not that the idea is empirically incorrect, it’s that it’s politically incorrect.
July 27, 2008 at 12:00 am
I like that, HA. Though I think it may be a a bit empiricentric (my word). How about “where there are social mechanisms to reduce the expression of an idea for reasons other than its utility or soundness”? This would broaden the scope to cover normative ideas, which may not purport to say anything about the nature of reality as such. The idea that “death is an imposition,” for example.
July 27, 2008 at 12:25 am
Chip, I have to say I deeply dislike your idea, because I think what I call political correctness has a big influence on which ideas currently hold normative status, including in political subcommunities. And I think it’s almost axiomatic that there is political utility for some subpopulation that seeks to promote the correctness of an idea beyond its empirical demonstration (or best probabilistic extrapolation).
For example, I think “death is an imposition” is a politically correct statement for the life extensionist community that may have significant utility for the goals of the community.
The statement “‘death is an imposition’ is normative idea in the life extensionist community” may be empirically correct.
But you signalled in your comment that you understand all this already.
July 27, 2008 at 12:29 am
Chip, in other words, if an idea is beyond empirical verification of correctness, I think the empirically correct approach is to state that. Promoting the idea as “correct” then becomes solely political, and remains so even if you think there’s utility in the idea becoming popular.
July 27, 2008 at 12:52 am
So, could good etiquette, which often means avoiding frankness or expressing thoughts even if others suspect we have them, be considered a form of political correctness, even when it has no connection to policy? I am reminded of the Pygmy divorce.
July 27, 2008 at 12:58 am
Also, while political correctness does often trod over ugly empirical facts (suspected to have murdered several innocent beautiful theories, the bastards) it tends to be tightly connected with normative beliefs. An appeal-to-consequences is often used, which may be characterized as “But then Hitler would have been right and Nazism would be good!”. So a P.C normative belief can provide cover to a P.C empirical belief in danger of falsification by the uncaring world.
July 27, 2008 at 1:30 am
TGGP,
1. Short answer to comment #9: yes. Longer answer: Politics as maximization of one’s interests in relation to other people works at the microsociological level of “good etiquitte”, it seems to me. And political correctness can be in not expressing an idea.
2. I think you nailed it in comment #10. Well-written!
July 27, 2008 at 2:15 am
By the way, I think a party organized around overcoming repugnance bias would be a more useful perpetual third party than the libertarian party right now. The useful elements of libertarianism are a subset of the repugnance bias problem anyways, and the rest is either irrational or some type of performance for social positioning (like the people that are careful always to perform being for lower taxes rather than for a total tax structure of a certain amount).
July 27, 2008 at 11:54 am
“I think a party organized around overcoming repugnance bias would be a more useful perpetual third party than the libertarian party right now.”
HA, may I say, in all good humor, that I find that statement hilarious? I’m trying to imagine an alternate universe where the ORB presidential candidate is seated in the national debates. You could write up palimpsest of the debate transcripts once the McCain-Obama puppet show commences. It would be a classic.
As far as empirical reductions and PC are concerned, I think your formulation is nested in positivist assumptions that may miss the spirit of what people are getting at when they assign negative value to an idea without investigating its content. What about aesthetic judgments? “Wagner was a greater composer than Bach” would seem to pass the whiff test in terms of how it’s sure to be received among interested scholars and afficianados, but its content distills to questions of value and taste about which people can argue endlessly. Is your view that even aesthetic value judgments (say, ones reflexively deemed to be politically incorrect) invariably hinge on some form of insular sociological utility leveraging that can be ultimately be expressed empirically?
Also, you write, “For example, I think “death is an imposition” is a politically correct statement for the life extensionist community that may have significant utility for the goals of the community.”
This may be true, but I question whether it is very helpful in explaining political incorrectness as a cultural phenomenon, which is “almost axiomatically” based on the breach of a broader consensus. In this, I would argue more salient, sense, the statement would seem to be politically incorrect in its normative expression alone. I bet I’m wrong.
(As an aside, it occurs to me that a politically incorrect proposition that may go the the subtsance of this discussion is “normative expressions lack truth value.”)
Finally, it seems odd to discuss political incorrectness without delving into the psychological and emotional responses that individually and collectively determine how an idea is received. Is your view that such are merely the microcosmic cogwork of more relevant “social mechanisms”?
July 27, 2008 at 12:36 pm
I think any political party is going to be pretty much useless. During the early years of the U.S parties were frequently dissolving and being replaced by new ones, but third parties haven’t had any significance since the progressive era.
“normative expressions lack truth value”
That would be emotivism/non-cognitivism, which I ascribe to. It might be politically incorrect, except that it’s above the heads of too many people. “Normative” is not a word most people use.
The utility of Wagner vs Bach beliefs among classical music afficianodos sounds somewhat like that of the harmfulness of cholesterol among dieticians, even if one is linked to empirical facts whereas the other is purely aesthetic.
July 27, 2008 at 4:00 pm
TGGP,
Any thoughts on the emotional angle? I’ve been doing thought experiments with politically incorrect propositions and it sure seems intuitive that an emotional fight or flight response — or trigger, conversely — might be an essential ingredient, at least descriptively speaking. Does this simply beg deeper questions, perhaps implicitly addressed under HA’s working definition?
July 27, 2008 at 6:06 pm
I’ve heard when a part of the brain involved in emotion is damaged/removed people are unable to make pretty much any decisions. So it’s going to be involved with all sorts of actions. I don’t know more specifically what you’d like me to respond though.
July 27, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Here’s the big paper on that: (brain injury/emotion/decisions)
“The role of emotion in decision-making: Evidence from neurological patients with orbitofrontal damage,” Brain & Cognition 55 (2004) 30–40
I appreciate your efforts to come up with a phenomenological definition of political incorectness. I am often irritated by writers lazily calling their ideas “politically incorrect” in order to lend credibility to them – “my ideas are so dangerous, the sheeple can’t handle them.” HA’s definition in #5 doesn’t require politically incorrect ideas to be credible or even correct (contrary to the commonly seen folk idea that politically incorrect –> correct) – just rejected for reasons other than their truth value. I’m not sure it’s too empiri-centric (as Chip puts it) – “where there are social mechanisms to reduce the expression of an idea for reasons other than its utility in creating the most accurate models of reality” covers equally well “people kill their step-children way more than their biological children” and “suicide is an important right” (the latter for those of us who find the concept of “ethical reality” useful).
July 29, 2008 at 11:13 am
Having mulled over HA’s definition, I think his answers to my attempted criticisms are sound. I’m a little slow on the uptake is all.
July 29, 2008 at 3:05 pm
The most interesting thing about PC is when it attempts to protect groups that generally violate other PC taboos.
Primarily, PC protects Hispanics, Blacks, and Muslims, but also homosexuals and feminists.
July 29, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Here’s a brand new thing that sort of takes it full circle, since TGGP started off with imputedly unPC dietetics:
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/07/good_news_for_vegans.php
July 29, 2008 at 9:21 pm
I don’t post mathematical proofs at the arXive forums. John Smith, why are you posting in this comment thread?
November 6, 2019 at 5:59 pm
[…] a decade ago I wrote about what it actually means to be politically correct vs incorrect, and liked Hopefully Anonymous’ very generic definition, which would fit with Loury and Kuran’s framework. Moller’s explicitly rejects […]