I'm not enthusiastic about continuing this argument, but since you have clearly thought about this before responding, I'll go on.

You seem to think there is some sort of incoherence in what I've been saying, but none of your attempts at diagnosis are clear.

First, I don't think it's necessary to declare beliefs in an argument. On the contrary, doing so generally means the argument is more stilted, since people generally don't like to concede that they were wrong. If you want to know lots and lots about the kind of arguments I've made outside of HN, you can read https://twitter.com/txtpf/with_replies

Second, you are attributing claims to me that I did not make:

1. Commitment to "CSJ" (your bailey). First, some clarifications:

- (a) I understand DEI to be a class of activities taken to achieve policy ends, not a doctrine. I believe that DEI exists, because it is a fact that organisations engage in it.

- (b) I believe that underrepresentation, the phenomenon that some people lack the ability to get their opinions heard and interests valued for no good reason, is commonplace in most hierarchies, and I've seen DEI initiatives that I thinked helped reduce problems in their organisations. I also think that worsening economic inequality is a major problem in many countries. However, I'm suspicious of the politically convenient top-down silver bullets that periodically appear to tackle these problems, and many DEI initiatives have caused more harm than good, especially around freedom of speech. I'm not a manager or a social scientist; I don't pretend to know how to balance the good against the bad in practice, but I am interested in the ethical problems raised and thinking more deeply how to solve these problems.

- (c) I don't recall that I've defended anything Haugen has said. I'm aware that there's a big story going on, I'm pleased by the idea that Facebook might lose its game of plausible deniability, but I've not made the effort to follow the details. My involvement here was more along the lines of getting a feel for what general opinions are held than getting to grips with the story.

- (d) I'm quite willing to "attack my own side" in arguments, when people who I broadly agree with make bad points. While I think there are urgent political issues, I'm generally more interested in the long term, and on my view this means raising consciousness is important and neglected.

Now, I do have beliefs about the relationship between, say, racial identity and underrepresentation that no doubt many self-styled opponents of CSJ would call CSJ, but they are quite complex, I revise them quite often, and they are the kind of thing I am often willing to set aside for the sake of argument if I find the argument interesting. I've attempted to cross swords with Lindsay on Twitter before, but not on anything I think he would call CSJ. I do not understand your position well enough to be confident that you would have considered my views to be CSJ if you if you had encountered them in a context other than the one you did.

2. Agreeing with the "more moderate Motte of DEI activists": I do not think "we" should make sure everyone gets along, nor do I think everybody should treat everyone else equally. It's an incoherent notion of liberalism that large organisations or the wider world should be made uniform in a way that even the happiest of families aren't. Calls for ends to conflicts whose causes are unresolved and the doctrine of equality are not successful in politics because they are a road to paradise, but because they're dead simple and that matters in democratic decision-making where there is little agreement about facts and justice.

Third, I don't consider the presence of shifts in an argument to be evidence of that something has gone wrong. It absolutely can be a danger sign if the same shifts keep happening, but arguments between people are usually informal and conducted in natural language, so people's position will shift their position. I think it's good to have a term for the retreat from a desired but hard to defend claim to something both sides can agree on is good, and it's valuable to be aware that it's happening, but the pattern can be healthy (a process of negotiation, where two people are finding common ground) or unhealthy (the dishonest strategem that people think of when they call Motte-and-Bailey a fallacy). The whole reason I linked to the (RW version of) Motte-and-Bailey is that I saw that this argument was taking place on territory in which these shifts are particularly likely to take place. It takes a level of confidence in one's rhetorical skill far above mine to notify one's victim of a fallacy in the same post one carries it out and still think one can gaslight them.

> The claim that CSJ was not determinative was your claim, which is why I contextualized your claim to the DEI doctrine that most people are familiar with.

I now understand. I had not encountered this use of the word "determinative" before: I actually wrote "determinate meaning". Yes, I think that moving from talk of CSJ to talk of DEI was a good idea on your part, but again the cultural divide struck: my understanding of the term was a little different to yours. If I understnd correctly, you characterised me as moving from claims about CSJ to claims about DEI in a Motte-and-Bailey fashion, but to me they are simply different sets of claims: related, yes, but the only thing I said about CSJ is that it is unfit for curious conversation, and if my DEI claims sounded "moderate", it is not because I had any problems with what I had said before.