Which doesn't discredit the equivalence, it discredits social scientists, since any layman can look at the two statements and see that they are facially the same.

And the layman would be wrong, because to judge the significance of a statement -- in sociology as in math -- context is crucial.

So now we have a privileged caste of self-appointed social 'scientists' who get to decide what constitutes racism and who gets their life ruined.

this is gold, seriously

I'm not sure understand what you're asking. Researchers in every field are always a "self appointed caste" and, yes, they tend to be privileged. Racism as an academic term is defined by the academic discipline that studies it, just as physicists get to decide what constitutes energy under the academic definition of energy, even though the word had existed thousands of years earlier, and with a different meaning. I don't think academics often get to decide who gets their life ruined, but social researchers do study the process of what ruins life in society. Have I addressed your questions?

No, because without repeatability and predictability, an academic is usually just a charlatan

Why do you say "without repeatability and predictability"? Social studies must be reproducible. When they are not, they are discredited (where are you getting your information about social science?) As we speak, there are academic organizations being formed to do exactly that: to reproduce more social science results. Prediction, as I explained, is generally impossible, just as it is impossible in computer science and biology in the general case, but in simplified situations, it exists and it is expected. Not only that, it is being used as a technology. Many manipulation techniques employed by large websites employ social science results to great effect.

I think you're attacking a strawman image of social science that's been constructed by people who really have no clue. That's not to say that the social sciences aren't plagued by many methodological problems, but we actually do know quite a lot.

Right, but it doesn't matter whether their belief is right or not, what matters is that they believe it.

That's a purely ethical perspective (although even in that perspective ethics, I don't think your conclusion is clear-cut at all), but Twitter's decision may be based on social damage rather than just ethics. The damage done by someone who represents power when attacking those with less power is greater than the other way around, regardless of the beliefs of the speakers. This, BTW, is why I'm so frustrated when people understand these things to be about someone taking offense. When society approves (or approves by ignoring) marginalizing actions and speech, there is actual damage being done through social signaling regardless of whether anyone present has been personally offended or not.

But if they are not equivalent, it logically follows that equality is not the goal, is that what you intended to say?

Here you go (the many linked articles with the variations are helpful): https://medium.com/@CRA1G/the-evolution-of-an-accidental-mem...

Nope, sorry, discrimination on basis of skin colour is wrong whoever does it.

Please find someone who advocated for this and reply to their comment instead of cluttering mine up.

Your link says that if a person feels more aggrieved (shorter) they should be allowed to be more racist (get a bigger box). That's not OK.

It actually says that if a person really is more harmed then they should get a bigger box. The ethical discussion behind that logic is rich and nuanced. As to "being allowed to be more racist", then that's not about that at all. It's about the racial discrimination on their part causing less actual harm. The two views here are 1. the conservative one, in which ethics is best decided from a personal perspective, which depends on the person's feelings and intent, and 2. the liberal one, in which ethics is decided on the amount of harm or good actually done, regardless of the person's personal intentions or feelings (of course, it's always a spectrum rather than two extremes).

What I always find amusing is how conservatives get mad that liberals are so sensitive to "taking offense", when the exact opposite is true. It's just that conservatives apply their own ethical perspective (where intent and feeling matter a lot) on the liberal view, and then think that the conclusion does not follow or is unfair. But the conclusions are a consequence of a completely different ethical framework, where they do make sense precisely because to liberals, the intent to harm and the feeling of being hurt don't matter as much as they do to conservatives, and what matters is the global effect actions have.

To a conservative, being racist means feeling negatively about other races or intending to harm them. To a liberal, being racist means taking any action that increases or perpetuates the actual harm done to certain races regardless of feelings or intentions.

Social scientists use the definition I attributed to liberals, because those of them who study racism are not ethicists and don't attempt to determine which ethical perspective is more "correct"; instead, they care about actual changes in society, and the truth is that the social effect of white people (we're always talking statistics -- again this is social science, not ethics -- so it's white people one average or as a group) discriminating against blacks is far more detrimental than the other way around (because whites possess more power), and therefore more racist. It is more "wrong" if your ethical perspective is not subjective but objective, and judges not intent but outcome.

It's odd that you focus on race when it's not even remotely the focus of the article.

It's odd that you didn't read the comment I replied to, which does.