--- title: "The woke test, one sentence, and the price of energy — Sami Miettinen on Weekly Wiseguys" titleOriginal: "Viisastelu – Viisastelijat Woke-testissä | Mika Aaltola pressaksi | Totuus energiakriisistä" description: "Sami Miettinen and Tere Sammallahti on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 22 October 2022: taking a newspaper's woke test live and conceding two of its premises, unpacking how one English sentence became a headline about the prime minister, and arguing against compensating households for electricity prices on the grounds of the European energy balance." format: "podcast" show: "Viikon viisasteluklubi" episode: "Viisastelu 22.10.2022" hosts: ["Ivan Puopolo"] date: 2022-10-22 duration: "51:00" language: "fi" original: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a84AKwwc3o canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/viisastelu-woke-test-aaltola-and-the-energy-crisis/ --- # The woke test, one sentence, and the price of energy — Sami Miettinen on Weekly Wiseguys Sami Miettinen joined **Viikon viisastelu** — Ivan Puopolo's weekly political panel, known in English here as *Weekly Wiseguys* — on 22 October 2022, with **Tere Sammallahti** in the third seat. The episode opens with the panel taking a newspaper's "woke test" live on air, and the useful part is not their answers but their reading of the instrument: the test scores agreement with a set of statements, the first of which is that humans have two biological sexes — so a maximum score requires denying something everyone present regards as a fact. That is a point about how a measure is constructed rather than about the politics around it. They also disagree with each other on the same item, one grounding a qualified answer in chromosomal variation and the other holding that the presence or absence of a Y chromosome keeps the binary intact. Two concessions come out of the same exercise. The classic market argument against discrimination — a prejudiced employer is an expensive employer — is offered and then qualified from inside the group: labour markets are not perfect, and if cognitive biases are what is meant by "structures", the claim is partly true. And on whether a white person can know how a black person feels, one speaker describes being the only white person in a part of London as a young man and says plainly that there is something to it. The strongest section argues against the panel's own political interest. With Russian energy down from roughly 40 per cent of EU supply to about nine, subsidising household electricity prices does not close the gap — it keeps demand up, which keeps prices high or produces outages. They say out loud that this is unfair on people with electric heating and long distances, and hold the conclusion anyway. Alongside it sits an observation about adaptation: within six months firms had replaced about half their gas use, households had cut consumption, and state spending had grown. It closes on a genuine disagreement about the presidency, with Sami defending a non-politician candidate on the strength of a specific piece of analysis and the others arguing that contacts and negotiating experience cannot be conferred by an office. ## Chapters - **00:00** — The woke test: what the instrument actually measures - **01:46** — Claim 1: humans have two biological sexes - **03:20** — Mutations, variation, and what follows from them - **04:07** — Claim 2: trans women are women - **05:43** — Safe spaces, and two recollections from events - **07:16** — Reading lists, and the police as an institution - **08:03** — Income gaps: the market argument against discrimination - **09:50** — The limits of that argument: language, incentives, imperfect markets - **11:29** — Claim: a white person cannot know how it feels - **12:45** — A concession: the experience of visible minority status is real - **15:33** — Orpo, "shrieking", and what the debate was turned away from - **17:53** — One English sentence, and the headline made from it - **20:19** — Hunting for intent instead of reading the words - **21:14** — A prime minister's tweet, the ECB and MMT - **21:59** — The missing no-bailout rule — and the objection to it - **22:56** — A concession: the question is real, but a tweet is not research - **23:49** — Stimulus in every phase of the cycle - **24:36** — Why only one side is asked for a list of cuts - **25:24** — Prime Minister's Questions, and what Finland lacks - **26:55** — Is the press allowed to polarise - **29:35** — Britain's tax level, and what the mini-budget actually failed on - **30:26** — The private sector adapts, the state does not - **31:12** — Russian energy from 40 per cent to nine - **32:47** — A housing company's equality clause, and shared misery - **34:21** — Why compensating electricity prices makes the problem worse - **36:43** — Emergency priorities, the Baltic Connector, and hertz - **39:18** — Cutting consumption as the only fast lever - **41:05** — Mika Aaltola for president — the polling - **43:25** — What a president should be required to have - **46:31** — Parties and celebrity candidates - **49:49** — Closing **The recording lives on Ivan Puopolo’s own channel and he owns it.** This page is a record of the appearance and a pointer to the original, not a copy of it. The chapter marks above are derived from the recording itself; the episode carries no published chapter list of its own. A fuller write-up is on Neuvottelija AI, [in English](https://www.neuvottelija.com/ai/viisastelu-woke-testi-aaltola-ja-energiakriisi/) and [in Finnish](https://www.neuvottelija.fi/poliittinen-satiiri/viisastelu-woke-testi-aaltola-ja-energiakriisi/). Original recording (Viikon viisasteluklubi): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a84AKwwc3o --- Cite as: Sami Miettinen, guest on Viikon viisasteluklubi Viisastelu 22.10.2022 — The woke test, one sentence, and the price of energy — Sami Miettinen on Weekly Wiseguys, 2022-10-22, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8a84AKwwc3o. Record: https://www.neuvottelija.com/media/viisastelu-woke-test-aaltola-and-the-energy-crisis/.