site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26564 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

8
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

While I sometimes entertain goofy social arrangements to solve this problem — could you livestream Dad working on excel spreadsheets at daycare to get kids organically playing at number problems? — there are only three, equally terrifying resolutions to the problem of humans getting less and less adapted to the current environment.

  1. Retvrn. Industrial civilization collapses at a global level. Humanity returns to the original affluent society, with the depletion of easily accessible hydrocarbons preventing complex civilization from ever re-emerging. @RandomRanger's concerns are moot because no efficient rival can appear to outcompete neo-primitives. Uncle Ted fans throw a wild party before getting to the business of the hunger wars that kill off 7 billion or so.
  2. Abolition of man. Industrial civilization re-writes human nature to be better adapted to what it needs from humans. Probably this is conducted through "voluntary" methods in most countries, though eventually those that refuse modification die off due to non-modified males becoming socially dysfunctional losers compared to the kids who spend 14 hours a day playing at economically relevant skills. This dynamic leads to a transhumanist arms race of unpredictable but probably horrifying, escalating self-modifications.
  3. Wall-E (or human extinction). Humans become irrelevant to industrial civilization. The optimistic view of this is a human zoo of total emancipation and self-actualization: a Disneyland with children, who play at hide and seek or with VR games or whatever. The pessimistic view is human extinction, with industrial civilization carrying on blindly turning as much of the universe as possible into low entropy structures.

Retvrn. Industrial civilization collapses at a global level. Humanity returns to the original affluent society, with the depletion of easily accessible hydrocarbons preventing complex civilization from ever re-emerging.

Complex civilization emerged without easy access to hydrocarbons - Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, China, Japan, Rome etc. You can have some pretty sophisticated and complex civilization powered solely by renewable resources. You can't have our incredibly wasteful modern society, but that doesn't mean you don't get complex civilization.

While I sometimes entertain goofy social arrangements to solve this problem — could you livestream Dad working on excel spreadsheets at daycare to get kids organically playing at number problems?

N=1 but my dad was a programmer and some of my earliest memories are of him writing cool little simulations and letting me play with changing numbers in them to see how the results changed. And some types of programming still feel like play to me now.

So I suspect the answer is "yes" (at least as long as the spreadsheet manipulator appeared high status, but I expect that wouldn't be a problem because "the person everyone is paying attention to" is pretty strongly correlated with status).

"the person everyone is paying attention to" is pretty strongly correlated with status

Children don’t generally hold their teachers in high regard, in my experience. And they pay attention to them all day every day.

My (not extremely reliable) memory from my childhood is that teachers were highly regarded throughout early elementary school, though that respect was greatly diminished by the end of elementary school and nonexistent by middle school.

I think children hold the good teachers in high regard. Most teachers aren't good. I think if we broke teachers unions and empowered school choice, we could quickly see a great deal of very good teachers teaching. Everyone loves a good teacher in the right circumstances, from students to parents to administrators to the good teacher themselves because it's such a fulfilling job. But in public schools where the principals receive the same salary regardless of performance, and powerful unions dedicated to preserving jobs over teaching children, good teachers are secondary to minimally risky teachers who don't get the school bad press.

I’ll have to take your word for it. I don’t remember a single teacher or professor from my school years fondly, except for the 10th grade English teacher that 15-year-old me badly wanted to fuck. And I attended very highly ranked (albeit public) schools and a historically top tier university program. I certainly didn’t think of these people as high status.

But I’ve read a fair number of sappy “the amazing teacher I’ll never forget” stories from Redditors over the years, so I’ll concede that I’m probably a minority.

Did any of your peers regard any teachers fondly at the time? No one was going, "Oh, it's too bad you got Mrs. Alice for math, she can't teach! I'm lucky I got Mr. Bob, he's hilarious and makes the subject make sense"?

Nope. A few professors were reviled for being harsh graders, but that’s about it.

Uh, farmers had to deal with this problem, what, 7,000 years ago? They seem to have found a workable solution.

Yes, taking your kids’ phones away and beating them for laziness or misbehavior is less pleasant than hunter-gatherer life. But agriculture is much closer to our current situation than hunter-gathering, and it seems to work for them.

This just reads and learned helplessness to me. As though the only possible solution is some manner of apocalypse, when that just serves as a convenient excuse to abandon all personal agency.

I've lucked into an arrangement that works fantastic. I work from home, and maintain productive hobbies. We don't watch TV as a family except sparingly. My wife and I strive to stay off our phones in front of our daughter, usually opting for reading instead.

Our 4 year old wants to do everything we do, which consist of exercise, woodworking, gardening, cooking, cleaning, yardwork and reading. She's already begging me to teach her how to program, which is obviously a ways off, but the wife is teaching her to read. If we actually make the leap to homeschooling her next year, I expect these trends to continue and strengthen.

It's honestly not that hard. Stay off your damned phone, and don't give them to children. Also, don't be a slob. Have an industrious hobby instead of being a couch potato.

Our 4 year old wants to do everything we do, which consist of exercise, woodworking, gardening, cooking, cleaning, yardwork and reading. She's already begging me to teach her how to program, which is obviously a ways off, but the wife is teaching her to read.

There are tons of drag-and-drop educational programming apps that teach stuff like loops and functions.

You benefit from an overvalued career that doesn’t require you to walk, shake hands, or do much more than bum around on a laptop all day. Presumably, your wife doesn’t work if you’re considering homeschooling. Your opinion on it being “honestly not that hard” is worth very little to the average person.

And I wouldn’t brag too much about the success of your parenting before your child is a teenager. Homeschooled children usually end up weird and unsociable.

Homeschooled children usually end up weird and unsociable.

I'm the 'designated cool grownup' for a homeschooling community. 'Weird' is not a normal thing I see with young people who can't find their way. 'Undersocialized' is, but homeschool graduates are a real mix. There's success stories and there's failures.

Definitely upvoting 'don't brag about your parenting success until you have a twenty year old', though.

Definitely upvoting 'don't brag about your parenting success until you have a twenty year old', though.

This is fair, but at the same time I object to all this plain old giving up I see, and simply assuming everyone taking steps to protect their kids from superstimuli is actually fucking them up even worse.

everyone taking steps to protect their kids from superstimuli is actually fucking them up even worse.

That does happen, but usually with people who are a bit loopy to begin with. Honestly I’m not sure that oversheltering can be cleanly distinguished from controlling parenting or general nuttiness in a lot of those cases.

Like I said, homeschoolers seem to have a pretty wide variance IME. Most are more or less average, some produce kids that are ready to be normal, functional adults by 16, some produce 25 year olds that act like middle schoolers. Going entirely off the worst cases leaves doesn’t paint a good picture, but neither does going entirely off the best.

Pretty much every engineering related job that doesn't involve direct supervision of construction or experiments can be done remotely.

Also I doubt he uses a laptop. They're supremely bad ergonomy wise, a screen or two and a keyboard do wonders.

Pretty much every engineering related job that doesn't involve direct supervision of construction or experiments can be done remotely.

Fake email-and-excel engineering jobs can be done anywhere your imagination takes you.

Pretty much the entirety of the software field doesn't require anything but an internet connection.

Engineers at least some of them might need to go somewhere and talk to the production people and look at what goes on, but with software, there's never really any need.

Yes, I’m aware that software isn’t real engineering.

49" 32:9 display. I can never go back.

Do you just never use maximized windows with a 32:9? With 3 smaller 16:9s I have one window active in each of them, but you must have a way of aligning multiple windows on one screen to use all that space

Yeah, I typically go with two windows. Apparently if I just drag a window to the edge, it snaps to filling the left or right half of the screen. Seems to be built into Windows 10. I installed PowerToys that has even more advanced options for window partitioning, but I haven't found I need it. My monitor actually came with some Samsung branded utilities for the same, but I found them actually more annoying than the default(?) Windows behavior.

I was going to mention Win+Left/Right if aquota didn't. It's great for snapping to the inner side of a two monitor setup. But I suppose you don't really need that feature.

pro tip, windows key + left/right arrow key has the same effect as dragging all the way to the side. If you continue to hold the windows key after doing this you can then hit the up or down arrow to quarter the window.

Tbh I don't see either 1. or 3. as remotely realistic. You say "RandomRanger's concerns are moot because no efficient rival can appear to outcompete neo-primitives", I say "Obviously any neo-primitive will be outcompeted by non-primitives". Hydrocarbon certainly makes industrial civilisation easier, but there is absolutely no proof whatsoever that it was strictly necessary, and even less that we require it now that we have already developed so far. Even worse, RandomRanger's point is about farmers, not industrial civilisation, so hunter-gatherers were already outcompeted long before hydrocarbons were relevant. There is just no going back.

Wall-E is also an intrinsically unstable system. The beings profiting from this system (humans) have no power, the beings who have all the power (AI overlords or such) do not profit from it. No matter how many safeguards we set up, a single mistake and we're done.

For better or worse, some sort of transhumanism seems to me like the only way forward.

How much do modern urban people profit from cats and dogs? I'm fond of my balls, but I can imagine worse fates than living as pets.

Yeah, have fun being (at best!) dropped into the wilderness bc your caretaker AI hit some economic difficulties. Humans already have a very strong in-built anthropomorphising bias and will often waste incredible money on pets, but this is a function of their affluence. If times get hard, they have no trouble getting rid of and/or mistreating them. In theory we might be able to design AIs who love us so desperately that they won't do it, but this is not the path we are currently going. And even then you'll have the problem that rogue AIs unburdened by humans might outcompete the good ones anyway. Either way it just seems like a stupid bet to take.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats