site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 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.

9
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

What will I do? Probably nothing more than perhaps consider writing a comment here. This whole business is pretty far afield of my personal priorities for action.

What comes to mind from the discussion? Well, frankly, I just read the discussion below about dress codes before I read this, and what comes to mind is that there are, perhaps, some connections to be made. I haven't fleshed out those connections thoroughly, but I see a haze around them. What are the interests in preserving dress/speech codes? Are they individually beneficial to various actors? Are there coordination problems getting in the way of 'better' equilibria? I know people poke at game theory downthread, but I think the core insight is not to just shut up and calculate, but rather to just investigate the interplay between disparate motivations and incentives. A mathematical version may or may not be a suitable abstraction.

Moreover, I see connections in that a variety of folks are trying to do some implicit inference, which seems to me to require a significant amount of the same reasoning that is necessary for a game theoretic approach. That is, they would like to infer something about the 'type' or 'quality' of the players, be it a single parameter like "trust level" or something else. But to do so, it seems necessary to situate those parameters within the context of the incentives/game being played, because only then can the parameters be correlated to the behavioral strategies which are observed.