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.
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Shaming.
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The idea that there is some state of pure discourse free of even the hint of antagonism where humans merely discuss, unmolested by concepts like personal interest or context, the culture war without waging it to any degree is a fantasy, unless they're Spock (in which case they aren't human) or some secret time traveler posting from 3050 who finds the whole thing irrelevant. Maybe it's an important or necessary fantasy to prevent a discussion forum from entirely turning into /pol/, so maybe me getting banned for stretching kayfabe a little too much with my prior post was necessary (not that I really think so, but I have no idea where the Culture War Roundup community went or how I can participate in it), but it's still a fantasy.
But no, I wasn't optimizing for heat instead of light in that post. (That's more like a genre of post not uncommonly made on /pol/ that says something like "All women like to be dominated, therefore all Israeli women secretly want BHC (Big Hamas Cock). Only JIDF shills disagree. Prove me wrong, if you work for Mossad. Also, God doesn't exist, and Nick Fuentes is confirmed gay. But don't post in this thread if you have an American flag, because I don't want to talk to mutts who can't stop getting themselves shot." (Pls don't ban me mods for accurately imitating a /pol/ poster like you previously banned me for accurately imitating a black person. It's genuinely just an example to illustrate the difference between what I posted and what actually optimizing for heat is.)) I simply acknowledge that there's no light that doesn't also produce heat, and sometimes the best way to get the kind of light you need effectively is to turn up the heat a bit (whereas with my current post I instead tried a more logic-based rhetorical approach). Again, only in a fantasy world is this never the case.
The only thing strict adherence to the absolute most literal letter most rules here gets you is the culture war still being clearly waged, just in an infuriatingly indirect, passive aggressive fashion, like when Andrew Yang fans would pretend they were entirely non-partisan even though they obviously leaned heavily to the left. (And this is why the strictest literal letter of the rules here is rarely/only selectively enforced, though who gets the privilege of bending them the most can differ based on mod fiat.) I prefer my direct approach, though it's of course necessarily limited by the venue.
And I am traffic as opposed to merely in it? Good. I appreciate the compliment. The only thing that gives me pause about the current state of this world is that I'm not getting in its way enough, not that I'm getting in its way too much. You know who also acted as really infuriating traffic for the drivers on the road once? This guy. Traffic can be a noble thing.
So am I just waging the culture war? No more than basically anybody else here, even if I acknowledge it a bit more than some. Maybe I'll get popped extra/again for rejecting the polite fiction that this is a venue inherently opposed to that, but again if that happens given the pretty anodyne tone of my current posts then that's just a matter of selective enforcement, not reality.
In any case, if you think my prior post was wrong, then you should be happy with the mods here, who banned me and incentivized me to use a different rhetorical strategy this time. Your Motte lives, or at least its naked emperor has not yet ended his alleged fashion show.
That's good for me. They should be in my view.
Yes, I'm happy to confirm that some reasonably intelligent people agree with me. (Though according to the OP's count, almost a quarter of voters still disagreed with me, so hardly an echo chamber. Perhaps I just made a good point, even if it wasn't dressed up all fancy in pretending that I have no dog in the fight?)
I remember those days too. They were called the '90s when I lived them. Alas, they've changed some things since then that have affected people's propensity for anger and hatred.
I'm not saying your original post represents "everything wrong with what the Motte has become" - I'm saying that particular paragraph I quoted does.
I don't expect unbiased discourse.
I don't expect an unadulterated pursuit of perfect knowledge.
I don't expect every single post to be an epitome of kindness.
I used to expect that the above was the desire. I used to expect that we had a shared desire to be unbiased, knowledge-seeking, and kind. That, when we fell short in this space, it was considered a mistake rather than something to be lionized. This is why the most important part (which I italicized) is you're proud of it.
That is what has been lost in my opinion. It used to be that the consensus was that we had ideals rooted in charity, curiosity, etc - however imperfectly rendered in practice. IMO, those ideals are no longer the consensus on this website.
"Kind", no. But I do desire to be relatively unbiased (other than by what I see as the truth) and knowledge-seeking (and it's worth noting that it's the pursuit of "kindness" that often inhibits those two more important values), and I think that I'm at a reasonable level of both and that the quoted paragraph in controversy by no means contradicts that. If effective rhetoric invalidates truth and knowledge-seeking, then there is not a truthful or knowledgeable person on this planet (or if there is, he has zero tools to communicate any of it to the rest of us or at least is apparently not supposed to use them, which seems a bit unproductive to me).
That's the rub, isn't it? Any time you make a venue to attract intelligent people founded on a certain set of principles, if you succeed, those principles will inevitably be challenged, because intelligent people (who you wanted to attract) always challenge principles and ideas. Perhaps by its original standards this place would have stayed better if it had stayed dumber, because dumb people listen and obey.
But yeah, I'm fine with being proud of not being lockstep in agreement with communicative norms inspired by weird Berkeley polysex people who have for the most part collectively accomplished nothing, even easy layups like all getting rich on Bitcoin so they could influence everything with money, other than mostly ruining their reputation in the mainstream. They don't have a monopoly on truth or knowledge-seeking any more than I do, and their blog posts from 2014 or whenever about Edwardian Salafi Confucius Lite etiquette or whatever are not the gospel for all time.
As mentioned too, the people who most adhere to the commandments of "niceness" on this site and other places like it overwhelmingly aren't actually that nice deep down either (including its alleged enforcers, if you'll look at the angry response left on my post by a mod here who chose to don their hat for it despite declaring it not even a warning) I often find. At their best, they're better at keeping the knife hidden behind their back. At their worst, they're merely sneakier about pulling it out and plunging it into your throat before you've even noticed.
That's why I'd rather hear it straight and say it straight, even if pesky human feelings and shocking realities like "conflict" and "People often associate negative emotionality with sociopolitical and cultural issues, especially when those who oppose their preferred beliefs and have hurt them over it appear." end up involved. That to me is helping the pursuit of truth and knowledge. Revealing that I'm biased by what I see as the truth in a particular evidentiary or even emotional (yes, we are not Vulcans, not even the rats) direction is helping the conversation stay overall less biased (or at least transparent about it, which realistically with humans involved is the best you can hope for). Everything else is a smokescreen of little imperial court mandarins just desperately trying not to rock the boat. Boring and pointless.
There may be a correlation between intelligence and contrarianness, but I think you're going a step beyond that and asserting a correlation between intelligence and aggression, or between intelligence and lack of charity.
I find that much more doubtful.
I will repeat my recent reply to a very similar objection for efficiency's sake in response to you:
So while I was perhaps asserting such a correlation (not sure if I want to commit to that or explain more nuance, but it's not super important), and I am perhaps wrong if I was, it's still worth nothing that no such correlation is required for "aggressive", "charity-lacking" (by your standards, as by my standards the mods here often lack the most charity when modding others' posts) people to be all up in your intellectual discussion venue (based on subjective frequency of appearance).
I haven't asserted that agreeability correlates with intelligence either. In fact, I just said that I think plausibly intelligence correlates with being contrarian.
But being contrarian, or even just disagreeableness simpliciter, is not the same thing as being a passionate culture warrior who seeks heat rather than light. I don't particularly care to discuss moderation here, particularly since, in my experience, culture and implicit norms are vastly more important than explicit rule enforcement.
Where I object to what you're saying is that I think you're defending a pugilistic, uncharitable approach to discussion, which I think is opposed to a goal like actually learning. I think a measure of charity, of good-faith curiosity and desire to understand different perspectives, is necessary for intellectual growth, and that's what I think is lacking in what you advocate.
That doesn't mean I think people should be dishonest, passive, or should feign agreement. Forthrightness is an intellectual virtue. But that is still a long way away from a Hitler-like "fire and brimstone" approach.
It may be that fire and brimstone are more persuasive - indeed, if your goal is to sway the public, they almost certainly are. In your top comment, you described Hitler as a 'great rhetorician', and indeed he was. But rhetoricians optimise for persuasiveness, rather than truth-seeking. 'Winning' in the sense of swaying more of an audience is something you may sometimes want to aim for. But here is supposed to be a place about 'winning' in the sense of learning and increasing your understanding.
That's why I think the aggressive, militant approach is wrong here. Soldier mindset, to use Galef's term, may be great for soldiers - but we're not soldiers. This is not a barracks.
I think the main conflict between us here is I don't see my "pugilistic" (good description) approach as inherently uncharitable. Can you point out where you think I lacked sufficient charity in terms of inaccurately or mendaciously characterizing things?
If I attack someone fiercely for what they've actually done that's truly terrible, then I've given them as much charity as they deserve, which is none, which means I've still been optimally charitable. Nor has the revelation of the truth been harmed. In fact, it's been enhanced by accurate characterization.
I'd argue that in the top post here you go beyond merely not being maximally charitable. You also engage in what I'd argue is childish name-calling. I won't criticise e.g. calling Scott's argument 'facile', which I think is within bounds, but how do you justify phrases like "ever since he let himself be fully chastity caged by Ozy and co."? That's a childish insult that is entirely unnecessary to the point you're actually making.
That seems to be to be more aggression than the minimum needed for truth-seeking or truth-speaking.
For what it's worth, I am in no way sympathetic to Scott's lifestyle or that of the Bay Area rationalists. You describe them as "weird Berkeley polysex people" above, and as it happens I fully agree that their lifestyles are deserving of contempt, particularly as regards so-called 'polyamory'. But when that is not germane to the point being made, I omit it.
It's not childish as children generally do not have knowledge of what a chastity cage is or what being in one would mean.
It is entirely true and also entirely necessary to the point I am making in that sentence as it is one of the main central criticisms of him worth being made these days.
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Sounds like we agree there has been a shift - just not on whether the shift is desirable. C'est la vie.
Personally, I don't think disagreeableness is all that tightly correlated with intelligence, and I certainly don't think that people who feel a need to vent on social media are more intelligent than those who don't.
Maybe not, but I'm not sure that the agreeable are generally more intelligent than the "disagreeable" (assuming in this case that a mere propensity for dissent and adversarial analysis is equivalent to the psychological trait of disagreeableness, but I won't get into the weeds of dissecting that now) either. That means that at a minimum, if you try to draw intelligent people to your platform, you will attract both kinds. In fact, if even just 5% of intelligent people are somewhat "disagreeable" (or actually disagreeable), that's still enough people in raw terms to force every janny online into a jumble daily.
If there is no correlation, then intelligence doesn't have anything to do with it, and your claim reduces to "as new people come to a platform, values drift unless they're all super agreeable, because some of the new people disagree with the original values". This is (I think?) obviously true, but doesn't pad our egos in the same way.
Re the 5%, my opinion is that the most confrontational 5% of users are net-negatives in terms of overall discourse quality and discourse quantity (i.e. they drive other users away). It seems like you don't agree?
I didn't say there's no correlation, just that I was unsure of how to characterize it (as I was involved in a lot of other conversations in other subthreads at the time). And I will say now that there probably is a correlation, just that I don't think "disagreeable" is the right word to describe it. "Intellectually autonomous", "prone to questioning authority", "less vulnerable to pure peer pressure", etc. I think are all better phrases to describe the trait I'm talking about. And yes intelligent people are more likely to illustrate those traits, because why wouldn't they be? Again, it is the less intelligent who are more prone to listening and obeying, because they have less of an ability to internally formulate their own alternative ideas and behavioral schemes anyway.
It's also just a matter of the basic bell curve. There's no reason to think that on any given venue like this that the moderators are going to be the most intelligent people around, because some research has actually shown that management ability does not linearly correlate with intelligence but in fact drops off after around an IQ of 120 or so, because you as you get more intelligent than that you lose your ability to easily relate and communicate to people with lower IQs. So inevitably more intelligent people than the mods are going to show up (which isn't to say that everyone opposing the mods is automatically smarter than them), and why wouldn't they question them if they're literally smarter?
Not at all. First of all, driving other users away means absolutely nothing inherently and is often a good thing (quality over quantity any day IMO). 100 quality posters (whether they drive other people beyond them away or not) who are capable of generating new ideas and posts is far better than 50,000 posters who are not. (And indeed a community with the first configuration could be quite a livelier than one with the second, as the 100 posters are capable of driving the conversation forward, whereas the community with the 50,000 posters may just straight up die if none of them are even capable of generating any content for the others to respond to unoriginally.) Or if you want to talk about something like Reddit, it's still far superior to 5 million people who are only capable of generating and responding to fake Jerry Springer-esque personal stories, bot-posted AI slop and endless reposts, cheap political bait, etc. The people who want to manipulate them ensure there's plenty of new activity, but most of it sucks.
Other than that, I don't see what would possibly be bad about confrontation. What is the essence of discourse if not the confrontation of ideas and claims?
Personally I think it's the top 5% of those who insist on an adherence to imaginary standards who cause the problems and reduce the discourse quality (which is not to necessarily say quantity, but quality is obviously superior).
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