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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Is this your first week reading the culture war thread? Its not a novel argument around here. In fact, it might be the whole reason this culture war roundup exists, and thus the oldest argument on this particular forum.
The argument you are gesturing at is sometimes call Human Biodiversity (and sometimes called "scientific racism" by its detractors) or HBD for short.
Some history:
There was a blog called SlateStarCodex (the blog still exists, but is now continued under a different name: astralcodexten. That is a whole story in itself). A guy named Scott Alexander wrote interesting articles on there. People liked his writing. They made a subreddit to follow the blog, the subreddit took the same name as the blog. Scott Alexander occasionally wrote about culture war issues (it was mostly supposed to by a psychiatry blog). These articles would attract a lot of attention. Scott often did not like all this attention.
Scott had weekly open threads where people could talk about anything. He found that people kept wanting to talk about the culture war and it drowned out all other conversation. So he said 'no more talking about the culture war'. The subreddit stepped in, and created a weekly thread where all the discussion of the culture war would be contained, so that it wouldn't spread and infect all other discussions.
This went on for a while. Eventually some people felt that the culture war thread was being taken over by HBD arguments. Some of those people were moderators of the SlateStarCodex subreddit. They decided to ban discussion of HBD in the subreddit. I was a moderator of the subreddit at the time. I did not like how often HBD discussions happened. I was weakly against banning the discussion altogether. Unlike most readers of a subreddit, when you are a moderator you can't just ignore a discussion because you don't like it. You have to read through all the comments to suss out what is going on. I wished there was less HBD discussion, but I didn't think banning it would mean less work for me as a moderator (and my main complaint at the time was how much work it created for moderators).
Eventually the HBD discussion ban expired or was overturned, I can't remember which one. It left a sour taste in a lot of people's mouths. Some people were upset about the HBD discussion, others were upset it had expired. I'd guess that most people that are still around in this community today were more upset by the discussion ban.
Things went on for a while, but Scott was recieving increasing pressure from people and threats of doxxing because he was associated with a subreddit that allowed discussion of HBD and other ugly culture war things. Scott asked for the subreddit to end culture war threads.
The mods agreed, but also decided to create a splinter subreddit that would not be directly associated with Scott, but would also allow the culture war discussion to continue. This splinter subreddit came to be called "TheMotte", a reference to motte and bailey arguments. There was uncerntainty about whether this move would succeed. I can say I was publicly confident enough that I took a bet on it and won the bet. I wish I had also taken a public bet for the move from reddit to off reddit to succeed too. I felt it was more than likely to succeed, but less likely than the subreddit switch.
The move off reddit happened because reddit admins were increasingly removing random comments, and going after subreddits that we had previously thought of as 'canarys in the coal mine'.
It expired, it was always a moratorium. Mostly because of a small cadre of users (TrannyPorno, LeggoMyEggo, zontargs, situation_normal, Et Al...) insisted on making every conversation about HBD. Conversation in the fun thread about the NFL playoffs? Here come the usual suspects to talk about how Atlanta isn't going to make it past the first round because they have too many n*ggers in skill positions.
Wait, was zontargs one of the HBD people?
Not initially, but he sort of became one as time went on. the dissatisfied HBD people formed the founding population of /r/CultureWarRoundup.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
HBD is an answer to the question "Why do different races have persistent group outcomes?". I was asking a different question; specifically, "Why do people frequently claim something clearly specious (group rates of discrimination) to explain (one particular set of) group differences, when literally minutes of thought and research is enough to disprove it?"
I mean, the answer might be "Claiming anti-black discrimination explains all group outcomes is a matter of Wokist doctrine solely, and no one ever advanced the argument in good faith, and its common presence simply indicates how far public discourse has fallen.", but I figured I should at least ask people to take stabs at the argument first.
So you're asking why is politics political?
I would surmise that the literal answer to your question is that most people simply don't find it worth their time to research an answer to this question. I would also contest that this explanation is really so specious that it can be summarily dismissed after a minimum amount of thinking and research. First, I simply doubt that you've actually looked at "literally any other group" and found no exception to the claim that historical discrimination is not the primary driver of group outcomes. I could, for example, bring up the example of Indian untouchables, who have faced de jure and continue to face unspoken caste-based discrimination and still lag behind privileged castes. Second, I don't believe that success in the face of discrimination proves its relative irrelevance in general. Consider a commonly offered explanation that Ashkenazi Jews are simply more intelligent than native Europeans and exhibit stronger enthnocentrism. Let's say that's true - well then, it may be the case that AJs are a special exception. They may have had the tools to thrive despite oppression that a group without such an advantage did not. I can foresee you claiming that this is special pleading, but to make a case for special pleading you'd need to already have a firmly established general pattern from which someone wants to claim exception. Can you list more than just Jews who have had to face a comparable level of oppression for that long in the country where they are the minority and came out on top or at least at parity? Third, it does not seem obvious at all as to what is the appropriate scale for answering this question. Jews have been in Europe for centuries. As recently as the 19th century, prominent individuals not especially invested in furthering a bigoted agenda like deutsch physik felt comfortable making the claim that Jews were of manifestly inferior intelligence to the native European. Were they simply ignorant, bigoted without cause, accurately assessing the apparent state of affairs at the time? When exactly since the departure from their homeland did Jews go from lagging to ahead? Moreover, should one factor in that a group identity like religion (and a preserved common language) could operate across borders while something like race, less so? Should one consider the size of the minority group at all? Fourth, I don't see any clear way to disentangle discrimination from other explanations. It seems just as plausible to me that, say, alleged Jewish ethnocentrism could be an evolved cultural response to oppression as a pre-existing protective factor. It seems plausible to me that persistent discrimination could have kept African Americans more localized in the initially poor South and that compound effects of being in a poorer part of the country and facing vicious discrimination could have done more damage than expected from a simple composition of those factors. Fifth, how do you even define a group? Do you differentiate them by how they immigrated? By some sort of measure of the interconnections in their social network? Genetically?
I don't think finding satisfactory answers to those questions, even limiting it to satisfactory relative to what conclusions can be drawn from extant knowledge (which may very well fall short of a more general standard for what is satisfactory), is going to be anywhere south of at least 100 hours of research. So, if I had to answer someone like you in a setting where my real identity is attached, I'd make the simple calculation that the generic, safe answer nets me the social win and a more detailed answer is simply not worth the time since it won't be actionable or necessary to socially defeat you. I imagine I'm not the only one with that position.
More options
Context Copy link
I think some intellectual humility is probably in order here. Your own argument appears rather flimsy as well I'm afriad. As an addendum to my other comment on your main comment, my objection to the logic of your argument is this; the argument that factor Y is the main contributor to group X's underperformance does not imply that all groups facing some degree of factor Y should also underperform the average. True, we would expect other groups to feel negative effects of Y, but the presence of other factors may be such that, in spite of Y other groups nonetheless outperform the average, other factors from which group X does not benefit (in this case, as I wrote above, one potential 'other factor' being the selection for educated and driven migrants).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link