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 -
I'm going to first go even more annoyingly meta: I'm not so happy with this sentence because it seems to be framed as just a personal preference that can't really be justified by more than "I personally like it". Everyone sort of has "inner values" based on such idiosyncratic preferences, but it always feels to me very morally wrong to try to argue with others by nakedly stating them (in harsher words, this is what I called "naked selfishness" before). Rather, you ought to find universal reasons that work for everyone---either extremely compelling "poetry" to convince others to have your same idiosyncratic preferences, or better, links to universal values like reducing suffering. Obviously you have a lot of these universal reasons which are explained more later in the post, so this is a nitpick. Also obviously, I have nakedly selfish reasons for preferring individualistic meritocracy since it gets close to my shining example of something like early 2010's San Francisco Bay Area (before housing availability/infrastructure issues really started kicking in). However, if I can't find universal reasons to support it, I should seriously question whether this preference is reasonable. At the very least, I should never expect them to be compelling to anyone else and keep them to myself.
So now lets get into the universal reasons.
I don't have much personal experience with Britain/Europe, but I don't really see much decay in the US, not coincidentally, the country where individualistic meritocracy is the strongest. Particularly in technology, the US continues to produce world-changing breakthrough after breakthrough---AI systems, fracking, mRNA vaccines, etc. Though it's hard to feel this because of relative status effects and short memories, people in the US have more than they ever used to---bigger houses, better cars, more variety at the grocery store, better entertainment, etc. It's also not a coincidence that the technological breakthroughs in the US come from its most individualistic, diverse, and open areas like San Francisco or Cambridge, MA.
I would even say that the most compelling explanation for decay in Europe is actually this attitude, which is far more prevalent there:
This promotes a sort of closed-mindedness and resistance to change. If you want scientific and technological progress, you need novel ideas. If you want novel ideas, you need to be tolerant of weirdos, immigrants, and outsiders. Conversely, if you close yourself off to the unusual socially, you're also going to lose the drive to create the new technologically---"why do we need more, our village is good as it is!".
Finally, 60 million is not a big pool at all. I'm in math, and the median best mathematician from a region of 60 million doesn't hold a candle to the world's best. Furthermore, agglomeration effects are really important for new ideas so it makes a big difference if one country can concentrate high-performers in one place. I guess if you're making this exception:
then it's not so bad (though 145 IQ is 3 standard deviations which is on the order of magnitude of 1/1000 people so there are around 10 million of them in the world. This is smartest kid in your year in your school district level, not world-changing genius).
I think this is the most compelling argument against my point. As far as naked selfishness goes, I much prefer the rat race since it pushes me to achieve much greater things than I would otherwise. At some level, you can justify it in this way: sacrifices we put up with currently to make the future better. However, I think a much better justification is that the people happy with the rigid social structure were those on top. For everyone else, being at the bottom is even worse if you're forever stuck there and there's nothing you can do about it. Having hope and agency over your life is really important for happiness, and if sacrificing the top 10% to stress is worth it to give this to the bottom 90%, then that's a worthwhile trade. I realize though I might just be typical-minding here---maybe as you say the chance to rise makes most people more stressed and unhappy than being stable in even a pretty low place.
Either way, once society is wealthy enough that everyone's non-status needs are met, I expect the rat race to eventually resolve itself by splitting into a million parallel races so that everyone can feel high-status by being in the top 1% of something---some niche video game, sport, academic field, etc.
As the final point:
Do you have universal reasons why maintaining your homeland's culture (in more of a sense than various minority groups are able to maintain their cultures within US-style multiculturalism) is important? I think there's something around monocultures being bad---like you can argue that my vision of progress coming from all the new ideas from mixing cultures is sort of a dead end since it won't work anymore once everything is mixed and homogenized. Again, however, I think US-style multiculturalism resolves this issue pretty well.
More options
Context Copy link