site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 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
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I don't even like Musk, but he's obviously just done more than almost every single human being alive.

When you're used to discounting building companies because that requires investment of money and/or people being willing to follow you (as opposed to personal physical/mental labor), this is not obvious. The intuitive response to "look at how much Musk built" is "he didn't build all 'at".

The intuitive response to "look at how much Musk built" is "he didn't build all 'at".

How many of the projects he's working on would exist without him? Yeah, the natural resources and people would still exist and presumably be put towards some kind of productive goal but consider the positive and negative effects of his competitors on the world. On the one end, you have things that are objectively bad like gambling. I would say Elon's current projects are pretty close to the polar opposite; that is to say, objectively good. Curing paralysis, colonizing the solar system, the HUGE push towards making electric vehicles the norm and more recently, major advances in AI.

And that’s just silly. Building companies are crazy hard. Which is why it is so well remunerated. Musk shows an almost unparalleled ability to build companies.

Ehhhhhh. Building companies is hard, and building companies is well remunerated, but being hard is not why building companies is well remunerated.

Building companies is well remunerated because capital enjoys systemic leverage over labour and is able to claim more of the rewards from their cooperation for itself. When capital and labour work together both parties are better off (otherwise they wouldn't do it), but capital gets more of the reward because unemployed capital is much less miserable than unemployed labour. So the worker is paid in wages, while the investor is paid in profits.

If building companies was easy, then there would be a lot more people doing it. If there were a lot more people doing it, then the labor they provide (ie in the form of equity) would be much smaller compared to the amount of equity that capital takes.

Market history suggests the dear thing isn’t capital but skill in building large scalable companies. Capital is common and cheap in comparison.