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 -
Pretty bad response. In any group of millions you can find examples of anything you want.
As we all know, cardiologists are horrible, horrible people.
Sounds like an isolated demand for rigour to me
“Oh, you don’t want your nation flooded with Haitian refugees? Got a source on why that’s bad? A peer reviewed, published government source?”
In fact, I’ll go further and say that this is an isolated demand for lack of rigor.
In a forum of people who read rationalists, in a subculture directly descended from blogs with names like “Less Wrong” and people who write long winded posts on logical fallacies,
That we should totally disregard an obvious day 1 of class example of a logical fallacy. Because hey, it’s against a group we tend not to like around here.
Isolated demand to let the fallacy against Haitans slide! We all know they’re bad anyway, it doesn’t really matter if we can prove it or not.
If I were to use the same tactic (one news article about a killer?) to show that conservatives are categorically dangerous, I’d get laughed out of the forum and for good reason. That’d just be ridiculous on the face of it.
Maybe one or two very patient mottizens would explain to me some of the very basics of how logical fallacies work. A few Scott Alexander posts and I’d be on my way having been educated.
Hooray for rigor! But, eh … here it’s about immigrants, and that’s kind of our thing around here. Why bring rigor to something we already know is bad? That’d be a total buzzkill.
Haiti scores 338 on the World Bank’s measure of Harmonised Test Scores, which is more than 1.8 standard deviations below the UK – the equivalent of 27 IQ points. So if Britain has an IQ of 100, Haiti has an IQ of 73.1, although other measures peg it at 67. I think that should be sufficient data then?
Ah, cool, that’s right about the estimated size of the Flynn effect
Roughly 30 IQ points
Flynn effect isn’t on G, and even with Flynn effect, racial group gaps and rank ordering do not change
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not at all isolated.
“Group X coming here has been a blood soaked affair!”
Um… source?
Does group X kill people at a higher rate than group Y, Z, A, B, or C?
Or are we just engaging in hysterics because it’s an out group?
If the data isn't published and accessible to the public in an easily parsable format, it's a bit disingenuous to do the "um... source?" thing.
So how do you know immigration is such a blood soaked affair?
Just going off preconceived ideas? You liked the vibe of how it sounds?
And does nowhere collect data on this? Just a complete black hole?
Meanwhile I’m able to find that the places that do report data on undocumented immigrant crime seem to typically report lower rates of crime than citizens.
https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-offending-rate-lower-us-born-citizen-rate
This is exactly what I mean. What do you do when institutions tasked with truth-finding do not make raw data available to the public, and only publish when it reaches the conclusions they wanted to reach to start with? We're indeed left with pretty unreliable ways to figure out the truth, but one thing is for sure "Uh, source?" is very disingenuous.
There's several issues here. Like I mentioned, the datasets are not public, so the work is not replicable by anyone who'd want to double-check it. Secondly, the category of "US-born" has little to no implications on the debate. Members of the various rape-gangs in Britain were all "British-born", and yet none of them would exist, if Britain had a more strict immigration policy.
I haven’t seen that the data isn’t available. I doubt that the data underlying the study I linked isn’t public. You should be able to access it. You might look into this. I honestly don’t care to.
(It’s not my job to go digging into these datasets).
But, it is my job to say:
Hey, one news article about a psycho is nowhere near enough to categorize an entire class of people as violent.
That’s just silly, and obviously so. Yet for some reason I get more pushback for pointing that out than the original claim got.
Honestly might be a sign of some heavy motivated reasoning going on in this forum. You guys are an offshoot of the rationalist movement for Pete’s sake. Isn’t pushing back on simple logical fallacies to be expected around here?
It is my experience that studies in general do not publish raw data at all, only aggregated end-results that make the point that the authors want to make. You can sometimes ask the authors to give you the raw data, but they tend to ignore internet randos doing it, and it's not unheard of for them to dismiss even other academics when they get a whiff that they might want to see the data to refute the original study.
Is the crime rate of the country they're coming from enough to consider it plausible that they're more violent?
Yeah, but an offshoot can go more than one way. For example "post-rationalism" is still an offshoot of rationalism (though I think we still have a decent amount of unrinoic Rats). In any case my personal belief is that the Rationalist movement was an utter failure as far as truth-seeking is concerned, and that is because of, rather than despite, Rationalist principles.
It's certainly within the bounds of acceptable discourse, and so is pushing back on the pushback.
Studies typically don’t publish the raw data but often work from public datasets. This type of data wouldn’t be something that the study authors collected, but data that the state of Texas in this case collected.
I doubt that it’s not public.
That’s an actual argument worth discussing.
Data would be what we use to see if that intuition is correct or not.
But posting one news article that supposedly defines an entire class of millions of people, then defending that by saying “at least I posted one example”, is just obviously a poor way to make any given point.
Similarly, saying “we don’t have the data showing that X is Y therefore you should believe that X is Y” also is not a convincing argument. It’s just how you feel, and opinions are nothing special, everyone’s got one.
I mean, we’ve got to reason about the world somehow.
You can do so using logical errors if you want, it sure is comfy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link