This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
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Notes -
"Legalizing gay marriage was not just 'allow different people to do their own thing' it was, 'change the basic way every child is taught about the basic institutions and building blocks of life.'"
I keep thinking about the rot here, and I think it goes back to in a certain sense that modern WEIRD people have a really hard time — for whatever reason— settling serious boundaries around things that should be obvious. Gay marriage is the last in a very long line of those kinds of decisions, but far from the only one. We can’t really say “no” on deconstruction of our heritage, the denigrating of our heroes, or the insistence that other people’s history or culture be taught alongside our own. Even among ourselves, for whatever reason, it’s rude in most circles to criticize others for casual sex, excessive drinking, or drug use. It’s really a strange thing that doesn’t happen in other places.
Casting aspersions on others maybe, but it seems totally OK to criticize these things.
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I'm partial to the "the lights went out with World War I" thesis. Very simply, valorous, self-confident, fertile, expansionist, white men are the most dangerous force in the known universe. I certainly don't believe that white men are the most evil force in the universe, but we are the most dangerous. White people, white men, are most scared of other white men, and so a lot of apparent self-sabotaging behavior is a back-handed way of trying to sabotage competing white men. But psyopping other white men into being self-sabotaging without self-sabotaging yourself turns out to be impossible.
I’m rather sympathetic to the idea. There’s just something that happened around the end of the First World War that just sort of shattered the self confidence of Western society. Where before we had no qualms about striding across the world stage and doing so in our own interest, of saying that our own values and ideas are of course true and right and that we could and would build a bright future for all humankind. I think the experience of war coupled with the technology disasters of the era (Hindenburg and Titanic especially) shattered our self confidence. Except that rather than simply learning from the mistakes we ended up deciding that we couldn’t be a force for good.
Looking at East Asia, I kind of see how we could have been. China has no qualms whatsoever in trying to promote Chinese interests. They absolutely promote the idea that they are good people and that their ideas are good and right and should be supported and respected. China isn’t self flagellating. And for that matter neither are the Japanese or Koreans. They are allowed to be the good people. And the thing is I think they’re much more healthy as a culture than we are.
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Earlier this summer some of my more religious connections circulated a tweet from Burk Parsons:
I have been thinking about the word "moralizing" in connection with this comment. Asking Google for the definition gives me this:
One of the logical consequences of asserting the "equality of persons"--a genuine ideological cornerstone of Western liberalism--is the idea that "no one is better than me." This is like, trivially false on its face, of course: probably many people are better than me at baseball, for example, or at knitting. "Everyone knows" (the consensus-building argument goes) that it's not total equality of skills, resources, etc. which egalitarianism demands, but rather a kind of "political equality" in which no person should be afforded greater rights or privileges than any other person by virtue of their birth or social position.
Most people seem to intuit that being great at baseball or knitting doesn't make you a "better person" than others, in any egalitarian-relevant sense. But there are other things that people seem, for whatever reason, to reflexively associate with individual worth and worthiness. One of those is intelligence. Another, I think, is moral praiseworthiness. Maybe it is because we do recognize some acts as criminal, and treat the status of "criminal" as naturally and permissibly forfeiting one's (political-equality-grounded) rights?
So: criticize someone's immoral-but-not-illegal choices, and a common response will be, "You think you're better than me?"
Of course, one needn't regard oneself as "better" to recognize bad! And I have certainly met my share of outright moralizers, people who derive apparent satisfaction from looking down on others, especially with an "unfounded air of superiority." (Snobbily religious folks, for example, as well as wokists--if that's not just a different word for the same phenomenon.)
My own memory is that as recently as the 1990s, people who drank, smoke, etc. were at least somewhat prone to saying "I know this is a terrible choice, but I'm still going to make it--but I really respect people who don't make this choice." I don't think I've encountered that sentiment in a memorable way since 2014 at the latest. My unfounded guess would be that something like "unconditional self-love" has largely replaced the pursuit of excellence and merit as a central motivator for those aforementioned "snobbily religious" types. And loving oneself unconditionally presumably comes part and parcel with rejecting any culture that asks or invites us to change.
I could make a case for the law not being a respecter of who stands before them. A person should not be seen as different before the laws because they’re really good at something. I wouldn’t want a person to get away with murder because he’s better at some skill than I am.
But I think somehow the idea came to mean that no one is objectively better than anyone else, and therefore nothing that those people choose to do is better or worse than anyone else. So you doing drugs all the time, not holding a job, and stealing is exactly equal in worth to my studying medicine, curing a disease, and giving thousands to humanitarian causes. I view self esteem as an outgrowth of that idea. If everyone is equally good, and all modes of behavior are okay, I can feel good about myself even though I’m doing bad things. Even criticism of other cultures as to whether those cultures promote good behaviors that will let people thrive is seen as evil.
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I have a little bit different take. It is not that western world is against moralizing, it is just that it changed values that people are judged by. The don't be judgmental schtick was there only as a temporary stopgap in order to protect these alternative moralities while they were weak. Now when they reign, instead of traditional moral values and virtues that people were judged by, you can now easily be judged as committing one of the big 4 "new" istophobic sins: racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. You can add various other moral issues such as being a bigot (you are against these values as interpreted by new religious authorities) or some sort of other enemy: anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist and so forth.
What I find interesting is how a lot of the new morality is direct subversion of traditional virtues and promoting related sins instead. Instead of chastity, we promote lust. Instead of humility we literally celebrate pride month. Instead of patience we celebrate righteous wrath of punching Nazis and persecuting bigots. Instead of temperance we literally promote gluttony, celebrate obesity and drug culture. Instead of charity we promote greed by eating the rich and demanding rights without any related responsibilities. Instead of diligence, we excuse sloth ideally enabled by some sort of UBI or by medicalizing it and removing any responsibility for it. Instead of kindness we prefer envy of those who have some kind of privilege and who are in in some mysterious systematic ways responsible for our situation.
I am not the first one to notice, that the new moral regime shapes up to be almost literal subversion of the old system.
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Who could've known that a half-arsed comment of mine will generate multiple QC responses!
Some people may be excellent, but a real master helps others be excellent!
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@gorge talks mostly about the changes to the conception of marriage from the perspective of a religious conservative, at least as I understand him. But I think even from a secular centrist state-based perspective, there are a lot of problems with it. In the old conception, the justification why the state should support marriages is very straightforward: For retirement, but also just the continued existence of the state in the future, children are necessary. Therefore, an institution for the purpose of family-formation is highly beneficial.
On the other hand, in the new framework, if we consider marriage primarily about love, it's pretty hard to argue why two people loving each other means they should get, say, a tax rebates or similar: Nice for them I guess, but why shouldn't two very good friends living together? Why not a lonely single? The latter is arguably most disadvantaged, so maybe he should get the biggest tax rebate? The answer from my left-leaning friends is mostly: No, actually, we care about children, so we should just support children directly. Fine, but now we have lost something! The old system also supported children, in particular if their parents couldn't. But in addition the old system had a clear framework, a path towards becoming parents before actually having children yet, and supported people who made a credible effort in this direction.
The new system offers nothing in its place, if anything it actively discourages people to have kids. It's like as if we said that well obviously we need plumbers in the future, but any training in plumbing needs to be inclusive towards non-plumbers, and actually you are not allowed to even claim that "plumbing training" is in any way related to the profession or task of "plumbing", and no, you're also not allowed to create a new category of "totally not plumbing training" that trains people to be plumbers. It's just that if someone just so happens to be capable of plumbing and performs the task, he is allowed to be paid for this. And everyone acts surprised that plumbing becomes rarer and rarer.
It gets worse! The new system claims to be about "love". But actually, there is no obvious criteria for "love". It's merely a claim people make. And most countries still offer tangible benefits for marriage.
So in the old system, we would support people in family formation, and then once they actually have children, we support them further. The evaluation of this was mostly straightforward, and the incentives line up nicely between what the state wants (children) and what the family was incentived to do (have children).
In the new system, there is, again, nothing like this. As said before, there isn't even a reason why the state should care that these two people "love" each other, and it isn't controlling or setting up incentives anyway. So this also explains why marriage often looks so outdated and pointless nowadays; It literally is, at least the way it is treated by the state. It changed from a system with a clear purpose and clear criteria to one with an unclear purpose and no criteria.
But at the end I still have to disagree on one point. I think the old conception can be rescued while still including some new means of family formation. Adoption, for example, can be set up in a variety of formats that allows homosexual relationships to still take part. Likewise, IVF can even allow them to have (partially) genetic children. While I have absolutely no problem giving heterosexual relationships a special status as the most common, most simple, most robust approach to family formation and which accordingly should be treated as the default, that doesn't mean we need to outright exclude all others.
To add to this, until Griswold v. Connecticut was decided in 1965, many states had laws prohibiting married couples from using contraceptives, so great was their governments’ interest in promoting children and preventing vice.
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Great stuff as usual, the babies topic in particular had a lot of interesting material. Credit to @satirizedoor; I actually think this is helping me form a better model of the world than the commonly understood thrive/survive and conflict/mistake frameworks.
That observation on mimetics plus my dim recollections of Teach's/TLP's writings is giving shape to a theory I've been bashing around in my head for a while: that optics and the almighty I is everything. Not quite fully formed thought but overall gist: we've sacrificed so much on the altar of individualism everything in the world is then judged on whether or not it benefits the individual's model of who they are. Whether it's conflict or mistake doesn't matter, what matters is masturbation vs narcissistic self-injury.
I think I’m largely going in the same direction. Though I think part of the rot comes from the idealized democratic values being promoted and thus ideas like expertise, merit, and self-sacrifice are being lost as people choose to live out the ID experience because that’s certainly easier to do than work hard and achieve things.
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Oh wow, my first QC. Thanks everyone, I am humbled.
Congrats! First one for me too, honestly didn't expect it.
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I can't recall another month where there were so many QCs that I found so ideologically disagreeable! That's a good thing though. I'm glad there's been an uptick in topics that generate productive disagreement. Better than being an echo chamber that just beats the same few issues to death.
I agree. It feels like the debates have gotten a little punchier recently, which is a good thing although maybe also a sign of something else.
What do you have in mind?
I think people have gotten more entrenched in their positions over time, and there are fewer semi-neutral interlopers who engage with actual 'curiosity.'
So the people who are left are basically fighting from positions they are VERY familiar with and thus can defend well, but there's going to be less movement of actual beliefs overall. I suspect.
Like, most of my contributions to the above report are me expressing at length positions I've worked myself into over a period of years, and feel very confident in. I am still very open to being challenged and changing my mind, but it seems less likely to happen. So I get a bit punchier in hopes of spurring someone to bring some stronger arguments against me.
Partially may be due to evaporative cooling, but I'm not sure if I'm even correct on the trend.
People were entrenched in the atheism vs Christianity debates of the 00s. I already had entrenched positions when I was 13, starting from the earliest internet debates that I can remember participating in. There was never a mythical time when people weren't entrenched. The fact that people are engaging in actual back and forth debate over an issue at all indicates that it's already an issue that causes emotions to run high.
Arguing to change people's minds is like playing high school football for the purpose of getting into the NFL. Yeah, it's technically not impossible. But if that's what all your expectations are riding on, you're probably going to be disappointed. Better to just do it for the love of the game.
I have had my mind changed or adjusted by arguments I read here over the years.
The quality of arguments seems about the same or even better in some ways, but there are not as many people just casually commenting on a given phenomena without staking out an actual position on the issue itself, around here.
My positions have changed over the course of my life, certainly. I don't think anything I've ever read on TheMotte specifically has ever changed my mind on anything substantial though. The last time I had anything that could be described as a major shift in views was probably... closing in on a decade ago. I've changed as a person in some ways since then; I've changed my mind on certain personal and idiosyncratic matters. But in terms of anything that other people would recognize as a major political/philosophical issue, it's been a while.
It's hard to expect someone to become an instant convert like Saul of Tarsus or that respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford just because they had a single discussion. Rather, the process of a well-intentioned discussion forces both sides to examine their own chains of reasoning.
And sometimes you both follow your chains backwards, fixing errors along the way, and you see that yours starts with "A is good" and theirs starts with "not-A is good". Okay, fundamental values dissonance, unless either of you have a literal revelation, you'll remain in disagreement. But sometimes it's "A is good" vs "B is good". And this is when you can change. You go, "actually, both A and B are good, I shouldn't disregard B completely. If A and B are in conflict, is there a way to avoid this? If not, what is the mixture of A and B that I find optimal and why?"
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I can distinctly remember two:
One was back in Covid days somebody pointed out that evolutionary pressures would make it almost certain that mutations of a virus would trend towards making it less deadly, which somewhat alleviated my fears of Covid running rampant and becoming more deadly as it spread.
The other was someone arguing that we currently have the capability of tracking any incoming asteroids or other celestial objects that are large enough to pose a danger to earth, and as long as we're actively looking we should notice one in with enough time, in theory, to intervene/deflect it, which led me to slightly downgrade "asteroid strike' on my list of existential risks.
One that the jury is still out on is whether LLMs/AI will end up hurting lawyer employment and salaries by supplanting entry-level attorney jobs, or if it will instead bolster lawyer employment by enabling contracts and other transactional documents to become MUCH more complex.
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I think the trend you’re observing is probably real, although in my case one of my contributions is a post where I express an opinion I myself am not 100% comfortable with and that is a change from my prior position. (Specifically, the one about how efforts to raise fertility are probably a lost cause.)
I do think we have a few high-effort contributors who don’t sort easily into any of the major ideological “camps” on the Motte, and I also think that most of the people who have fled the site entirely were not actually the squishy moderates but rather those who were most ideologically rigid and could not deal with the enforced charity rules. That being said, I haven’t been a Motteposter for nearly as long as some others in this community, so perhaps my perspective is skewed.
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That's pretty close to how I see it as well.
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