site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28220 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 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.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I think people are kidding themselves about how well we understand genetics and the mind. I hereby bet that in twenty years they realise the lower-IQ kids they were screening out actually may have had superior brains and intelligence traits in other respects.

A bet that a counterfactual would be superior is never going to resolve.

"The selected children will be worse than average" seems like a simple resolution criteria? Sure, "worse" is pretty hard to define, but that cuts both ways.

Worse than which average? Not being able to choose a reference class doesn't "cut both ways", it makes the question unresolvable.

Which reference class is the company purporting to be better than?

Aren’t IVF kids already crappier than average because the sperm which conceives them isn’t selected for strength?

Could you elaborate on this ?

No, I don’t really understand this claim I’ve just heard it as an explanation for why most IVF embryos are destroyed. To put it another way, my question was actually a question.

Sure. Selecting the correct reference class is also pretty hard, but that cuts both ways too.

We've had IQ tests for about a century now. Don't you think we would have noticed if there was actually some advantage to being stupid in that time? Why would another 20 years make a difference?

What kind of positive traits would you expect to find?

These traits are notoriously polygenic, and virtually every gene is pleiotropic. It's not hard to imagine that optimizing for IQ specifically can have unforeseen deleterious downstream effects. Genetics as a field is rife with unknown unknowns.

Like @Rosencrantz2, I think people here are kidding themselves about how well we understand genetics or the mind.

Psychology is one of the "softest" and least rigorous of all the sciences, and to the degree that IQ tests are measuring a real phenomenon it seems to me that whatever it is produces diminishing returns and starts to come with significant downsides in terms of mental (and to a lesser extent physical) health as you approach the tail end of the bell curve.

We are talking about a 6 point IQ difference here. East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews are already more than that compared to Whites. And there isn't any evidence for significant downsides in terms of mental or physical health, just the opposite.

IQ appears to be as close to an unalloyed good as it gets. To the best of my knowledge, the markers for most things we consider indicators of a good or successful life positively correlate with IQ, such as overall health, mental wellbeing, income and so on.

Is it theoretically possible that after a certain point, further IQ gains will require horrible tradeoffs (such as an example Scott once brought up of a family that seems to get +20 IQ points at the cost of going blind)? Yes.

But for very large and very meaningful gains, well past the 160s, we have existence proofs that people with high IQs do just fine. Better than you or me for the matter. I'll take plenty more gains along those lines.

IQ appears to be as close to an unalloyed good as it gets

This depends entirely or at least heavily on what you consider good. I disagree strongly that IQ is close to an unalloyed good, although I admit that it's correlated with many good traits.

I'm seeing a few comments like this but they're all frustratingly vague. What specific negative traits do you mean?

It is often linked to, at least in the modern world, a lack of ability to connect to emotions, and to connect deeply with other people in a somatic or non-rational way.

If it helps, you can think of IQ as more 'left-brained' whereas the capacity I'm talking about is more "right-brained."

high IQ people are more likely to be married (except at very young age) and less likely to be divorced...

That stereotype is, as far as we know, incorrect. Intelligence is positively correlated with empathy, prosociality and morality. Academic success also seems to correlate with empathy.

Which makes sense, if you look outside of carefully curated bubbles. Who do you think is more empathetic, university graduates or unemployed members of the underclass?

But if you look at the highest IQ university graduates they seem more socially inept on average and sometimes less adept at managing poorly defined problems than their not-quite-as-high-IQ peers. Perhaps they don't even have some higher innate trait, they might just be more in their own worlds and thus more able to focus/get good at logic problems. And the thing is that, while logic problems and math are useful in certain contemporary professional and scientific settings, they are in a sense simpler to solve than social problems are to navigate. We could end up creating AI that can replace high IQ people but cannot replace people who are good at handling social and political complexity, or who are good at understanding what really motivates someone.

To be clear I have no proper evidence that very high IQ is associated with less good understanding of people, it just matches my experience so wouldn't surprise me. And I don't believe psychological studies are good enough to prove it either way.

More comments

I do think that there are advantages to not having too high an IQ. I studied maths at Cambridge and met my classmates.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats