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 -
once you analyzed lots of phenotype-genotypes for moderns you can apply these models for ancient, and analyzing population averages is simpler in some aspects than getting a good score for individual: for individual, a trait would depend on non-linear combinations and rare alleles; for comparing between populations, these aren't significant, because a population cannot reliably continue lucky non-linear combinations (we however do in in agriculture with f1 seeds and cloning).
How verifiable is it, though? Where are we getting DNA from, are they outliers trapped in peat bog pits or something? The article says they just found basically anonymous DNA samples from across Eurasia, over thousands and thousands of years. We can't know that this is a balanced sample.
What if they have X genetics and we accurately capture that but some epigenetics are activated/deactivated at the time? As far as I can determine, the methylation pattern is more easily lost (and they didn't cover it anyway).
I like my science as concrete and provable as possible. This is dangerously abstract. Abstraction is fine if we had some real Indo-European farmers or Neolithics to talk to but since we don't, standards for validity should be kept high.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link