site banner
PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   26119 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 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.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I've never linked to X before, lets see if this works.

People who are not logged into Twitter can only see the linked Tweet, not the context.

Here's the whole thread:

Crémieux Recueil: I just saw a cost-benefit analysis of prisons where prisons save society money until you factor out $50,000 per prisoner per year for "suffering", then they cost society "money".

Scott Alexander: I think this is an inaccurate description of the study.

It costs society money if you take the author's mainline beliefs, if you adjust for current incarceration costs (I didn't do this adjustment because then you'd have to inflate crime costs as well, and I didn't know how to do this, but plausibly cost disease has driven up incarceration costs faster than inflation), or if you're thinking about blue states (which have higher incarceration costs than red states). I described it as saving society a small amount of money under the most generous possible assumptions, but being net negative otherwise.

But also, it does seem like low-key torturing hundreds of thousands of people, ~5% of whom are innocent, is a "social welfare cost". The process used to value that cost at $50,000 is no sillier than the process used to value a murder at -$9.4MM, or any of the other crime numbers in the paper.

Crémieux Recueil: I think it is sillier, since a point of prison for many is to punish, whereas there's no justification for murder.

One commenter posited a reductio that should probably be addressed: by this logic is everything you can buy free after accounting for "joy" or "forgone suffering"?

Scott Alexander: Not just free, but positive sum! If we didn't count the value of joy in buying things, we would have to model all trades as exploitative - stupid people getting tricked into giving companies money for no reason.

If we discount the suffering involved in prison because prisoners are bad people, we should also discount the suffering involved in murder insofar as murder victims may also be bad people (eg drug dealers, gang members, etc). I think a virtue-weighted utilitarianism would be fun to think about, but I've never heard anyone seriously propose it.

Crémieux Recueil: A voluntary purchase should be positive-sum to an individual, but if I buy an expensive truck, I may strain the family budget enough to turn it negative at the household level regardless of my personal enjoyment of the truck.

If I'm involuntarily committing someone to prison and generating enormous surplus for society, throwing in suffering for them, that relatively few outside of prison care about, messes up the whole equation by mixing up costs and benefits across levels of aggregation and treating all the numbers alike when they aren't. If the weight for suffering was adjusted to reflect that, that might make things fine, but no one can reasonably stand on a high estimated cost of prisoner suffering if they're doing cost-benefit analyses for the society we live in.

Given that criminals are generally disliked, suffering is being given a value above prisoners' incomes outside of prison (before and after imprisonment), and false-positive rates are low (especially for long-term prisoners), suffering probably adds value to society anyway. That's part of the now academically neglected retributive function of prison.

Scott Alexander: I think this is a good place to apply Thatcher's Law ("there's no such thing as Society"). Benefits go to individuals - people who don't get robbed, people who don't get stabbed, etc. Even indirect benefits go to individuals - people who live in nicer communities. It's perfectly valid to count costs to other people against the benefits to these people.

But also, aren't you supposed to be based and IQ-pilled? Have you met the average prisoner? They've got the IQ and self-restraint of like a ten-year old child. I don't really know who it benefits to keep creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society and then, when they fail to live in modern society, say "Yeah, they deserve to be tortured for that".

I'm totally fine with the consequentialist position of weighing their suffering against the suffering of their victims, I could even potentially be convinced that this suggests incarceration at or above current margins. I just don't see why we have to add "desert" into it, which I think implies some kind of failure to exercise a self-restraint that these people never had in the first place. You wouldn't say that a kid deserves to suffer super hard for some arbitrary number of years because they hit their sibling. You'd give them whatever punishment you expected, through deterrence and/or incapacitation, to either make them a better person or protect their sibling in the future. Why hold criminals to a higher standard?

Crémieux Recueil: Making the analysis entirely individual-level is consistent with what I've said. But I don't think the analysis as it was done actually does that adequately, and it ends up extremely overweighting the suffering of criminals beyond all reason. If you're being "based and IQ-pilled" this stands up: those people average far lower incomes before imprisonment than even $50k/yr.

Now regarding desert, having it as a guiding principle in criminal justice doesn't mean to engage in exorbitant punishment, but it does mean to punish people fairly and equally. If you kill a stranger in cold blood and Bob with a 75 IQ kills a stranger in cold blood, you should both receive the same punishment even if Bob didn't really know any better. If you remove desert from the equation, you necessarily move towards illiberal justice, and I have a strong preference for liberalism and find it hard to imagine rational and workable criminal justice without it.

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