site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 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
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

One of the main problems outside of science in academia is that they never had to confront the poor axioms. Physics had to throw out Archimedes and then throw out Newton. It was painful but it had to be done. Accepting Darwinism invalidated a large body of work based on prior ideas. It was tough for the people whose papers got invalidated but it had to be done.

In Social science people can still pretend that the garden of Eden existed, that fanciful tales of people on paradise islands living in absolute freedom were true etc.

Economists still talk about how money was created from people who wanted to barter more efficiently even though this has been disproven and even though writing is older than money. The idea of a social contract is still used even though humans lived in groups for tens of millions of years before we became human. The social sciences are stuck in a worldview in which humans spawned on Earth as individuals and invented all social structures even though this goes against all evidence.

The idea that women were historically oppressed is based on the assumtion that the natural state of women is a state of absolute individual freedom. The reality is that no hominid females of any species live in such a state. An animal that lives in a social structure isn't going to be happier if they are deprived of that social structure. If women were historically oppressed they could have packed up and walked into the woods. The reality is unless the family was exceptionally abusive most women clearly prefered belonging to a social structure over complete personal autonomy in the great wild.