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The Science post screwed up the link to the announcement, here's one that works. Despite Science's spin, the overall reporting is accurate. Let me de-spin it a bit, with quotes from the original announcement:
An elected government chooses a popular priority--economic growth--and a ministry aligns with that priority.
So the applications to this fund should either make a reasonable case that they will benefit NZ economically, or that they have some potential to lead to that. That's in line with the priority the elected government has established for itself (economic growth).
I can see why humanities and social scientists would be upset: nobody likes to have their source of funding taken away. I have but two questions: (1) do they disagree with the current elected government prioritizing economic growth, or (2) do they argue that the humanities and social science projects funded by this fund lead to economic growth as well as the core science projects?
If the disagreement is with the first question, then the response is: elections have consequences. New Zealand economy is doing poorly, people are worried, they elect a government with a mandate to grow the economy. While other goals have value, they have lost priority.
Is there any argument on the second front? The Science article hints at the possibility:
... but there is absolutely no follow-up or development of this argument. In fact, it's clear that "fundamental science" of the kind that an Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology is likely to do indeed will continue to be funded, and likely at a higher rate than before now that the funds are not going towards social science / humanities. Unless, despite the name, that institute is pursuing non-core, non-fundamental-science projects (e..g, "How would an advance in nanotech affect [$historically-disadvantaged-minority]?" or "Indigenous knowledge of microchips").
That brief hint of a beginning of an argument is followed by a conflation of economics and social cohesion, and then by how this will impact Maori-led research. So bupkis.
Your argument is at least more developed: you think that growing the economy through pursuing advances in science and tech leads to decrease in well-being of the population. I wonder, though: New Zealanders adopt science and tech products made elsewhere, and (let's take your claim at face value for the moment) suffer the social consequences anyway. Isn't that strictly worse than having NZ companies develop the product domestically, and at least capturing the economic benefits of the product?
My more direct fear is that critical reflection on questions such as: what is "well-being"? to what extent is "well-being" worth pursuing? does it make sense to have a single unified metric of "well-being"? - will cease. Such reflection is naturally at home in humanities departments.
You can argue that we don't need state funding to think about such questions. But a culture that sees no value in the humanities in general is unlikely to find value in these questions in particular.
I greatly distrust a humanities department's answers to such questions. To the point where I doubt their answers are even net-positive for society.
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What was the last big win for this state-sponsored critical reflection?
There's been a lot of interesting work on illusionism about consciousness in recent years. I don't agree with illusionism, but defenders of the position have made strides in showing how such a seemingly implausible position can actually be coherent, and they've helped clarify exactly what's at stake in debates over materialism.
Definitely not the one idea I'd expect to see grow in strength from my admittedly cursory undergrad study, and definitely much later than any example I could think of.
Thanks!
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I was gonna read the philosophical paper and scoff at its navel-grazing, but turns out it's quite interesting and got me thinking about applications of its ideas to AI.
To argue his thesis (that just cause you "obviously" feel stuff (generalized Moore argument) doesn't necessarily mean that you actually subjectively experience it in the moment), he distinguishes between the subjective experience (phenomenal), the behavioral aspects associated with the experience (functional), and the value we assign to the experience (normative).
I don't know what it's like to be you (or anybody other than myself). So even if the generalized Moore argument feels compelling to me when applied to myself (I feel stuff, so obviously I have phenomenal experiences), it takes a generalizational leap for me to also apply it to you (I am human, and others are human, so their experiences are probably like mine). That's even though I have lots of evidence that other people don't feel like me, and don't experience the world like I do. Still, it's safer to err on treating everyone like Player Characters in their own right and assume that they also feel stuff (phenomenal), because otherwise they'll think badly of me (normative) and gang up against me (functional).
But what about AI? It's not going to think badly of me and gang up on me if I treat it like it doesn't have feelings. I can adjust levels of politeness in my prompts if I think it will make a difference in the output (functional), and disregard the normative notions of proper communication.
(Of course, the same idea applied to animals. Well, I wasn't going to donate to PETA anyway.)
Come to think of it, I have heard versions of these ideas before... in Theravada Buddhism. Does it count as being "state-sponsored" if the founder was a prince?
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I agree that such critical reflection is important, I disagree that government funding is either necessary or sufficient to promote such reflection. If anything, it seems to me that government funding is more likely to corrupt either the critical or the reflective part of it. Such corruption can happen by the State funding its apologists. See, for example, just about anything officially published in the USSR on the well-being of soviet people.
Such corruption can also happen by elite-group capture, which is what is happening now. While I don't know how specifically the Marsden Fund was administered, but I know how other such funds work, and I don't expect anything different here. If they give grants in [$academic field] for [$purpose], they get some prominent people in [$academic field] (as prominent as they can get, at least) to evaluate applications for their worthiness in [$academic field] and their adherence to [$purpose]. So in fact all such Funds purposely start out as elite-group capture: who else would you ask to evaluate a chemistry proposal but chemists? And that's fine, so long as you can trust [$academic field] to fruitfully pursue [$purpose]. But once the field gets an influx of members who are diverting the field from [$purpose], and they rise to prominence within the field, then they will become the evaluators who determine where funding goes, and it will go away from [$purpose].
At that point, if you care about [$purpose], start by turning off the funding spigot.
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No it won't. We reflect on that question right here on the Motte. And, of course, these conversations happen every day within families, friend groups, and churches. We don't need credentialed elites to tell us the answers to these questions.
But even so, these credential elites are doing an awful job measuring and promoting human well-being. The current dominant ideology inside academia promotes a nihilistic view of the world and stokes social division. Even worse, it often places objective truth-seeking below appeals to authority. That's how you get stuff like "indigenous ways of knowing" being taught in NZ schools as an alternative to science.
The sooner we free ourselves from this corrupt priestly class, the better.
On the Motte, and many similar sites, materialistic view of life are starting to dominate. I've been told many times now on similar websites that well-being is improving "because the GDP is increasing". They believe that an increase in wealth is a direct increase in well-being, and that the two are basically the same thing. They then use this as an argument for "progress" and to dismiss any values, customs and ideals of the past.
I think this is a direct consequence of being an intellectual and liking nerdy things like mathematics. You start thinking "logically" and "scientifically", and eventually you become materialistic as you confuse the map and territory (theory and reality). For instance by thinking that the truth values of logic ('true' and 'false') has anything to do with truth (meaning as 'existing in reality').
I agree with this, but it's difficult to be an intelligent person interested in things like well-being, without encountering material which has been poisoned by the priestly class or somebody who is influenced by them, and if one practices actual psychology, they will find not only the truth but they will also understand why some people avoid the truth. If you have recommendations of works written by highly intelligent people who dare to think for themselves (they can be arrogant, a little bit of mania usually only makes for better writing), I'm all ears!
Hmm. I don't have numbers... I feel like materialism peaked a few years ago in the internet atheism era... has it still been growing since then? If so then its probably just my filter bubbles that have changed. Something to do with my own fall into nihilism and subsequent spiritual journey.
Oh, and my favorite psychology authors are the ones writing Magick Tomes. Much more aesthetic than the other therapy paradigms let me tell you.
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So, shifting the focus to philosophy specifically, since that's where I'm more knowledgeable.
A couple points do have to be conceded. Philosophy is simply easier (in certain ways) than STEM subjects, and you can have cogent thoughts about philosophical questions with much less training than you can about scientific questions. It's not uncommon for bright undergraduates to anticipate the major positions and lines of arguments when they're first presented with a philosophical problem.
It also has to be pointed out that the modern research university, and with it the concept of the "academic philosopher", is itself a somewhat recent historical invention. Although institutions of higher learning in some form date back to antiquity, not every canonical philosopher has had institutional support - Spinoza was a lens crafter, Kierkegaard was independently wealthy, Nietzsche held a PhD in an unrelated field and did most of his writing after he left the university. So we know that good work can happen even in the absence of universities.
Nonetheless, in my experience the difference in the quality of thought and breadth of knowledge when you compare credentialed professionals to enthusiastic amateurs is striking. The credentialed professionals are simply better - which makes sense, because if you pay someone to do something for 40+ hours a week every week for years, you'd expect them to get good at it. If you value these questions as highly as I do, and you value high-quality work on these questions, then there is a tangible ROI in paying people to work on this stuff full time.
I love TheMotte dearly, and obviously you can tell from my prolific posting history that I derive a great deal of value from this forum, but I don't come here expecting to be exposed to completely radical new ideas. Which is to be expected; we're just like, a bunch of dudes, there are no requisite technical/academic qualifications for posting here. Most of the things I've encountered in my life that really blew my mind and changed the way I think either came from credentialed sources, or they came from sources that credentialed people recognized as being worthy of attention.
It depends on who you're talking about? I suppose the anti-natalists and transhumanists could be plausibly accused of being nihilist, so if that's part of the "dominant ideology" then sure. Wokeists and Marxists in the general case though are definitely not nihilists. You can disagree with them and call them evil, but they're not nihilists. They think that what they're doing is extremely meaningful
Only if the incentives of that work align with not only producing high-quality work on these questions, but also effectively disseminating the results. Current incentives in academia do not.
Yes, some academics still produce great work (aimed at others in their sub-field). The work of disseminating their result even among their sub-field peers is a challenge due of the deluge of poor-quality stuff that everyone (including them) puts out to inflate their publication record.
I have been in enough hiring and promotion committees to witness first-hand that most committee members (a) will count the number of publications, taking into account the frequency and recency of them, and the quality of the journals based on SJR metrics, and (b) will not even bother reading any of the works if the applicant is even in a slightly different sub-field, but instead rely on the blurbs in reference letters / external reviewers, which (b1) tend to be way too nice and uncritical, and (b2) tend to do about as good a job conveying the actual qualifications of the candidate in their field as we professors do when we write a letter of recommendation for a student's grad school application.
(And gods-forbid that the candidate tries something interdisciplinary and we couldn't find a reviewer with decent knowledge of both fields. Or collaborates with someone outside their field. In math at least, that tends to look like this: the mathematician use some low-level mathematics to make a reasonable model in the context provided by other collaborators; if the reviewer is a mathematician without much knowledge of the other field, the reviewer isolates the mathematical model, realizes that it's pretty low-level math, and reports that in the review. The hard part of the collaboration is the endless back-and-forth with the non-mathematicians to get them to elucidate what, specifically, they want to model, and to commit to particular measurements and parameters. None of that work comes through in the review of the final polished publication, and is certainly not apparent to any pure mathematician.)
As a result, those who rise in an academic field must go through several such filters: at least one successful tenure-track hire; successful tenure review; successful full-professor review, and any reviews in-between. The process selects for those who stay firmly in the confines of their sub-field, making numerous and safe publications. By the time one gets through these filters, one might as well stay in that lane where it's safe and comfortable, and where one has already achieved some level of prominence and prestige.
At that point one becomes the cog that perpetuates the system: one gets swamped by requests for reviews (manuscripts submitted to a journal that published your work; external review of a tenure / promotion candidate; letters of recommendation for junior colleague; letters of recommendation for students). That's a shit-ton of work, and one feels obliged to take on some of it (to keep ones connections), so one develops streamline methods for quickly writing those reviews. Which results in more bland, overly-positive-while-saying-little-of-substance reviews that others then rely on for admittance/publication/hiring/tenure/promotion. And because they know (and you know) the worth of those reviews, everyone falls back on something concrete like the JSR metrics, which feeds the Goodhart's law and further dilutes the few high-quality works that do indeed get produced and published.
So no, the current academic system's incentives do not align with producing a few but high-quality explorations into important questions.
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Big doubt.
This is going to be somewhat complicated by the fact that the fields I followed are different from yours, but if economics, psychology, or social science are any indication, the quality of thought and breadth of knowledge don't amount to much. Don't get me wrong, I know what you're referring to, and I agree it exists, but it seems to boil down to a difference in form rather than substance, and the form of showing off your "quality of thought" and breadth of knowledge is mostly used to deflect from obvious questions.
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I wouldn't undersell philosophy as a discipline. In some ways, it is the ultimate discipline. Social science is just applied Biology which is just applied Chemistry... Physics... Math... Philosophy. When you start examining the ultimate questions it gets quite philosophical.
But here's the thing. As a discipline so untethered by constraints, it's difficult to be "good" at philosophy. Breadth matters more than depth. And, when it comes to breadth, someone like Scott, Cremieux, or even a top 4chan autist is going to have far more of it than a philosophy professor at Oxford. The modern information network has created polymath monsters of the sort which Thomas Jefferson could never imagine.
This surprises me entirely. Academia is so stilted that it rarely produces novel thought at all. Who are these radical new idea-smiths, sharpened by years of formal training?
It... depends on what you mean by that. In some sense, yeah, philosophy is more radically free of constraints than any other discipline, in the sense that any foundational premise or assumption is always fair game for critique. If you're a physicist and you think Einstein was wrong, you're a crank. If you're a mathematician and you want to be an ultrafinitist then at best you're engaged in a non-standard project that has little relevance to the work of mainstream professional mathematicians (and at worst you're a crank). But in philosophy, if you want to argue that philosophy itself is dumb and not worth doing and is incapable of generating truth or knowledge (as, arguably, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein held at times), then you're not a crank. You're just doing philosophy, and philosophers will praise you as an insightful and original thinker if you're capable of supporting your position.
But in another sense, it's just as constrained as any other discipline. With few exceptions, the vast majority of Western philosophers past and present have taken themselves to be addressing questions that had correct and incorrect answers, and their goal was to arrive at correct answers and support their positions with arguments and evidence (yes, even the "postmodernists" - the "relativism" of Foucault and Derrida was greatly exaggerated through misreadings of their work).
My use of the word "breadth" may have been misleading there. I meant "breadth" insofar as you can bring a wide range of relevant knowledge and references to bear on a specific question or problem you're addressing. Not in the sense of, you can give me hot takes on a lot of different topics that may or may not be related to your specialty.
To give a concrete example, the work of Ted Sider and Trenton Merricks addresses, in far more meticulous and thorough detail, the problems that Scott outlined in The Categories Were Made For Man.
"Polymaths" almost always grossly overestimate their competence.
I linked the work of François Kammerer regarding illusionism about consciousness elsewhere in the thread. It's not uncommon for people in internet debates to express skepticism about the hard problem of consciousness, but they tend to be unfamiliar with the existing academic work on the problem, and frankly they usually don't understand what the problem is even about in the first place. Contemporary defenders of illusionism both understand the problem, and they appreciate the severe uphill challenge that illusionism faces, but they still defend the position, which is interesting if nothing else.
Todd McGowan's work on reinterpreting Lacanian psychoanalysis in light of his Zizekian reading of Hegel (part 1 of a brief overview and part 2) made Lacan's work a lot more interesting and accessible than Lacan himself did, and it had a significant and enduring impact on the way I interpret my own actions and the actions of other people.
Chris Cutrone managed to convince me that the Marxist tradition was more intellectually interesting than I previously assumed.
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Does New Zealand have a comparative advantage in such questions? Or is it better off trying to materially improve the lives of its citizens and leave those questions for others?
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