site banner
PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   26710 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 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.

9
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Their article on Man the Hunter being inaccurate makes great points about how women can be excellent endurance runners, outpacing men over long distances.

This is not a great point! The claim is based on extremely thin evidence from a few races that don't include genuinely top-tier athletes. At all distances that have been optimized by deep fields of professionals, men run ~10-12% faster than women with no dramatic diminishment at long distances. There are bioplausible reasons for women to get more competitive at extreme distances (or at least requiring less aggressive fueling), but the evidence for it is scanty at best.

Perhaps more to the point, considered in the context of hunting, it really doesn't make much sense to be talking about 200 mile races. Men are faster at every distance that a human would plausibly have covered during a normal day and this difference widens if they're forced to carry any sort of kit with them.

Perhaps more to the point, considered in the context of hunting, it really doesn't make much sense to be talking about 200 mile races. Men are faster at every distance that a human would plausibly have covered during a normal day and this difference widens if they're forced to carry any sort of kit with them.

The way I've always heard it, endurance running is exactly what made human hunters OP, not speed. It's why we traded fur for excess sweat capacity.

endurance mostly in the ability to sweat to cool down while other less sweaty animals overheat, this is a process that might take hours on the absolute long end, not long enough to require this kind of distances. Gazelles can go something like 5 miles before needing to rest.

I'm always kind of skeptical of this story, for practical reasons -- a gazelle can do the five miles (at which point it is well beyond the horizon, even on the savanah!) in like 5-10 minutes. Which is like twenty minutes faster than even a very fast, unencumbered person.

So how long does it need to rest? How long can it go for if it only needs to average 15 mph to keep away from the humans, rather than top speed?

My suspicion based on personal interactions with furry animals (and documented hunting tactics of North American Indians) is that the way to hunt without great ranged weapons is either herding (see buffalo jumps) or hiding -- this is what lions mostly do, for instance, and they are way faster than people! (with built-in weapons, to boot)

Wolves are an animal that can sometimes run prey to exhaustion, but only in specific circumstances AFAIK (crusty snow that will hold them but not the deer), and again, they can run a lot faster than people.

I believe endurance hunting is mostly done by tracking, after the animal has already been wounded by the hunter- it’s blood trailing as is taught to hunters today, but over much longer distances. The limiting factor here is not so much the range of the weapons as their destructive impact; 30-.06 puts animals down better than broad heads better than flint tips better than pointy sticks. I can tell you from experience that when a wounded animal stops to rest, it will probably not get back up and won’t move very effectively if it does(and usually hits the densest thicket it can find which encumbers quadrupeds handily- a good thing if hiding from coyotes, but not from human hunters. AFAIK blood trailing dogs work by surrounding game in thickets until a hunter arrives to take advantage of the bipedal mobility advantage in heavy brush, but I’ve never used them).

Modern day hunting has a eccentric and hardcore subset who hunt by stalking, tracking a game animal and sneaking close enough to shoot it with a bow, pistol(30-50 foot effective range), or shotgun. If I ever manage to meet one I’ll certainly ask more questions along this line. But it’s definitely possible to sneak up on a deer or hog close enough to throw a spear into it, even if very difficult.

Endurance hunts don’t take literal days, though.

Yeah, I wonder why people keep making this claim. It's so easy to look up record times by distance and see that men always outperform women and by nearly the same margin.

This is just basic level stuff, and yet people get it wrong all the time. Why?

My guess is availability bias. Distance running is more trainable than sprinting. So a trained woman can easily beat an untrained man at distance running. She can't necessarily do the same at sprinting.

I looked at this list of records for the Badwater Ultramarathon. The women are fairly competitive with the men. That would never happen in something like powerlifting, or intellectual sports like chess or esports, or sprinting.

https://www.badwater.com/results-history/

I Actually know someone who won badwater one year. It's a really swingy race with few participants. Much depends on who shows up for the year and who doesn't need to drop out. You train for it in a sauna and need a whole team and strategy to maintain hydration. It's a day long run at high elevation in extreme heat.

For normal races, men are about 10% faster, whether its 100 meters or 100 miles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarathon

I took a look at the Badwater and it seems that, in recent years, the men's champion is about 10% faster than the women's champion, although with high variance. Sometimes, it's only a small difference. Sometimes it's a HUGE difference. In 2012, the best woman's time was 30.6% longer than the best men's time! That's about the same difference as between Usain Bolt and the world record 9 year old. In other words, a giant chasm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badwater_Ultramarathon

Early years of the race were weird and should be thrown out. Consider this:

During the early years of the race, no particular route between Badwater and Whitney was specified and runners attempted various "shortcuts" between the start and finish. Adrian Crane, one of the competitors in the inaugural race, even used cross-country skis to cross the salt-flats at Badwater.

The Badwater only provides more data that men dominate in long distance events just as they do in short distance ones. The only thing weird about the Badwater is that variance is much higher than normal.

Just find a casual enough pool. Ultras are still mostly amateurs, nice white college educated people.

Look! Here's race where you have to hop on one leg while saying the alphabet backwards for 7 miles. One year, a woman beat 5 male competitors to win the race.

From that we conclude that women have superior endurance.

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