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 -
There's no way to measure this in a person. Furthermore, I think this is much more about culture at a local and national level. Stated differently a lot of "entrepreneurialism" is simply the American Way. A really obvious example of this is the fact that Europe's tech sector is approximately zero even though they have more than enough elite human capital. In fact, not only do the best European engineers come to the U.S., the best Canadian one's do (Waterloo is the Stanford of Canada).
Although your analysis quite good, I think the Jensen and Elon arguments fall into the "Great Man" fallacy. That without this one, specific human, we don't get the rise of GPUs (nVidia) or SpaceX, Tesla, Twitter revamp etc. I don't believe this. I think the major technological progress arc of history is mostly about the collective increase in human knowledge (and ways of sharing it) combined with ever more excess wealth and capital to finance the implementation of that knowledge. This goes back quite a ways - didn't both Leibniz and Newton independently invent equivalent theories of calculus?
So, maybe the hard-scrabble Jensen Huang isn't let it. Maybe Elon the Lumberjack stays in Canada. I don't think that's bad in the specific. I'd assume we get Eensen Muang and Jelon Husk instead - maybe two Math Olympiad champions, or obvious super STEM graduates from prestigious foreign universities. I seriously doubt we somehow fail to create trillions of dollars of value because these two people, in specific, aren't admitted to the U.S.
I don't think it's overdetermined that NVidia and SpaceX are American companies. It seems plausible to me that the leaders in these fields would have ended up Chinese in an alternate universe (not that America never would have invented graphics cards, but that Chinese competition may have leapfrogged American firms, as Japanese cars did American ones).
The "Great Man" theory is a theory, not a fallacy, and I think it's pretty clearly correct at least in some cases (would Shmalexander the Great really have conquered all those kingdoms?). Whether it's true or not in these cases is hard to say.
Ironically, rejecting it entirely seems to be close to what I see people here accusing the left of, that is, "treating people as fungible economic units".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link