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 -
Let me give you a slightly different example.
In higher education, the gossip right now is revolving around perceptions that students are cheating more, less inclined to come to class, more fragile with feedback and being challenged, less prepared for university-level work, etc. I'm not aware of any specific, careful empirical data here, and there is certainly a tendency among professors to complain about their worst cases. But certainly my own experience has aligned with that of the gossip.
I grew up hearing all kinds of stories about how those who grew up during the Great Depression had a tendency toward hoarding, "upcycling," and so forth. "Post traumatic stress disorder" has come to encompass a lot more than shell-shock these days. What's weird, to me, about post-COVID sociological changes is how just wildly unnecessary the whole mess appears to have been. My students aren't skipping class and sloughing assignments because they lost their families to the plague; they're skipping class and sloughing assignments because most of them spent a year or two living under government lockdowns, being assured all the while that this would not impact their life progression. But it already has.
Did you know that six U.S. states just waived the bar exam for law graduates to become lawyers. The bar exam, which is supposed to be the line between "competent" and "incompetent" representation, and state governments just said--eh, just wave everyone through.
Someone will undoubtedly say--well what were they supposed to do? I get it, really. People spent two years or more improvising at every turn. Mistakes were bound to be made. But it is depressing to me that so much of that improvising involved total abandonment of anything approaching ordinary common sense in favor of absolutely maximum panicking. That sort of thing is bound to have long term impacts.
I think in many ways Covid accelerated preexisting trends. One was toward remote work; we would probably have gotten there eventually anyway, the incentives were strong as cost of living and commute lengths skyrocketed in high-income employment hubs, but Covid probably moved us ten years into the future in terms of forcing adoption. Another is probably a secular trend away from meritocracy. IMO the fundamental driver there was the end of the Cold War and generally increasing wealth (slackness is more pleasant, and can be viewed as a luxury good that we are consuming more of now that we have more wealth), but Covid again moved us probably ten years forward in terms of abandoning standardized tests, having sympathy for mental disorders (or laziness that uses the language of mental disorders) and adopting racial and gender quotas in employment and higher education.
More options
Context Copy link
Man, that is wild. I genuinely have a hard time believing that anyone would do something as stupid as that. Do they not stop to think for one second about the consequences of such an action?
And isn’t it normal to have to take multiple times anyways?
More options
Context Copy link
I think what gets me is--maybe there won't be any noticeable consequences. Most, maybe all of these states implemented an "hours of supervised practice" prerequisite. If supervised practice really is enough to accomplish the goals of the bar exam, why in God's name would we continue administering bar exams? That's an expensive, deeply unpleasant process to subject people to for literally no reason at all (queue Meditations on Moloch electroshock discussion).
Conversely, if the exam really does protect consumers in ways that can't be accomplished by supervised practice, what possible justification could there be to shrug your shoulders and say, "well, this year we're just not going to bother?" "Yes, hundreds of lawyers whose legal education was interrupted by COVID, also never had to prove that they learned anything to the state, so... just watch out for lawyers who graduated in 2021 I guess? One in ten should probably not be practicing law?"
But no--we get total doublethink on the matter. The bar exam is absolutely crucial to protecting consumers from incompetent representation, and also a completely optional exercise with no serious relevance to professional competence, somehow.
No, there are reasons for it. Maybe not good reasons for it, but definitely reasons. Just off the top of my head, we have:
(1) the bar filters for people who are either capable of ingesting and processing lots of information, or working like cast-iron bastards for six months to simulate the brainpower. These skills are extremely useful in the legal field.
(2) the bar filters for people who are able to write well (for a certain definition of "well") and with clarity (for a certain definition of "clarity") under high stress, significant time pressure, and over an extended sequence of continuous tasks. This is also a very valuable skill for many lawyers (though not all).
(3) the bar does at least require a certain amount of basic legal knowledge about a number of different legal sub-fields. Most of these fields are quite complex in their own right, and can take whole careers to become an expert in, but the bar means that no attorney is going to be completely clueless when it comes to, e.g., family law, or the remedies available in different kinds of litigation, or the steps necessary to form a contract. As long as we're going to be pretending that all lawyers are members of a sacrosanct professional guild, some degree of basic generality is required so the number of lawyers providing affirmatively wrong information and advice is cut down somewhat.
(4) the bar functions as a literal bar-to-entry to the lawyering guild, increasing compensation in the industry.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not really a sophisticated and careful analysis, but Bloomberg had a recent op-ed about SAT/ACT scores. They've plummeted during COVID. If anything, it probably understates the loss, as universities have increasingly dropped test requirements and would-be weak scorers have decided not to take the tests and submit scores.
Obviously scores don't tell everything. But they speak to the trend. And there's a reason for the dearth of other empirical data: American educational researchers are very disinclined to look into this question, and schools don't want to surface self-condemning metrics.
More options
Context Copy link
Listen to all of the smart people who were screaming at the top of their lungs that this sort of thing was exactly what was going to happen, and work to avoid it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link