site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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.

20
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I'm honestly not sure what "better processors" really gets you in a phone, outside of using it for phone games (which generally trend towards being light-weight in terms of computational cost anyways, I suspect, or at least being not-so-reliant on high, stable framerates/tickrates) or maybe some fancy gimmick like Apple's face-tracking (making things like the iPhone X desired by some VTubers for the genuinely amazing face-tracking it provides), but even that is probably more down to algorithms/software than raw hardware power.

You get better battery life from the same size of device and pages/apps are, all else being equal, going to render faster (especially if they're using a JS framework adapted to mobile to cut development costs). iOS has always had the edge on Android in terms of UI responsiveness, too; managed languages are a bit of a handicap right out of the gate, and Google has never really been one to emphasize UI polish (much like post-2012 Microsoft, for that matter).

Really, though, iPhones aren't necessarily the most advanced in terms of specific features- it's true that Android has some real interesting things going on with its support for foldable screens (2 apps at the same time with a screen that folds up actually is a big deal- make it 250 dollars so I don't have to worry about it inevitably breaking, and I'll probably buy one). But it works pretty damn well, and you can walk into any repair shop in the world and get parts for it.