site banner
PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   27783 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025

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.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I sincerely doubt that there's are any Dark and Heretical ideas he holds but is forced to deny or decline to defend.

I suspect that he's far more sceptical on the trans issue than he lets on. This article was staggeringly evasive. "Yes it's bad that everyone is coming out as trans and we should try to understand why it's happening, but people who investigate why it's happening have had their brains broken by the issue, and the fact that two of the parties in a seminal court case on this issue have silly names means that you're silly if you pay any attention to this issue. Yes it's bad that confused teenagers are undergoing irreversible and disfiguring medical procedures they will likely come to regret, but the precautionary principle demands that we should allow them to even though the evidence base is so weak. Even if it doesn't pan out, in the scheme of things when it comes to medical malpractice it's not that big a deal, and the fact that so many European countries are taking steps to prevent teenagers from undergoing disfiguring medical procedures is just proof that they're all Stalinist nanny states. Anyway I'm not an expert on this so take everything I say with a pinch of salt" - when has "not being an expert on something" ever stopped Scott from expressing a definitive opinion on a contentious political issue, whether it's Covid treatments or rape culture or sociology or criminology or...?

There's also the tail end of this article, in which he alludes to transgenderism possibly being a Western culture-bound syndrome.

I suspect that he's far more sceptical on the trans issue than he lets on

I mean, subtle people can take different positions on different parts of the trans issue. One part is - are "trans" people really, in any sense, "actually women" - are they typically male or female in terms of psychology, the "brain"? Are they literally "women trapped in a man's body"? Even if not, do they at least have strong and deeply set desires to be the other gender, such that not satisfying them inevitably leads to pain and suffering?

And another part is - even if you don't believe any of that, even if you think it's just a weird social phenomenon caused by something like the modern social environment being inhospitable to real masculinity, lack of exercise for youth leading to low testosterone, xenoestrogens - you can still believe that the kind of person who thinks they are trans should transition, and live as a woman. Because it's the best option for them, or because they want to.

I think Scott probably is concealing, or at least being evasive about, some beliefs in the first category. But I think he's solidly progressive in the second. (I'm anti on both, even though I find most anti arguments generally bad)

Also, there are a lot of trans people in the rationalist community, so I think Scott has a lot of trans friends, so given his previously stated aversion to conflict believing or stating those people aren't their claimed gender, or shouldn't be trans, is something that might be tough, if he was otherwise inclined to believe that.

I agree with all of the above.

There's also the tail end of this article, in which he alludes to transgenderism possibly being a Western culture-bound syndrome.

Hes mentioned it again since, and I think he believes it - but this doesnt mean he is anti trans. This is the guy who was ground zero for the HBD therefore socialism argument. @self_made_human

HBD therefore socialism

Two of these three words feel like a gross misrepresentation of the article.

The most HBD thing he says in that article is that " IQ is 50% to 80% heritable". He does not talk about group differences at all.

The thing you call socialism is likely based on this paragraph:

Ozy once told me that the law of comparative advantage was one of the most inspirational things they had ever read. This was sufficiently strange that I demanded an explanation.

Ozy said that it proves everyone can contribute. Even if you are worse than everyone else at everything, you can still participate in global trade and other people will pay you money. It may not be very much money, but it will be some, and it will be a measure of how your actions are making other people better off and they are grateful for your existence.

Below that, he talks about donating a portion of your income to whatever causes you feel are important. This hardly seems to be a call for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Fair point about HBD. Is there a simple name I could have used instead? Socialism is not really about the parts you quoted, but about the very extensive discussion of what you "deserve", even if not directly about money. If I had to pick a quote, it would be

The best reason not to say that is that we view Ramanujan as intellectually gifted. But the very phrase tells us where we should classify that belief. Ramanujan’s genius is a “gift” in much the same way your parents giving you a trust fund on your eighteenth birthday is a “gift”, and it should be weighted accordingly in the moral calculus.

HBD therefore socialism argument.

To be fair, I have long been uncertain whether widespread acceptance of HBD (to which I claim no strong opinion) isn't the right-wing slam dunk that I see it occasionally presented as. In particular, a very extreme left view of it is pretty terrifying too: "comrade, we've discovered a way to measure ability. You know, from each according to his (or her, or their) ability, and we've deemed you to have lots."

There's a reason I like to bring up HBD blogger "Jayman" on these discussions, because he was rather forthright about his support for HBD, and hard line hereditarianism (for one, he liked to argue that poor outcomes for children of single mothers are entirely due to genetic differences between the kind of women who end up single mothers and the kind who end up married mothers [and between the kind of men who knock up the former and the kind of men who marry the latter], and have nothing to do with the actual single-parent environment at all), being about justifying racial spoils in perpetuity. He'd argue that the infamous crime stat differentials are entirely due to blacks being genetically predisposed to criminality… and therefore they can't help it, and thus society owes it to them to punish them less harshly and less often than whites to compensate for this genetic disprivilege; and that black-on-white (and black-on-Asian, and black-on-Jewish) crime — which he once characterized in HBDChick's comments section as "a one-way race war" — is simply something that the less criminally-inclined races are obligated to tolerate, even indulge. That the reality of HBD means that the "genetic have" races are morally obligated to redistribute as much of their wealth to the "genetic have-not" races — particularly blacks — as is necessary to "close the gaps" and produce "racial equity" in perpetuity.

Georgism for IQ would be hilarious to suggest just for making that sort of person think about the consequences.
"If you have the IQ to post about Rick and Morty on Reddit all day, you could easily afford your tax payments by working as an investment banker instead. Hurry up: Cleetus's UBI won't pay for itself"

Reminds me a bit of Mankiw's Optimal Taxation of Height parody paper. IQ is observable, inelastic, and correlated with income, and so the government should collect IQ measurements and tax those with high IQ more.

I hadn't thought of that one in years, thanks for reminding me!

Thanks for pointing to the Mankiw, that's a pretty funny idea.

Georgism for virtue, by contrast, is already widespread. The idiom is "ruining it for everyone".

"If you have enough self-control, intelligence, and/or temperance that restricting your freedom is an injury, you're obviously wise enough to find a way to be able to pay the taxes on the licenses and permission slips we deem necessary before you may exercise those freedoms. If it saves just one life taken by the most selfish, nasty person in society, it's worth it."

Hes mentioned it again since, and I think he believes it - but this doesnt mean he is anti trans.

No, but "gender dysphoria is a very recent phenomenon almost entirely parochial to the West" contradicts at least three of the core tenets of gender ideology. I don't think hardcore trans activists (who are a penny a dozen in the circles in which Scott moves) would appreciate the nuances of a statement like "gender dysphoria is probably a culture-bound mental illness, but that doesn't mean trans people aren't deserving of respect and shouldn't be entitled to do with their bodies as they please", and I think Scott knows this better than anyone, which is why he's so cagey and evasive whenever the topic comes up. People have been smeared as transphobic bigots for much less.

This is the guy who was ground zero for the HBD therefore socialism argument.

I think a more accurate gloss of his position as I recall it is "HBD therefore UBI". I appreciate that there's significant overlap between socialism and UBI but I don't think they're interchangeable or that one necessarily implies the other. "He who does not work, neither shall he eat" was a popular slogan in the early Soviet Union, after all.

contradicts at least three of the core tenets of gender ideology

Sure, because they are highly sensitive to any deviation, but you shouldnt take that too seriously in looking forward. The "haha yes we are transing your kids and its good" branch already does pop up occasionally, and if* the cause keeps progressing, its plausible that this could grow more visible, incorporate stuff like

Before anyone gets too excited about this, I want to stress a version of the point Bures got right earlier: there is no neutral culture. Having lots of transgender people is downstream of cultural choices. But having lots of cisgender people is also downstream of cultural choices. There isn’t infinite flexibility - evolution ensures a bias towards heterosexuality, for obvious reasons. But there’s a lot of flexibility - Spartan men married and had sex with women, but they thought this was a dumb annoying thing they had to do to have children, and sex with young boys was the obvious enjoyable satisfying option. Even within evolution’s constraints, culture can do some pretty weird stuff. I think you could probably have a culture where 99% of people were transgender, where it was generally accepted that everyone transitioned on their 18th birthday, and where only a few people (disproportionately schizophrenic) would object or see anything wrong with this.

...and remain accepted/eventually become the standard.

*uncertain in the near future, and independently of current events, I give it a good chance that trans isnt part of the progressive vision long-term.

I do think it’s suspicious and bad that everyone is suddenly becoming transgender, and I support efforts to figure out why and stop it at the root, in some way which will prevent so many kids from wanting to be transgender. But it seems cruel to fail to figure that out, let lots of kids become horribly depressed about their gender, and deny them access to treatment.

I think that's quite outspokenly anti-trans (or at least against the mainstream of trans activism, and likely the cultural milieu that Scott personally resides in as a Rat in SF).

Even if it seems like a very restrained argument, keep in mind that many (?most ?the most outspoken) trans people think that an increase in absolute and relative numbers of trans people is a victory, that the percentage of people de-transitioning is minimal, and that the idea should receive more share of the memplex and every effort should be made to have people frequently reminded that transitioning is an option and coax them to do it if they show the slightest inclination or anything that can be interpreted as dissatisfaction with their current gender.

I will caveat this with the disclaimer that I might be unfairly maligning the average trans person or trans activist. The UK, and certainly not India, have very little of that compared to the hotspot that is the US. If the majority of trans people just want to be left alone, or if most activists only endorse the right to choose and not be discriminated against, I can't say with certainty. I see things from a great remove, after all.

I think that's quite outspokenly anti-trans (or at least against the mainstream of trans activism

It's buried inside a big post and a lot of obfuscatory verbiage. The point of saying something like this is to communicate it to others. Saying it without communicating it may as well be not saying it, even if some Internet weirdos might parse it mechanically and figure it out.

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