site banner
PaperclipPerfector  26d ago (text post)   36915 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 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.

Yeah, I'd like to know what they are thinking here. It seems like a bad move.

I'd guess that most of the money was going towards funding for woke-aligned individuals, so that's what they are fighting against. You don't win by funding your enemies. But it seems like a crude instrument. We should at least fund the best performing programs, even if the people running them are woke culture warriors.

I do have a somewhat related question though. Last year, I asked themotte which were the best charitable programs to give to. I ended up buying some malaria nets, and funding some other similar EA-type charities, but I did have some disquiet about it. If these charities are so effective that $100 can save 1 life or whatever, than why hasn't someone like Bill Gates simply funded the entire project?

The same can be said of these programs. Why must the US do this with taxpayer dollars? If it's so important, why hasn't some billionaire just done the entire thing already. The global NGO complex has trillions of dollars in turnover per year. Why do they insist on funding 99% garbage instead of things which are so obviously high impact? It make me feel like it's actually about political power, not benefiting mankind.

A university might think these HIV drugs are more important than YOUR money, but they don't think it's more important then THEIR money.

I'm guessing that he's going to make the recipients show how they're following the DIEA and biological sex executive orders to get their grants back.

If these charities are so effective that $100 can save 1 life or whatever, than why hasn't someone like Bill Gates simply funded the entire project?

It's $3,000+ to prevent a statistical death from malaria, last I checked, and probably not as simple as $30B saving 10 million statistical lives.

Yes, I was joking about $100. It's not $3,000 either and probably not even $30,000.

In any case, even though I don't believe the numbers, I donate anyway just in case they are accurate.

$3K is now at the bottom end of GiveWell's estimates, which go up to $8K on the high end. Maybe some of that increase is better data, but I suspect that some of it is just that the marginal cost of preventing malaria deaths goes up as the number of deaths already prevented does. In the limit, if everyone has an insecticidal bednet, but there's still spread via mosquito bites of people who are awake, what do you do next?

Gates donated some money for bednets, and a little more for anti-mosquito gene drive research, but at some point the Gates Foundation seems to have gone all-in on funding malaria vaccine research instead. Whether this was a good idea (a really effective vaccine could make malaria go the way of smallpox, not just continually fight the problem with nets that wear out every few years) or a bad idea (current generation vaccines are like 33% effective and won't be driving anything extinct) is still an open question IMHO.

The current givewell estimates are around 4-5k per life saved, and the Gates foundation was a significant factor in pushing that number up that high. It is also working more on malaria eradication, which is a project much harder to make marginal donations to.

I'd guess that most of the money was going towards funding for woke-aligned individuals, so that's what they are fighting against.

This is going to be the real killer question. Do they have the extreme cajones that would be necessary to, when they decide to start releasing funds again, say, "...and it can't go to any organization that has a DEI/affirmative action program or otherwise discriminates on the basis of race/gender," or some set of qualifiers. It would take huge cajones, because that would immediately leave a huge number of universities, who currently get the bulk of the research dollars, totally frozen out. The stakes would be high. People would point to critical areas that basically cannot be funded. Some unis would crack; others might hold out. Either way, this would be an 'all in' play after he's already gone after this stuff that's directly within the gov't.

I expect it will have a lesser version of that qualification. That is, the grant will say "and you can't use money for this to fund DEI crap", so the Advanced Physics Program won't (openly) do DEI, but the same university will still have its feminist vulcanology program at least nominally not funded by Federal grants.

I'll bet they will have to show they don't have any DEI/Affirmative Action and commit to only two genders to get the money flow turned back on. Punished Trump has no chill

The idea seems to be to cut everything off temporarily, then decide positively what can go back in. Probably a much more effective way of making cuts than directly trying to find things to cut.

That's a good point. And from a PR standpoint, it doesn't matter whether you cut spending by 100%, 10%, or increase it by only 3%, you get called the second coming of Hitler. So why not just go big?

Still, I wish they had tried to make some small cutouts, not for any political reason but just for humanitarian ones.

I disagree vehemently. No sappy heartstrings are worth putting your hand in my pocket. If you're so sad about humanitarian crises, spend your own money, don't spend mine.

why hasn't someone like Bill Gates simply funded the entire project

Bill Gates doesn't care about saving lives. You can tell because of the things he does. He cares about power, and shaping the world in the way he thinks is best.

Bold words from someone standing in life-saving range.

If spending that kind of money on saving lives doesn’t demonstrate it, what does?

Spending his money demonstrates that he wants to spend his money on something. I think that something is control and power. The "saving lives" is to stroke his own ego, but I don't believe it and neither should you.

Neither you nor @jeroboam answered my actual question, though. I understand how spending money buys him things aside from lives saved, and I understand that on priors, you (and I!) expect people to care more about power/status than lives saved.

But I’m asking what Gates would do differently if he really did care more about the latter. What could convince you?

This has always be a conundrum for me as well. If Gates, Soros, Musk, WEF are so evil...what should they do instead to prove they are pro-social?

There is nothing that can convince me, since the spectacle of a man "donating" billions of dollars to his own company then calling himself a philanthropist tells me all I need to know about his character. There is nothing he can do now. If he was a different man, he'd have done different things, and I might believe he means well. Now it is too late, and there is very little that he can do to change my mind.

If you knew someone had secretly swapped bodies with Bill Gates overnight (with access to all his passwords etc.), what actions would the New Gates have to take to convince you he was a good person?

Retire to the countryside, and resign from the foundation.

Interesting. Why do you expect whoever is next in line to run it (presumably picked by the real Gates) to run it more ethically than Fake Gates?

More comments

To be fair the difference between having 200 billion and 300 billion rounds to zero. So there was no personal sacrifice.

And he got a lot of good PR and political power too.

This was not altruism more like enlightened self interest. Which is fine and good but fully consistent with him not actually caring.

Gates is demonstrating Daniel Webster's statement:

"There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters"

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