site banner
PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   36274 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.

Sure is fun being a grad student in STEM and pouring every waking moment into a grant proposal due in the next few weeks to see this news today!

We’ll see if the United States decides to continue being a scientific powerhouse or if we’ll all get chased away to other countries..

Sorry, but as a grad school STEM student you're already eminently employable, it sucks to possibly be the cohort when the music stops (I do not think that will happen here) but the government isn't obligated to dump money in it. As someone who went through grad school unfunded, the whole system is quite unequal, but I saw funded people fail to complete their degrees and still do very well with ABD. I know the argument is that the funding gets people (including smart foreigners who will continue to work in the US after graduation) lucrative employment in the US and they will contribute to the 'scientific powerhouse' as you call it, but given how little people's coursework is often used in their later careers, and how an advanced degree just felt more of slog of mortgaging my youth for money later, I think we should look into this credentialism fueled education cost-inflation run amok and ask if there is a better way.

Not only that, but very little of our powerhouse STEM sector comes about because the government funded it, in fact most of the innovations have come from private companies despite government interference.

AI is coming out of private companies, so did much of our Internet companies stating with Amazon and moving through Zillio. Even in the past, most American innovation came from private research firms like Bell Labs or the Edison Labs or Tesla’s company. Modern robotics will come out of Boston dynamics.

At best, the government grant system works well for very basic research into pure sciences. It doesn’t work well to create new technologies that people will actually use. SpaceX has done more to improve space travel than NASA has in 50 years.

AI is coming out of private companies, so did much of our Internet companies stating with Amazon and moving through Zillio.

The Internet and the WWW both came out of government-funded research though. It's one of the best examples of why government-funded basic research and private-sector R&D are complements, not substitutes.

You’re not really doing the “no innovations came from basic publicly funded scientific research” thing?

Let’s just take biology: CRISPR, the polymerase chain reaction, green fluorescent protein, huge numbers of basic discoveries that inform things like cancer therapy research, discoveries of new classes of drug such as discovering GLP-1s in Gila Monster saliva, surely one could write a book on all the contributions of the last couple decades.

That’s a ridiculous opinion that basic science with the support of public funding hasn’t contributed anything lately.

Chinese value excellence. No politics in universities either, they make students take an hour or two of political theory at universities, but that's about it. Activism is not tolerated at all.

Between the demographics and all, it's quite likely at least half of cutting edge research is going to happen there.

Sure is fun being a grad student in STEM and pouring every waking moment into a grant proposal due in the next few weeks to see this news today!

These days you can evaluate that quite fast. The idea no doubt is to starve the beast of left-wing NGOs that infests so much of the West.

It's depressing that in Europe, the Comission of Retards funds 'climate' NGOs which are then used to justify these policies and lobby for more of it. The end result is, insofar climate is concerned dismal. Once the truly impactful policies like banning ICE in cars or banning all heating that's not a heat pump, politicians balk because it's political suicide and activists howl in outrage how they're dooming the planet.

In the US you have the same thing. Veritas, ever ready to ruin someone's horny time sent some hunk at an EPA official who then proceeded to blab about how they're throwing 'gold bricks off the Titanic' to fund the NGO complex. Of course, the funniest part is that a lot of this was happening under the "Inflation Reduction Act".

Chinese value excellence.

A bizarre statement to make about the country that has sewer oil, tofu-dreg buildings, mass counterfeiting of products, extreme academic cheating, among other fraudulent practices.

I don't want to overstate the amount of fraudulent activity that occurs in China, but clearly China's version of "excellence" is a less virtuous and more selfish that how most people would use the term. "Results and personal gain at all costs, even if it's fraud" is certainly one way to define excellence.

Yes, because prestigious university administrators are using exactly the same criteria for offering jobs to scholars as the worst of lowest bidder construction vendors.

Between the demographics and all, it's quite likely at least half of cutting edge research is going to happen there.

I went to American grad school. I have reviewed Chinese research papers. I can't exaggerate the sneering contempt American researchers have for them. In every way trivial and not worth publishing. People around here keep calling things "slop". This is the real slop we need not concern ourselves with.

I've worked in China a bit. I married a Chinese woman. I understand that they are smart and hardworking. If this were a computer game then their high stats would make them win. But they just don't. The factory workers can't follow instructions without a taskmaster standing over them. The researchers publish large numbers of papers worth nothing at all. Something is missing. I blame culture. Chinese people in America working as engineers are productive. Participating in our work culture cures them.

I went to American grad school. I have reviewed Chinese research papers. I can't exaggerate the sneering contempt American researchers have for them. In every way trivial and not worth publishing.

I can confirm this. I have rejected many papers from solely Chinese authors, many of which are on the spectrum from "not even wrong" to "what are you even thinking that you're doing here?!" I've now accepted one, from a guy who got his PhD in China, but then spent several years on post-docs in the west before returning to China. They're definitely not stupid, but they're still really catching up. Over time, they may take over, but the state as of today, right now, is that their fundamental scientific research output is mostly hot garbage.

Don't get me wrong, there is plenty of hot garbage coming out of American universities, too. But in my discipline, your filtering algorithm would have very few false negatives if it just rejected everything from China... and it would be much more mixed with American submissions.

In the fields I'm familiar with, this was true ten years ago, but there has been significant improvement in the quality of Chinese publications since then. My understanding is that this is the result of targeted government pressure in a few areas deemed nationally significant and may not generalize.

How do we square this with real world happenings? Deepseek, DF-21, Chinese batteries, the fact that they're now selling basic everything at competitive prices etc?

I am aware there's shitty research and Chinese are unusually good at gaming systems, but they deliver.

Or, you know, they operate the world's biggest HSR system without incurring massive casualties.

What fraction of a billion 100+ IQ people need to deliver to generate a GDP per capita similar to Mexico driven by, largely, the same factor- heavy industry.

I doubt that PPP adjusted Mexican GDP is same ad Chinese..

Their high speed trains derail sometimes and some have been slowed down to make them less likely to derail. They also have high ticket costs and low ridership. The system is propped up by government spending and could not sustain itself on ticket costs. I know some people really like high speed rail, but I'm not too hot on it in general and Chinese HSR in particular.

I have worked in Chinese factories. I know they can make stuff. I also know Chinese factory workers need constant monitoring and correction. There's something off with their work culture. They are not lazy. But if they have to be careful rather than fast they can't do it without someone like me watching them. And when I leave they start doing the work really sloppy and fast.

I don't see any contradiction between Chinese research publications being trash and also they make batteries and electric cars and DJI drones. They just need good factory supervision and quality control.

I think you are extremely overindexing on your experience. A century or so ago they were stereotyped as lazy too. This is a matter of culture that can change very quickly.

I've never heard of a lazy Chinese stereotype. My American public schooling taught me about how they were worked very hard in abusive indentured servitude in the 1800s.

And 150 years ago they were stereotyped as undesirable immigrants because they were able/willing to work harder for less money and undercut white workers. "Coolie" had all the connotations of "illegal Mexican day labourer" in the current year.

I have seen exact opposite claim: that ridership is sufficient and there aren't really any new serious crashes. Wasn't the last one in '17?

And when I leave they start doing the work really sloppy and

Fining them for off tolerance parts didn't work?

This was not a supplier, it was our own factory. Scrapping or reworking parts is burning our own money.

In that sense we had more leverage over external suppliers in that they had to be in spec or we could reject their parts and it is their problem if that makes them lose money.

We had a major customer reject a large order of a part due to it being out of spec. It was a disaster. I was on a plane within a few days.

A bit of googling claims Chinese HSR is not financially sustainable and survives on taxpayer funding and hundreds of billions of dollars in debt. But that's true for other HSR projects and not a particularly Chinese issue. Planes are just too fast and cheap and HSR way too expensive for HSR to make financial sense.

The issue with Chinese HSR is that it became a sort of flagship national pride / soft power / foreign influence vector during the post-2008 stimulus period.

For various (mostly American-adjacent) geopolitical-meets-green reasons, high speed rail became an international symbol of being a 'modern' and 'advanced' country, particularly because the Americans weren't into it. (For pretty sound economic reasons, but that doesn't stop good propaganda.) Building more and more HSR was not only a quote-unquote 'easy' way to beat the US at a metric of global prestige, but it was a complimentary infrastructure investment with the construction boom and the early Belt-and-Road infrastructure project wave (and thus a Chinese jobs program / influence investment overseas). China was a Train Power who could spare trains and track for a reasonable price and no strings attached* (*terms and conditions apply), and all that.

The issue on the domestic front was that the construction boom was a bubble, and the dynamics of the Chinese system that led to ghost cities also led to high speed rail to those sort of ghost city projects, even though the fundamental issue- like in a lot of places- is the human geography dispersion. People need movement within cities, or from suburbs to cities, more than they need movement between cities.

I feel like this goes back to the communist roots of the PRC, and it was a similar problem with the USSR in the olden days: tick the boxes, meet the quotas, who gives a damn if the end product is no good? The political officers only care about making things look productive and good.

I expect the NIH and NSF will restart shortly after everyone has a chance to remove the idiotic paragraph where they explain why their research in geology will help marginalized communities.

I do fear for my area of study to be honest.

To doxx myself, I study ecosystems with satellites. I develop models that link what we see in earth observation pixels with how much water is in vegetation.

The problem is that this is something which is verifiably being changed due to climate change, and with that I’m now in political waters.

I think earth science is definitely on the chopping block. Doesn’t seem to be in republicans vision of what we should invest in as a country.

Can't say much, except I fear you're right and hope you're wrong about that.

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