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 -
As the meme goes, you are like a little baby. Watch this.
Alternatively, an extended Undertale reference that feels so on the nose it almost hurts (yes, fucking Chara is definitely the best person to mentally consult while trying to rationalize your actions).
Once you make "no-selling social reality" your professed superpower, I imagine the difference in performing Olympic-levels mental gymnastics to justify eating cheese sandwiches and coming up with legitimate reasons to stab your landlord is negligible. (I know the actual killer is a different person but I take the patient zero as representative of the "movement".)
I'm not very well versed in Undertale lore, so can you point out how this is an extended Undertale reference?
[cw: spoilers for a 10 year old game]
In brief, Chara is the most straightforwardly evil entity in all of Undertale and the literal embodiment of soulless "number go up" utilitarian metagaming. One of the endings (in which your vile actions quite literally corporealize it) involves Chara directly taking over the player avatar, remarking that you-the-player have no say in the matter because "you made your choice long ago" - hypocrite that you are, wanting to save the world after having pretty much destroyed it in pursuit of numbers.
Hence the post's name and general thrust, with Ziz struggling over having to do evil acts (catching sentient crabs) to fund a noble goal (something about Bay Area housing?):
It really can't be more explicit, I took it as an edgy metaphor (like most of his writing) at first reading but it really is a pitch-perfect parallel: a guy has a seemingly-genuine crisis of principles, consciously picks the most
evilself-serving path imaginable out of it, fully conscious of each individual step, directly acknowledging the Chara influence (he fucking spells out "override by true self"!), and manages to reason himself out of what he just did anyway. Now this is Rationalism.I just can’t imagine being so much of a loser that I’m going to base my moral convictions on characters in a video game. That’s the thing that really strikes me here, not the murder and the consequentialism or even the rationalism, it’s that this is a person of obvious intelligence who has founded their entire worldview on video games and the Matrix movies.
I don't think they're founding their moral convictions on video games, only using video games and their connotations to smooth communication. It's no different than HPMOR, in my view.
I think you're underselling the phenomenon by just rounding all this off to crazy. I think it's entirely possible that Ziz and their accolytes have, among them, some significant neurological abnormalities. But it's hard to escape the impression that they're not losing their minds so much as intentionally throwing them away. They are actively taking concrete, premeditated action to undermine and compromise their own sanity, because they've bought into enough reasoning convolutions that they've committed to it being a good idea. I have some minor personal experience with cult shit, and this is definitely cult shit.
Yeah, and I also think HPMOR is very silly and shouldn't be treated as serious. Harry Potter fanfiction is not the means by which serious people discuss or disseminate philosophical treatises; it insults Harry Potter by trying to make it something it isn't, and insults philosophical treatises by trying to make them something they're not. That Yudkowsky used Harry Potter fanfiction to distribute his ideas indicates to me an unwillingness to choose the right register in which to communicate, a bit like TYPING IN ALL CAPS LIKE YOU'RE A BOOMER WITH A BROKEN CAPS LOCK or refusng 2 us propper gramar to rite yur txt bc its to hard 2 rite n propr inglish. It indicates a disrespect to your content and your audience, while also implying you don't believe your work is strong enough to stand on its own without adding a gimmick.
And that's exactly what I charge our cultists here are doing: they're disrespecting themselves by describing extremely significant and important themes in metaphysics and social reality through video game references, which aren't reality, indicating that either they can't justify their views in more complex terms or don't have the patience, lucidity, and self-control to choose to do so, both of which are damning.
Sure, maybe. But I don't see "cult shit" as meaningfully distinguished from crazy; by crazy I don't simply mean schizophrenia or something along those lines, but simply that these are people whose reasoning and behavior are separated from reality and whose ramblings are therefore fruitless and best to be ignored. I don't really care, Margaret, whether the delusions came from neurological abnormalities or from manipulation as part of a cult.
I would argue that Harry Potter is the perfect story to use as a foundation for philosophy. I never got into HP or HPMOR, but at the turn of the 21st century Harry Potter occupied a position among our elite children similar to the Odyssey among the Ancient Greek children. The Odyssey was written to be entertaining and compelling in order to motivate Greek boys to participate in sailing expeditions and behave prosocially. This was its first and primary objective, because this was the first and primary objective of the community. Harry Potter motivated young Western boys and girls to enter elite academic institutions and eventually the PMC class, and it accomplished this wonderfully, with higher-ranked institutions being the first to establish Quidditch clubs. How did Harry Potter do this? Briefly,
Every aspect of “elite life” is exaggerated in the Harry Potter universe, made into a super-stimuli of sorts, which winds up enhancing interest in their real world equivalents. The letter of admission to the institution becomes the owl (wisdom personified) delivering a beautiful letter, which rescues the half-blood boy from a life of antisocial obesity-ridden mediocrity among those of inherently lesser ability. The half-blood boy’s real family and community are actually among the qualitatively superior wizards, where he belongs. The stupid “muggles” are no match for the pull of the elite institution. 12yo readers are actually sad that they never got their admissions letter, because children are delusional, and this disappointment becomes interest in academies later on.
Book-learning becomes magic learning; formulae become spells. (This is actually a device used to make medieval priests interested in reading books, too; close to all of the “magic” books in medieval history were written by and for priests, and they made extravagant promises of ability-enhancement from magically finding a thief to summoning a demon. Now, none of these worked, and there isn’t even any symbolic truth in them; the point was to maximize the interest of the priest for books, which will make him more interested in the Bible longterm (especially when he realizes the magic doesn’t work lol)). Paintings with history become “talking paintings”. Etc.
Hogwarts is, of course, written as a super-stimuli of elite institutions in the Western tradition. It uses aspects of Oxford, Cambridge, the monastic institutions, all blended into one.
Every aspect of Bildungsroman is associated with Hogwarts. First time friend picks you up in his car? It’s a flying car, and of course you crash into a tree (no, no, on top of a tree…)
Social issues like institutional corruption and racism also make an appearance. Voldemort is bad, even though wizards are objectively superior and their blood objectively superior; the fear one experiences saying his name is the same as saying the N-word. Draco and the Slytherins? Etc.
Okay, so Harry Potter is the defining book of the 21st century aspirational PMC child. (The PMC is Potter Mania Culture). Now let’s sail back to the Greeks. Greek philosophers applied an allegorical interpretation on top of the Odyssey, for educating elite children. Byzantines as late as the 12th century were using the Odyssey as “hooks” for their ideas. This is really what it’s about: mnemonic hooks, no different than in a memory palace. Hogwarts is one enormous memory palace to be exploited by philosophers. The story is sealed into the child’s mind, and then after that you can use his memories to add philosophy. This isn’t unique to the Pagans either. Philo interpreted every primitive part of Old Testament as an allegory of Greek philosophical ideas, which were genuinely completely retconned into the stories. The Church Fathers did something similar. If you want to be blasphemous, Jesus is the beginning of philosophy on top of the Hebrew Canon, reinterpreting and repossessing previous information in light of greater wisdom, and his story was written to be compelling from a number of different angles, eternally compelling. Jordan Peterson today is trying to use Old Testament stories for his ideas. TheLastPsychiatrist, an old favorite, used both popular culture and Greek myths.
Are philosophical treatises more “serious”? Frankly, I think they are completely unserious, because no one serious reads them. It would be one thing if our philosophers resided in an Ivory Tower on our community, and the crumbs of their wisdom dropped down to us as table crumbs drop down to dogs, but they seem to reside in an ivory tower on their own private island. Almost nothing of what they do will ever actually influence the lives and minds of even our elites, not just the normal and more functioning Americans. Because wisdom needs to be relatable to mainstream culture in order to be consumed. It needs to be digestible, easy, tasty. Because we don’t have a landed gentry, we have stressed elites who don’t have infinite time, and the children of our super wealthy are also retarded. Wisdom is like a small amount of leaven that a woman took and hid in 60 lbs of flour, and it leavened all the bread, blended into it, making it lighter and easier. If your wisdom isn’t relatable it’s not really wisdom.
(Replying also to @Corvos)
More options
Context Copy link
It worked. I have a personal philosophy of never looking down on a method that yields results; I may choose not to use it but I would rather succeed in a manner that's undignified than fail like a serious person.
More to the point, writing didactic fiction is as old as time, as @coffee_enjoyer will be happy to tell you. The idea that good philosophy is only communicated through complex essays is just untrue, although complex essays certainly have their charm. Look at GK Chesterton, whose happy conviction was that truly solemn ideas can only be communicated through laughter.
More options
Context Copy link
As far as I understood, what you describe as "the correct language to use for philosophy" is only a part of "social reality" that they've learned to "no-sell".
In that, I largely agree with them. In philosophy of all areas, what should matter is communicating the concepts, not signaling that you're a real philosopher by wordceling it up like it's 1800s Germany and your name is Heisenfreuden.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I knew about Undertale's general outline but couldn't piece it together, so thanks for doing that. So, in essence, ziz identifies one-to-one with Chara, an avatar of utilitarianism. He excuses his actions by simply asserting that his "true self" is a soulless consequentialist; he by-passes moral deliberation or crisis of principles by simply saying that whatever actions that puts him into conflict with himself are expressions of his true self. And because they are expressions of his true self, and therefore out of his control, he should not feel guilt over them. Determinism taken to its logical conclusions. Rationalism is just its beast.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Good points and I appreciate you bringing up the lore, I now understand better why people are repulsed by rationalists if this kind of thing is what they think of.
I still think this isn't real timeless decision theory though, this looks like a severe case of antifa syndrome with a heavy dose of being defective as a person. Timeless decision theory is about basilisks and multiple universes and real proper game theory not 'kill nazis'. The galaxy-brain version of antifa syndrome with all these weird blog posts about being an obnoxious creep and a weirdo that are hard to decrypt more specifically is still only antifa syndrome.
Like what is going on here? I think this is schizobabble, it sounds like schizobabble. Timeless decision theory is incomprehensible but seems vaguely meaningful in certain rare circumstances, like advanced science. Maybe wrong science, who can say? But there's something in it more than this. If you put weird inputs into a bad piece of software and it glitches out, it's not the fault of the input but of the software (in this case Ziz and gang).
I already dumped most of this schizo shit from my mental RAM so I can't be certain, but s/he does explicitly touch on this in the extended Undertale reference above:
<...>
Given this evidently failed to induce any disbelief, I parse e.g. the sandwich anecdote above as revealing one's focus to not actually be on the means (I am a vegan so I must not eat a cheese sandwich), but on the ends (to achieve my goals and save the world I need energy - fuck it, let it even be a cheese sandwich). Timeless ends justify the immediate means; extrapolate to other acts as needed. Sounds boring, normal even, when I put it this way, this is plain bog standard cope; would also track with the general attitude of those afflicted with antifa syndrome. Maybe I'm overthinking or sanewashing it, idk.
On the other hand, quoth glossary:
...I admit I have no idea what the fuck that means but I do see related words...?
I think it’s describing a situation where you engineer a threatening environment so that you don’t need to use explicit force at the moment of decision. I think ziz is trying to say once you recognize that the environment was designed to corner someone into compliance, you can view it as morally similar to actually using violence, because the threat itself is doing the work of forcing their hand.
Why ziz didn't just say that- I may never know.
More options
Context Copy link
Man this is a very convoluted way of describing the concept of persuasion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link