site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 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.

4
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Yes, but humans are also biologically selected for certain patterns of collective action - thats part of normal evolution for a social species.

The most interesting questions arise from the idea of the memetic immune system. What pressures does natural selection exert on the memetic immune system?

An egregore is in competition for minds with other egregores, much as a fox is in competition for rabbits with other foxes, but with a twist. Human minds are not its food, but its substrate. Call an egregore fertile if it encourages the women it occupies (cordyceps?) to have many children. Call an egregore barren if it discourages this. Natural selection works on egregores to improve their own reproduction, we might call this their infectivity, but also to be fertile rather than barren so that they have more substrate to infect. Meanwhile natural selection works on the human genome, hoping to generate subtle memetic immune systems that are vulnerable to fertile egregores, but resistant to barren egregores.

You could go all in on reductionism and say it is just natural selection, but this will be an obstacle to understanding the tangled mess when people and egregores are evolving a subtle mutualism.

Another more subtle selective pressure in this scenario is for egregores to encourage other woman to pass around barren egregores, and to discourage other woman to pass around fertile egregores.

One might suppose that this also results in selective pressures on the human genome to be asymptomatic carriers of barren egregores (i.e. pass them on to other woman, but to not be actually affected by it themselves). And the opposite for fertile egregores - i.e. to be heavily affected by them but not pass them on to others.

Again, all of these are more subtle effects in the presence of limited total resources.

Yes, but humans are also biologically selected for certain patterns of collective action - thats part of normal evolution for a social species.

...did you even look at the link, maybe? Or read what I wrote about reductionism not being useful in the context of this conversation? You're not saying anything I don't know, but perhaps more importantly, you're not saying anything you shouldn't anticipate me knowing. In the end, we're presumably all just subatomic particles doing what subatomic particles do! Your question was "why is it egregorian and not just normal evolution" and my answer was "because evolution describes biological patterns and arrangements, while egregores describe social patterns and arrangments." Your response appears to be "nah those aren't different things" but they are at least as different as diamond and graphite, for which we have different words despite their consisting of the same atomic substrate.

Maybe it would just be simpler to point out that British-descended humans in Britain, America, and Australia clearly share "normal evolution" in common--but not egregorian memespace?

Or maybe I just don't understand your question at all.

You said that transhumanism is "subjecting ourselves to egregorian evolution". Im saying that biological evolution already has egregorian emerging things. My point is not whether the egregorians reduce or anything, its whether "Now with transhumanism, we are under the influence of egregorian evolution, whereas previous evolution didnt have that".

I did not understand your question at all!

I think the answer will depend on where one draws a number of lines within important continua. Not everyone agrees (as far as I know) on the extent to which human civilization (and related egregore(s)) has or has not guided human biological evolution, so I didn't want to hinge my argument on prior agreement on that particular point. But I'm sure there is more than one way to usefully conceptualize the problem; if you prefer, for example, it wouldn't be incompatible with the substance of my post to suggest instead that competing egregores are at issue.

Not everyone agrees (as far as I know) on the extent to which human civilization (and related egregore(s)) has or has not guided human biological evolution

Right, because the part thats old enough that were sure it has is not called "civilisation". We certainly have some adaptations to language use for example, and its development was an emergent social thing.

it wouldn't be incompatible with the substance of my post to suggest instead that competing egregores are at issue.

You mean like this?