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PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   32107 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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The parsimonious explanation is that Musk is using his voice to mold opinion, not to plainly tell the truth. This is “immoral” in the sense that punching someone is immoral, when they have been punching you for years. The news has been doing this forever. Everything else Hanania writes is not a full representation of facts, but a partisan slant to make you dislike Elon (eg, no proof that cutting Department of Ed employees will reduce the longterm collection of debt in any way that it deserves a moment’s thought; no entertaining the notion that he did not cut those specific employees; no entertaining the notion that “build fast and break things” may be the overall utilitarian strategy which simply looks worse when you write a slanted list of all the bad things; etc)

The thing is, when you post provably false s*** like the 4% approval rating thing we discussed in the other thread, and then when called out on it you double down, that alienates smart people who care about the truth. For instance, here's what Steve Sailer said today:

It would be great if DOGE could distinguish who is doing useful boutique research on education and who is wasting taxpayer money. But it appears that DOGE doesn’t have time for that, much like DOGE doesn’t seem to have time for much else in the way of useful analysis.

On the other hand, every time the NYT dubiously asserts that Trump is about to do something stupid, Trump cultists dreams up all sorts of ideas why, actually, that would be a genius 4-D chess thing to do.

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/will-doge-cancel-naep

Seems like DOGE is burning its bridges with the very demographic it was supposed to appeal to, while maintaining the support of people who have never said a critical thing about Trump in their entire lives.

One canceled contract was weighing how effectively Oregon schools spent taxpayer dollars that were set aside to improve reading instruction, by emphasizing phonics, vocabulary and other building blocks of early literacy.

Sailer’s entire post hinges on this.

The lab for which funding was cut spends a lot of resources on addressing “inequitable disciplinary actions” ie wasting money on trying to “address” why blacks are disciplined more, etc. So it’s good that their funding was cut. On WestEd, who was granted money to work on REL West —

Take research consultancy WestEd, which runs REL West and is a supporting partner for several other RELs. With $260 million in revenue and more than 1,400 employees across 13 offices, the consultancy receives substantial public funding. Financial statements show that a third of WestEd’s revenue comes from federal sources, and almost half from state and local sources. The consultancy’s products include a report promoting the replacement of standardized tests with controversial lottery admissions to ensure “equitable” access to competitive magnet high schools, and a teacher’s guide on “culturally responsive” math education. WestEd even trained teachers on “Critical Race English Education.” Participants learned, for instance, how they could lead lessons which examine the role of the “white savior complex” in Atticus Finch’s character development in To Kill a Mockingbird.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-department-of-education-contracts-left-activism

If the media cared about the truth, an iota, they would tell you this. They don’t. They omit and lie. I hope conservatives become the best omitters and liars in the entire world, and then we win. As of now, because it’s such a waste of time to actively determine how the media is lying, I am in a kind of default “the media is always lying” hibernation. Just cut everything at this point, I really don’t care — the Oregonians get what they deserve

The parsimonious explanation is that Musk is using his voice to mold opinion, not to plainly tell the truth. This is “immoral” in the sense that punching someone is immoral, when they have been punching you for years.

Punching a specific person that has been punching you for years is fair game.

Punching people more generally because you were punched for a while isn't remotely the same, and is usually rather frowned upon.

All is fair in existential infowar.

This is one of the big classical problems with democracy.

I’m not sure what you mean. In a democracy filled with uninformed and incompetent voters, if one side lies all the time, the other side must lie in turn in order to compete, let alone win. This is actually the very basis of newspapers in the American democratic tradition. X is not a newspaper, no, but it has taken on the same role. If the American voter wishes to learn about the facts and only the facts, they have to read papers and bills and data, and not Reddit or X or Bluesky. And yet they continue to use these services, at once proving that they are incompetent judges of the most obvious fact that the media lies. To quote Thomas Jefferson,

It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them

It's not irrational to delegate some amount of legal or political understanding to a trusted intermediate. One should still be open to whether they lied/erred and check their work from time to time, but expecting everyone everywhere to be deep subject-matter experts in this stuff is foolish.

The parsimonious explanation is that Musk is using his voice to mold opinion, not to plainly tell the truth. This is “immoral” in the sense that punching someone is immoral, when they have been punching you for years.

Hard disagree. If your opponent burns down the epistemic commons, and you respond in kind, you have just ceded the moral high ground. See Scott Alexander's Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons:

Logical debate has one advantage over narrative, rhetoric, and violence: it’s an asymmetric weapon. That is, it’s a weapon which is stronger in the hands of the good guys than in the hands of the bad guys. In ideal conditions (which may or may not ever happen in real life) – the kind of conditions where everyone is charitable and intelligent and wise – the good guys will be able to present stronger evidence, cite more experts, and invoke more compelling moral principles.

If you abandon Simulacrum Level 1, you might win or lose, but to a proponent of the truth it will not matter more than it would matter to an atheist which religion won the memetic competition and established a theocracy.

Also, Hanania argues that Musk is worse than the liberals:

The worst offense here is the deboosting of links. Under the old regime, liberals wanted you to only rely on what they considered credible sources of information. Musk doesn’t want you to read anything at all that is not in meme or tweet form.

The woke left has obviously not been a steadfast ally of the Truth. They certainly pick the studies they cite as cannon fodder for their side, and this has skewed all of the social 'sciences'. The embrace blank-slatism to a degree that they are unable to even engage with HBD on its merits. But to their credit, they at least believe that their world view is correct. This opens up the -- theoretical -- possibility to engage with them over the factual state of the world and convert them.

By contrast, Trump (the guy who Musk is backing and sucking up to) has had a total disregard for Level 1 through his entire political career: birtherism, qanon, election denial to the migrants eating cats and dogs. He is not so much lying (which would mean knowing the object level truth, than subverting it) as much as bullshitting and presumably, the median Trump voter knows this.

The "epistemic commons" have not been "burned down" because they never existed in the first place as a "commons" that excludes a plurality or more of the population is nothing of the sort.

What has been badly damaged is the Blue/Grey tribe's ability to dictate the rules of engagement and maintain the structural integrity of thier information bubbles.

There is no "sense making crisis" there is only a subset of people who are the intellectual equivalent of flightless birds on an isolated island who hadn't had to worry about predatory rodents until a bunch of jerks showed up in a boat and now its the fucking apocalypse.

If you abandon Simulacrum Level 1, you might win or lose, but to a proponent of the truth it will not matter more than it would matter to an atheist which religion won the memetic competition and established a theocracy.

In other words a whole lot, depending on how each religion feels about burning atheists at the stake.

He is not so much lying (which would mean knowing the object level truth, than subverting it) as much as bullshitting and presumably, the median Trump voter knows this.

I'm not sure the median Trump voter knows that so much as does not pay attention to politics?

The median voter does not necessarily engage in this kind of theorising. I suspect the median voter just votes straight R or straight D because that is what they have always done. I suspect that what the median Trump voter knows is more along the lines of - Trump's opponents constantly accuse him of lying, they are liars themselves, sure Trump can be a bit hyperbolic sometimes, but he's correct on the big picture. And then they probably don't think too much about specific details.

The worst offense here is the deboosting of links. Under the old regime, liberals wanted you to only rely on what they considered credible sources of information. Musk doesn’t want you to read anything at all that is not in meme or tweet form.

That’s quite a leap. The more likely explanation is they are optimizing for time spent on X.

When people leave the app they aren’t consuming your ads and might not resume using your app for many hours or days.

Elon found himself with an unprofitable company and took a lot of drastic steps to get to profitability.

This is also parsimonious with Elon’s own recommendation for putting links in a reply. They don’t want people bouncing directly from feed to another surface.

It's funny how so many people I read who are made at Musk are writers who don't have the ability to promote their Non-X writing platforms on X anymore. They find this to be a huge injustice and immoral, I find it mostly annoying because I have to read them complaining about it all the time.

Platform X doesn't let me promote other platform Y doesn't seem like a shocking situation to me. Nothing is preventing them from writing an X-article or wtf X calls their longer form platform if it bothers them so much. They're not being censored, they're being encouraged to produce on the same site they're promoting on.

The more likely explanation is they are optimizing for time spent on X

Fine, but wasn't Elon's whole motivation for buying X to improve or level in some way the social media information space? With which the link de-boosting works at total cross-purposes.

I guess the first priority is making the site self-sustaining.

This opens up the -- theoretical -- possibility to engage with them over the factual state of the world and convert them.

Many of them explicitly say "do not even try to understand what racists are thinking -- or you might yourself turn into a racist".

Yes, but I would rather deal with hypocrites who claim to be on the side of truth and logic than with honest conflict theorists, because with the former there is an opening, however small, to engage intellectually, while with the latter there can be only war. Obviously both sorts exist on either side and we may disagree on their proportions, but to me it seems clear that the median woke progressive is more of a hypocrite (based on revealed preferences when it comes to lifestyle, the neighborhoods they move to, etc.) while the median dissident rightist is more of a conflict theorist.

I specualte that often two conflict theorists often ally against third conflict theorist, and that conflict vs mistake is false dichotomy.

I dunno, I would rather my side wins battles rather than constantly loses them while “fighting fair” against an opponent who refuses to even entertain the idea.

Truth matters in pragmatic affairs science, or from purely philosophical perspective - but it has never mattered in politics. Nope, not ever. This is perhaps the one area postmodernists get it right, in the struggle for power in the political arena, the winners get to tell you what the truth is.

The way I would put it is that there is a correct way to do things, but the people who believe in it were lulled into a false understanding of the world and exploited by the unscrupulous. By the time enough of them woke up to do anything about it the game had already been thoroughly rigged against them, so they were forced to turn to the unscrupulous to fend them off.

I would then go on to say that that through something like deus ex machina, they somehow managed to get Trump. And that his deceptions are red tribe styled not blue tribe and that's essentially what this disagreement is about.

But I left that off the first bit because then the first bit is easier to agree with. Because that's how little effort it takes to influence people if you know what you are doing, and for all their faults the media does know how to influence people.

If your opponent burns down the epistemic commons, and you respond in kind, you have just ceded the moral high ground.

It turns out the moral high ground is not useful.

The woke left has obviously not been a steadfast ally of the Truth. They certainly pick the studies they cite as cannon fodder for their side, and this has skewed all of the social 'sciences'.

And they've got something better than objective truth. They define the accepted truth. If you try to contradict them, they'll print a thousand authoritative studies that back up their work and prove you're not only an evil racist but an ignorant science denier too. THAT is useful. That means that whatever "objective criteria" you try to institute, they can define the truth so those criteria support whatever they want. You can't beat this with words; you can only beat this with an "objective truth" they can't mess with. Not one "so obvious" they can't mess with it, because there's nothing so obvious. One that is as futile to deny as an oncoming train.

It turns out the moral high ground is not useful.

I, as a person who hates and argues against the act of doxxing--regardless of who is involved, have just met an argument I can't defeat.

"Moral High Ground?" Fuggedabout it.

If that's a veiled threat, don't bother; I've already been doxxed.

If not, the point of the term "moral high ground" is that "high ground" is in some way a superior tactical position. If it is not, the term is misleading. Without that implication, complaining that someone should not respond because they will lose the "moral high ground" is basically saying they should follow your (not their!) principles and lose rather than violate them and stand a chance. If you want to say that, say that; using the analogy of a "moral high ground" implies otherwise.

I was absolutely sincere, very confused why you thought it was threat. I think Doxxing is about the most evil and dishonorable thing you can do with the Internet. I consider Swatting a form of doxxing.

What other argument--aside from "moral high ground" is there to not dox people?

It turns out the moral high ground is not useful.

And they've got something better than objective truth. They define the accepted truth. If you try to contradict them, they'll print a thousand authoritative studies that back up their work and prove you're not only an evil racist but an ignorant science denier too. THAT is useful. That means that whatever "objective criteria" you try to institute, they can define the truth so those criteria support whatever they want. You can't beat this with words; you can only beat this with an "objective truth" they can't mess with. Not one "so obvious" they can't mess with it, because there's nothing so obvious. One that is as futile to deny as an oncoming train.

they they they

The claim was that team Musk+Trump have left the level 1 reality + destroying regular people's opportunity to seriously discuss level 1 reality on social media. Instead of employing " "objective truth" " in quotes, they employ bullshit. As far as I understand, you argue it is good and necessary because you will lose to "they" (Team Blue) otherwise?

Consider the downside of this policy: There are several examples modern and past what happens to a country when its governance is based on bullshit. Requiring your underlings and associates to repeat your bullshit back to you leads to success of people who are good at bullshitting or stupid enough not to know the difference. When ideological vibes and feels become more important than material reality, being knowledgeable about material reality becomes a hindrance in a smart person's career. Venezuela and South Africa are prime examples of such countries. If you try to build a dystopia of lies out of Ayn Rand novel except nominal political valence switched, more likely you are going to get more of Trumpzuela where big corp CEOs continue to get fat government contracts to build things that don't work as long they fat flatter Trump's ego. It is unlikely to be a cathartic step in a heroic journey where you win the fight and get to start building country you like after you win. The bullshit apparatus will say that fight is still going on no matter what it achieves. It was built for having power and repeating bullshit and after it has been built, its prime objective is to perpetuate itself.

This dovetails to a more important complaint. If the politician supposedly representing my tribe is running on vibes and bullshit, I can't trust them to do anything long-term useful. Musk claims that DOGE has achieved an amount-you-can't-keep-track-of in saving government expenses and exposing fraud but it has not. Instead, the claim is that Musk does his best to foster an information environment where it is difficult to find out what they really achieved and how they could achieve what they set out to do.

Let me extrapolate: Team Red says they will do something about gender ideology in schools, do something about the border and the illegals, do something about China, do something about economy and trade. Do I really want to hear about Team Red's performance concerning these issues by the way of DOGEfied information environment? Truth-seeker is always in danger of learning something new, followers of philosophical system of abandon-reality get to bullshit everyone, including their voters.

The claim was that team Musk+Trump have left the level 1 reality + destroying regular people's opportunity to seriously discuss level 1 reality on social media. Instead of employing " "objective truth" " in quotes, they employ bullshit. As far as I understand, you argue it is good and necessary because you will lose to "they" (Team Blue) otherwise?

I am saying that most of social media was never really discussing "objective truth". Instead, they were discussing accepted truth, as defined by the institutions. Trying to hew to THAT means you lose, because the institutions are controlled by Team Blue.

Bullshit, of course, has been a staple of political discourse forever. It's just that Team Blue has been able to pass their bullshit off as objective truth for a long time.

Consider the downside of this policy: There are several examples modern and past what happens to a country when its governance is based on bullshit. Requiring your underlings and associates to repeat your bullshit back to you leads to success of people who are good at bullshitting or stupid enough not to know the difference.

This is where Team Blue was taking us.

Musk claims that DOGE has achieved an amount-you-can't-keep-track-of in saving government expenses and exposing fraud but it has not. Instead, the claim is that Musk does his best to foster an information environment where it is difficult to find out what they really achieved and how they could achieve what they set out to do.

One cannot expect Musk, as a principal of DOGE, to give objectively true facts about it. He will boost it and should be expected to do so.

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