site banner
PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   32740 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 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.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The lack of rigour is perhaps the most fundamental tenet of Trumpism. If these rates were based on actual facts or informed by expertise, then the policy could be argued with and modified based on reasons and data. This way, each other country has to negotiate its rate based on bargaining, flattery or retaliation.

The defence I hear of Trump/Musk's approach most often is that they just do things without looking too closely at data or potential harms, and that this is good because some action is better than none. Even further, this attitude seems to have become reified into something like 'if you aspire to rigour, you are a cuck and not suitable to be near power'.

I gotta assume that someone seeking to challenge the accuracy of Trump's tariff chart would be thrown out of the White House and not asked to come back, and that this preference for anti-rigour is more deeply ingrained in his circle than any particular policy.

To you and @Raziel, who commented below, I can only ask: What rigor? Who are these experts and what has been the outcome of their advocacy?

From where I am sitting, the 'experts' of the western world have for the past decades managed to run the most peaceful and technologically advanced societies in human history into the ground. Why look at anything they have done with veneration?

And even then we are presupposing that 'rigor' has ever been a relevant thing at all beyond an aesthetic preference where people with power modulate academia and media towards their own wants.

Which experts would you look to if not ones in the western world? Are you saying there is no expertise, no right and wrong, only power? If so, you do you, but in a nominally rationalist setting that has rules of debate, why are you here? You should prefer a forum where posters do not use words but just pipe bellowing noises into other people's homes at a volume set by their net worth.

Ethos is not the same as Logos. And the conceit of this forum is that the latter is more valuable to the pursuit of truth.

This holds practical regardless of the possibility of knowledge.

I don't think I follow your meaning here, do you mind spelling it out slightly more?

In rhetoric, the three modes of persuasion are Ethos, Pathos and Logos.

Ethos, which means "character" is an appeal to the authority or credibility of the speaker. This is typically done by being a notable figure in the field, demonstrating mastery of jargon or being recognized by established authority.

Expertise, insofar as it means anything, relies on Ethos. An expert is someone who can provide such bona fides and reason in forms that give him credibility.

Logos, on the other hand, which means "word", "discourse" or "reason", is a mode of persuasion in which the speaker uses logic, patterns and generally relies on the internal consistency of his claims or thesis.

This forum has been founded in an intellectual tradition that ultimately traces its lineage to Aristotle and Socrates who both held that good thinking comes from a focus on Logos and a avoidance of Pathos and Ethos. Socrates himself is well known to specifically downplay his own authority because he believed that this would enable a better pursuit of Truth.

So when you ask which experts one would look to, it seems the obvious answer in such a space would be none of them. We're here to think by ourselves and discuss that with people who disagree so that we may perhaps approach something close to the truth.

Relying on authority rather than looking at the evidence and making up your own mind would be the antithesis of that.

That's quite interesting, but this line of thinking feels close to Cartesianism. If we can't appeal to authority at all, we have to discount almost all information about the wider world – we don't know what any countries' GDP is, what the tax rate is, whether there's really a war in Ukraine etc, unless we trust in certain authorities whose information we have no reason to strongly doubt. We wouldn't be able to discuss the world economy at all.

I would have thought a more pragmatic version of this philosophy would have us interrogate and challenge the data and views of experts, and hold them lightly, always seeking to check that the experts are abiding by similar evidentiary standards as we would aspire to ourselves, but realising that it is impractical to check everything and therefore being good Bayesians about what we can't be sure of.

I don't find skepticism to be impractical at all. I just find people would feel it more comfortable to know more than they actually do.

All empirical statements are contingent. A pragmatic stance would be to deal with this reality by embracing epistemic humility. The idea we can adopt some framework that negates this problem is in fact the idealism in this scenario.

I know it's a strong temptation to delegate thinking, but it is impossible. Not without giving up autonomy. Feel free to do so, but then I'll want to talk with the people you get your reality from. Not with you.

On that topic, what do you think about Trump's solar tariffs on Vietnam and Thailand?

I don't really know that particular supply chain enough to tell what the effect will be. My broad take is unless we get an actual global economic crisis out of this shock, the general rise of SEA as a manufacturing hub will continue because the underlying factors remain positive and the US isn't the only game in town to sell your widgets anymore. I think the internal politics of ACFTA members are more important.

But to be fair, I have no investments in places that are specifically targeted by Trump's tariffs so I can afford not to care that much.

Musk, at least prior to DOGE, erred on the side of being overly optimistic and discounting risk, rather than a clear lack of rigour. You can't run moonshot companies like as is literally the case for SpaceX, or Tesla, if you don't make sure you've done your best to account for all relevant factors.

Unfortunately, the move fast and break things approach is a bit harder to endorse when it comes to federal governance, not that I'm an expert.

I do not think Musk could have done what he did at Tesla and SpaceX if he was not orientated towards objective reality. Clearly there was a lot of fake-it-till-you-make-it puffery, particularly at Tesla, but it mostly involved over-optimistic projections, and Musk didn't make obviously false statements about the present.

It is possible Musk at DOGE is still orientated towards reality, but he has taken up lying on an industrial scale. But most people who successfully make a Big Lie part of their public persona end up high on their own supply.

It's possible that his orientation towards reality has broken down through some combination of his mental health worsening, stress, drug abuse and just arising from the fact that politics is often a mind-killer. But as you correctly say, if you wear a mask often enough, it might turn out to stick.

I think the decline of Musk illustrates what makes Trump so impressive.

It is is nearly impossible to function at a high level if everyone fucking hates you, even if you have unlimited money. Musk is not handling it well, the fact that Trump has done so well for so long is amazing!

Both Trump and Musk have enough fanboys that they can surround themselves (including in their social media feeds) with admirers - indeed being surrounded by sycophants is the default if you are that rich and powerful. Both have unusually devoted fandoms - even Reagan didn't have supporters calling for him to be put on Mount Rushmore while he was still in office.

If Musk is exposed to the fact that large numbers of people hate him, it is a choice.

Imo Musk has always been the same kind of person he is now - Make wildly implausible promises of over-delivering, including lying about current capabilities, and then reach beyond what anybody else can do ... while still technically significantly underdelivering compared to the promises. DOGE is the same. I'm not aware of any western government managing to significantly reduce spending in any way whatsoever - at most there is a moratorium on increase of spending. DOGE does not deliver what he is promising, but it still seems above any comparable efforts. Though I admit that his approach just objectively works best on easily-measurable metrics, such as "does the rocket fly", "how much does it cost" etc.

Sweden did in the 90s. The fiscal consolidation during the period of 94-98 amounted to some 7.5% of GDP. This led to a sustainable surplus, growth and sustainable entitlements, including pensions.

For America that would equal about $2.2T and a bit more than Musk promised.

Of course, you're never ever going to get there by firing government employees. You need to cut entitlements.

I'm not aware of any western government managing to significantly reduce spending in any way whatsoever

The 2013 sequester led to a small cut in headline total spending, and the cuts to discretionary spending (which is all that DOGE is looking at) stuck. Discretionary spending on the eve of the pandemic was lower (after adjusting for inflation, but not GDP growth) than in 2012. Sweden and Canada both cut headline spending in the 1990's - again the cuts were small on a headline basis, but large after adjusting for inflation. Trend inflation was higher then so Margaret Thatcher was not able to cut headline spending in the 1980's, but spending consistently grew slower than inflation.

The problem in the current year is that the cost of the welfare-state-for-the-old grows in line with population aging, and it is genuinely impossible to cut the rest of the state faster than that without breaking things. Sustainably cutting spending in an aging society means making the welfare-state-for-the-old less generous over time.

Sweden and Canada both cut headline spending in the 1990's - again the cuts were small on a headline basis, but large after adjusting for inflation.

Dunno how Sweden did it, but in Canada it was more or less an accounting trick -- health care costs were downloaded from the feds to the provinces, which was great for the federal budget but resulted in commensurate impacts on both service levels (down) and provincial budgets (up).

Probably some amount of true cutting obtained through the device of scapegoating the provinces when the health care system became underfunded, but provinces also increased taxes/deficits to make up some of the gap -- it's nowhere near as impactful as the headline numbers might imply.

I don't think those really are comparable - all of them were reactions to concrete fiscal crises/shocks which absolutely needed a short-term budget correction. Our current problems are ballooning costs, and while I think this has significant long-term negative effects, it doesn't have that immediate necessity. But I'll grant that I myself was being hyperbolic - it would be more correct to say that governments rarely manage to limit spending with long-term foresight in mind, but only purely reactively after a crisis has already happened and desperately requires action. DOGE is attempting the former.

On the second point, I completely agree, but in my view this makes reducing welfare spending for the old a foregone conclusion, it's only a question of how long we can kick the can down the road. And mind you, Americans have a comparably rosy situation - here in Germany the old / young ratios are much more grim.

all of them were reactions to concrete fiscal crises/shocks

Canada/Sweden were. Sequestration was a response to an entirely artificial crisis (it was part of a deal to increase the debt ceiling), and Margaret Thatcher could have spent the North Sea oil money on spending increases instead of tax cuts.

DOGE is attempting the former.

Musk has always attempted to justify what he is doing at DOGE on the basis that the deficit and debt are a near-term crisis.

Sequestration was a response to an entirely artificial crisis (it was part of a deal to increase the debt ceiling)

The ceiling may have been a somewhat arbitrary value, but the crisis wasn't artificial. The debt increased in a major jump, reaching the ceiling in 2011, which was a direct result of the 2008 financial crisis and demanded some action, one way or another.

and Musk didn't make obviously false statements about the present.

"We are building it right now" about the Roadster, or some other vehicle that never materialized, back in 2017 or so, sounds pretty false, and pretty about the present to me.

I thought they had a working prototype on stage when they announced the Roadster. That seems consistent with "we are building it right now".

I'm pretty sure prototypes don't count as "it".

I think a prototype in the process of being put into production would count. A mere concept car would not.

You can't run moonshot companies like as is literally the case for SpaceX, or Tesla, if you don't make sure you've done your best to account for all relevant factors.

As someone in the tech industry, I actually have the exact opposite take, to say the least.

The quiet "Mittelstand" of tech is based on domain expertise, driven by B2B sales, and moves slowly but is actively transforming industries as the largest corporations don't want to be "left behind" with new innovations. This, for me, is calculated and matches your pattern of doing the "best to account for all relevant factors".

Moonshot companies and big tech are strategically opposite: operate on hype-cycles and vibes driven by marketing and build enormous moats that will plug the holes of the flaws of the Version 2 of your product (see: enshittification). This is not only "move fast and break things", but also "fuck you got mine".

Edit: This is also my experience as someone who has worked for both types of companies, one which was sold for $3XXm as a portfolio subsidiary, only to later be shuttered as a $3XXm loss once a hike in interest rates exposed it as smoke and mirrors.

That is the crux of the problem. At the end of the day, there's no problem for Elon (really) to run SpaceX or Tesla into bankruptcy. Sure, huge loss in net wealth, but at that level you are not motivated by equity in a company being your comfortable safety net for retirement. So there's no issue in also taking risky bets.

When it comes to government (that is not some banana tier republic), you can't really operate with that mindset.

Same problem actually with Trump and doing deals as if everything is just zero-sum one-period (no long-term co-operation) real estate deal.

He totally did in the past but I think that a combination of success and the company he keeps has lately morphed a Silicon Valley bias towards optimistic action into a bias against thinking or delay of any kind. Also I think he would genuinely care about potential damage to his companies whereas he is not likely to weight e.g. other countries getting mad, or his enemies spluttering, or federal workers losing their jobs, as damage at all, quite the opposite.

Or he might just be bipolar and worsening, with hypomania transitioning into full-blown mania. The evidence I've seen for that claim seems quite robust, man's hardly sleeping and Xeeting all day, when he isn't making other questionable life choices. Not that recent sycophancy or political mind-killing aren't factors, but he's going off the deep end.

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