site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   14183 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 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
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Nobody brings up CICO as merely an underlying physical mechanism. The implication of CICO is always "therefore, the way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise more, and it's your own fault that you are fat".

To be blunt: it is people's own fault that they are fat. It doesn't just happen, they made choices that led to that point. Perhaps there exists the occasional edge case where someone has a genuine medical condition that is hindering them, but the overwhelming majority of cases come down to bad personal choices and the consequences thereof.

And this isn't just about assessing blame - much like with addictions, you can't make progress until you acknowledge your own agency and the fact that you will need to make different choices if you want to get to a different place in life. The battle doesn't end there, and you might need to come up with different strategies based on your unique circumstances. But the fundamental truth is that it really is about personal responsibility in the main.

It's like saying "the way to get rich is to earn more and spend less".

That is in fact also true. Lots of people who are fairly poor bust ass, live within their means, and get ahead as a result. It's hard, and you can suffer setbacks from circumstances even when you do everything right. But the fundamental truth holds.

Is it fundamentally the poor's own fault they are poor?

Depends on where you draw the line at for poor really. Wealth is a lot swingier than weight, you can't in a single evening consume enough calories to be the equivalent of gambling away your life savings. If by poor you just mean they are low wage earners with minimal skills for upward mobility then it is not their "fault" that they're poor. Although maybe having minimal skills could be thought of as a fault in some sense, usually we use fault to mean a problem with conscious decisions but it could also mean just having a unfortunate qualities. If someone is poor because they gamble away 20% of their paycheck and carry credit card balances then yes it's their fault.

In the United States, in the sense that it's relatively simple not to be poor? Yes. No, in that having lowing intelligence, high time preference, low conscientiousness makes it very hard to do the simple things.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But the point is that staying poor is very often the result of bad personal choices. Not always, but often enough that trying to remove personal responsibility from the equation (as many activists do) is misguided.

Yeah that's fair and pretty sensible really. This is the motte though so I thought I'd better check.

Isn't this only true in countries/areas which have a high rate of social mobility? In countries that have more barriers to social mobility, since the poor have less power over their own lives, they have less responsibility for staying poor too, no?

Maybe. I suppose I can really only speak to my experiences in the US on this topic.

Up to a point. I recall stuffing myself with food, at least 4-5kcalories/day for 15yrs and my weight never got above 190 even though i was sedentary (all day on computer). That was three large meals, lots of snacks, and lots of soda. I didn't need willpower because my body decided to not store enough fat for my weight climb any higher. It's not a personal failing if for some people this threshold where surplus leads to fat storage is set too low or unreasonably low.

Sure, I'm happy to acknowledge that it varies. For example, I never had the supposed "teenage metabolism" even when I was a teenager. I gained weight from a very young age. But my frustration when people push back on CICO is that in my experience they usually blow right past "everyone's body is different and so the diet that works for one might not work for another" (which is reasonable), and into "CICO is nonsense and therefore people can't be expected to even try" (which is not).

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