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 -
To me I think the entire debate has missed the point altogether. While it might be a "deepity", that's not the source of cross-purposes!
Let me make a useful analogy, and honestly this really should have been Scott's approach. In statistics and machine learning, you have something called a "confusion matrix": you are trying to classify something, and you are either correct or incorrect. In each cell, you have the true positives, false positives, false negatives, and true negatives. You need all of them to correctly decide if your classification has acceptable tradeoffs, and the tradeoffs are problem-dependent. Also, some measures don't tell the full story - a classification can be highly "accurate", but if you didn't have many of one class to begin with, this number is deceiving, because you're essentially just juicing your numbers with the "easy" cases (simple but common example). You need to dig deeper.
In the case of police, as an illustration, "what the system does" could plausibly focus on any of these cells: action that is justified that cops should do and do successfully (true positive) vs action that is unjustified and causes bad things to happen (false positive) vs stuff the police ignore but should have done something about (false negative) vs stuff the police should ignore, and actually do ignore (this could be trivial stuff, or it could be declining to take action to protect broader civil or legal liberties). There are four cells of action/inaction and justified/unjustified, each meaningful on their own, but not only that, there are like, at least eight different ratios (see here) you can compute that all mean something different, and have distinct and important real-world implications. For example, we might say "policing is racially biased" but that statement alone needs substantial clarification. Arguably, you can't actually contain it within a single phrase, you might need a full sentence if not two. Because "bias" could mean a lot of things, and have different causalities on top! Do you mean white people get pulled over more? That white people get let off with warnings more? That identical crimes get different punishments? Do we care more about the ratio, of given being pulled over, does the cop find a crime? Or do we care more about, given someone is guilty, how often do the police catch them? What about innocent victims, wrongly convicted, how high do we weight that? What about police response times, what about geography, we can go on. Do proportions matter more, or absolute numbers? When talking about systems, a simple conversation is almost inherently impossible. So yes, POSIWID is doomed from the start there.
LOTS of politics is like this, people quite often get stuck and make judgements based on just one or two pieces of information from the matrix, or a single computed ratio. To use Scott's example, police beating a suspect is obviously a false positive in a loose sense - action the police took, which was bad, but that's just one piece of the puzzle. If we're talking about the system as a whole, you can't just look at that. You need to make an argument that the balance of all the cells is way off - and even then, abolition of the system often isn't the answer, especially if the "true positive" cell still has significant value for society.
In my opinion, everything stems from a values disagreement, over how strongly to weight "false positives", i.e. actions taken by an institution, often a hot-button one, that result in negative consequences. In theory, a POSIWID advocate is saying that "the ratio of false positives and true positives" (i.e. all affirmative actions a system takes and the associated results, good and bad) is "out of whack". That's fine to say. That's an important conversation to have. You don't even need to talk about intent there (though you probably should) to have a good conversation based on facts and weighted by personal values, even a few opinions. In practice, however, many POSIWID advocates (that Scott skewers) focus entirely on the "false positives", and obviously that is both illogical and potentially bad faith. I'm inclined, however, to say that these dynamics have more to do with people not being thoughtful and considered enough in their takes, plus internet dynamics, than they do genuine stupidity, for lack of a better term. I still think the underlying disconnect is one of values (after all, we have to subjectively weight each cell and ratio differently, and this is compounded and made messy by the news and political environment), but the vocabulary is genuinely difficult.
No wonder that Twitter especially has a problem with this? As I explained, exploring the tradeoffs in even a simple system's "confusion matrix" requires full English sentences.
Edit: I'm conflicted on the proper use of bolding. Reverting to minimal
More options
Context Copy link