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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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I think this is the same point that @FCfromSSC sometimes gestures at: this is a relatively straightforward problem to solve in a cooperative non-adversarial environment and a very difficult one in an adversarial environment.

Given a list of candidates, I’m confident that either of us would be able to put together a reasonable analysis of which candidates have views broadly in line with the current consensus and which don’t. I’m also confident we could work together and create a merged analysis with perhaps a bit of bickering and horse-trading but no fundamental issues.

I’m NOT confident that I could write a set of rules that would be serviceable and not easily abused at scale. Perhaps a mathematical sentiment analysis, but that’s obviously less ideal.

In general, I think that once you start thinking about how to do the latter, your civilisation is already in deep trouble. Thus the meme about law as an incredibly rickety construction propped up by one beam called ‘the word [reasonable]’.