site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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.

15
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

As others said, this misses the overall debate and more importantly also function of language. Overall you have two types of language: you have colloquial, normal language that tends to be broad enough so that it is simple to learn and capable of communicating vast majority of day-to-day concepts between people with different backgrounds. It tends to break on the edge cases. Then you have scientific language (that rationalists prefer), which requires a lot more effort to learn, it is mostly meant for smaller communities of let's say academics but which has advantage of being able to deal with edge cases that these communities find interesting.

A simple example of a word: chair. Go and google image the word chair, you will find all types of those: office chairs, lounge chairs, plastic chairs, wooden chairs, chairs with armrests and those without them, chairs with multiple legs but also chairs with square or circular base. Now there may be some edge cases, where we may have confusion if something is a chair, or a table and many other edge cases. But people generally know a difference between table and chair. The solution should not be to force people to say: "Please, sit on that plastic object over there, that weighs 4.85 pounds and that has four cylindric legs touching the ground."

In a sense I think that your proposition is just another attack on normal language and parlance and common sense. It is exactly in line with the original attempt that similarly confuses words such as sex and gender and personality and interests and so on, which just reinforces the idea that everything is just socially constructed and everybody is entitled to their own version of social reality, and that there is no common ground for communication - of course except of social power relations in this never-ending cultural war of what group can force their version of social reality upon the rest of us. The only criterion for preferring certain language has to be moral/ethical/ideological one, there is no such thing as usefulness of language, or its history - it is only about power and if it leads to "good" or "bad" moral outcomes. I refuse the whole thing as a premise.