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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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I saw a lot of this sort of thinking on those EA forums that were linked over the Bostrom controversy. It's a fundamental problem with collectivist, authoritarian thinking. They can't just accept a descriptivist fact, it must be twisted into a prescriptivist dictate.

I mean if I tell you, hey that pitbull is charging for your child - there's a gun in the car, I technically haven't made any policy prescriptions. Nonetheless, it's pretty obvious what basic widely shared moral intuitions demand that you do with those facts. This is why I bring up the emperor. In the real world, your emperor being deluded enough to fall for invisible clothes implies that him and/or his advisors need to be removed from power and there's no way around it.

The general atmosphere of seemingly paranoid fear among the blue tribe is totally legitimate. In this country, the kulaks never lost their guns and blue tribe subjected millions of their children and it's own (Columbia students ride the subway too) to disgusting conditions... for nothing. What is mind-boggling for me, having recently realized what this is in fact what we were doing and defected to the other side is finding that the dog-whistles we were worried about weren't dog whistles at all, and that there are only marginal elements in the red world interested in doing anything about it's subjection.