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 -
It seems like we are talking past each other. My whole argument is about not necessarily conscious decisions. You ceded the argument to me when you said:
And elsewhere when you said
Like your ability to determine facts from evidence. If you learn a bunch of inconvenient facts, you can't just choose to ignore them and believe the opposite. You can lie to yourself and others about it, but if you believe something is a fact, saying it isn't true doesn't change your belief. The belief can change over time, I never said beliefs can't change, but you merely chose to lie about it - it is not until you are no longer lying about it that it becomes a different belief. And you won't stop lying about it until you lose faith in the facts you originally believed.
That's the difference between a belief and a reason - faith. But reason isn't an alternative to faith, you need to have faith in reasoning to utilise it - you can't start reasoning until you have faith in reasoning as a tool to ascertain the truth. And once you trust in your own ability to use logic and deduction and inference, it is almost impossible to stop believing in it, no matter how much you wish you could, as anyone who has found evidence the love of their life is cheating on them knows. So if you start going down the racial crime statistics rabbit hole, for which the rebuttal is "how dare you look at that!", you are going to arrive at conclusions you probably shouldn't put in your podcast (note I am not claiming the newspaper did wrong by him, I don't think they had a choice either, as I have already said it is the reasoning not the actions I take issue with).
But being silent about them doesn't change your beliefs. The only thing that would change your beliefs is alternative evidence, which doesn't exist, or if you abandoned logic and reasoning. Perhaps you can do that. I don't think it's outrageous to think Adams can't, because I know a lot of other people who are in that position. People who didn't want to be "racist", people who desperately sought out rebuttals and alternative evidence because they were told repeatedly throughout their lives and believed that black crime is a racist myth. But they didn't find rebuttals and alternative evidence, because the alternative is "Wait these stats agree with racists? Stop recording them then!"
Which is why I agree that Adams is not a good faith communicator and also don't care. He's as good faith as any other media pundit. He's saying something other people, people without his reach, have been saying. That is when a pundit is closest to truth, and when people say they don't think he can choose that belief they are often people who came to a similar unavoidable conclusion.
You mean you shouldn't do that; the unwashed masses do so most of the time. Meanwhile, sophisticated, urbane individuals such as yourself or I simply weigh the inconvenient facts against a set of more convinient ones, with our values/worldview/will casting the deciding vote. Intelligent people learn that any question worth discussing is highly complex, hence comes with a fair amount of ambiguity, and that ambiguity is more than sufficient for opposite conclusions to be drawn from the same set of evidence, merely through weighting, emphasis, and similar selection effects. You can conclude, if you are young and have not yet learned that you are capable of error, that anyone who disagrees with your assessment of evidence is simply lying to themselves. But From many, many years of arguing with people, I have concluded that, no, they really do see things differently.
You don't have to stop believing in it for Reason to not operate deterministically. Human reason simply is not good enough, precise and reliable enough, and the knowledge it's based on comprehensive enough, to operate deterministically beyond even slight abstractions. It's good enough to read a map or split an atom. It's good enough for you to be convinced your wife is cheating on you, if you catch her in flagrante. It's not good enough to tell you why she's cheating on you, or how you should feel about it, or what to do about it. And this is for extremely simple questions, with low-single-digit numbers of first-order variables!
...This does not seem accurate to me.
You and Adams are pointing to the obvious, overwhelming evidence of Black crime rates. The people on the other side are not shrieking "how dare you look at that", they are pointing to the obvious, overwhelming evidence of multiple centuries of brutal chattel slavery, followed by another century of strictly-enforced racial oppression, followed by a few decades of quite severe racial animosity that slowly declined over time. That is a lot of evidence that you neglected to mention in your summary!
You weigh these two sets of evidence, and many others besides, and in doing so you use your own values, perspective, and axioms to render judgement. It is my contention that your values and axioms are themselves chosen by you, that they tend to be dispositive unless the evidence is absolutely overwhelming on an issue, and that the evidence is never, ever overwhelming on any issue of real significance. You choose your values, incrementally over time, and in turn your values lead you to choose what evidence to collect, and how to assess it.
Conclusions are, to a first approximation, never unavoidable on any question of substance. If they were, it would not be a question of substance any longer, because evidence would deterministically conform peoples' beliefs to the truth. This observably does not happen with questions pertaining to human nature, behavior, or history, to philosophy, theology, or ideology, questions of value and questions of worldview. People differ not because they fail to use their reason properly, but because human reason itself is insufficient to the task.
What, out of any of that, is supposed to be evidence that white people should hang around black people? Or that they don't commit an excess of crime for their population? Which is what Adams is saying. And what I am saying Adams is saying. On top of that what I am also saying is that there is no evidence explaining why black crime statistics are such an unthinkable topic that you can't even empathise with people who are scared by them and by the fear instilled by a society which knows they exist but will punish you for mentioning them, without being assumed a racist.
Lol seriously what the fuck are we doing here? How do you keep admitting I'm right and then writing another billion words treating me like I'm an idiot? Also I think you have dispositive backwards, doesn't it mean conclusively settled?
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, they are. They demand these statistics not be mentioned and they demand race of perpetrators of crimes not be revealed by the press (or sometimes police), at least when it isn't a white person.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link