It’s been pointed out recently that the topics discussed in the Culture War thread have gotten a bit repetitive. While I do think the Motte has a good spread on intellectual discussion, I’m always pushing for a wider range (dare I say diversity?) of viewpoints and topics in the CW thread.
I was a lurker for years, and I know that the barrier between having a thought and writing a top level comment in the CW thread can loom large indeed. Luckily I’m fresh out of inspiration, and would love to hear thoughts from folks about effortposts they want to write but haven’t gotten around to.
This of course applies to regulars who post frequently as well - share any and all topics you wish were discussed in the CW thread!
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I've got a number of ideas bouncing around in my head that I just never have the time to try and make the case for convincingly. Headline followed by tl;dr.
A) Oryx and Crake was an instruction manual for biological research - not the cyperpunk zaibatsu dystopia species-level cuckoldry, but the bioengineering. We'll never understand biological systems until we start trying to build them. Preferably with the help of AI.
B) The Bayh-Dole act gave us a sugar high but led to us eating our seed corn. The startup ecosystem and private industry are dependent on uncommercialized, foundational basic research carried out by underpaid and overworked scientists motivated by furthering humanity and/or ego, not profit.
C) Are we witnessing the birth of two transnational ethnicities? Also, the case for globalization.
D) What I tentatively call 'pregnancy autism,' or maybe an autistic attempt to analyze relationships and relationship conflict. Hard to do a tl;dr, but maybe it's an existential crisis inspired by this quote from 'What to expect when you're expecting':
E) Whatever the fuck this bullshit spam is from Nancy Pelosi/DNC that I get daily:
Complete with 2005 html-era formatting highlighting text in red and blue.
F) Healthy at more weights than you thought. IMO, people overstate the health risks of being overweight and don't sufficiently differentiate between overweight/obese and active/inactive.
G) Criticism is valuable, but easy - standing for something is hard but much more valuable. Tied to my distaste for reactionary thought and experience with pitching scientific ideas.
Numbered lists apparently reset after quotes, unfortunately. Apologies for having to use letters instead.
edit: for my own records, the consciousness blackpill.
I don't entirely understand what you want say but speaking from some experience on D), the quote reads to me like the very idealised advice that is always floating around everywhere. It's not entirely wrong and so it gets shared, but it's over-consistent and fits a bit to conveniently in the currently popular framework of "always be nice about everything". Not taking the outbursts too personally is correct, not holding them against her mostly also. But you absolutely should point out the moods to her. When the hormones are talking, it can be surprisingly difficult for oneself to notice that you're being unreasonable. There's plenty of broken relationships because people just refused to stop indulging the wife. You should obviously pick your fights and time it right though. Also, there are certainly also plenty of broken relationships because the guy was a loser and/or a slacker, but there are no articles floating around how you totally should support your husbands "streamer career" even if it looks like he is just playing video games with like four people who aren't paying him.
Edit: Though I guess I'm falling into your "criticism is easy" trap, ha. So I'll be more specific about what I'm advocating: Be nice and considerate, but also confident and stand your ground. Hug her, but don't just agree with her because it's the easy way. Make her some tea, do some housework that normally she would have done, let her sit down and relax, but also let her know it's out of special consideration for her state, not because you crumbled under her accusations. And so on, you get the drift. This is obviously much harder than the former advice, because here there is tension between two values, "be nice to her" and "don't let her steamroll you", instead of the simple one-dimensional optimization.
You're fine, it's not meant to be a trap to stifle discussion. It's more along the lines of someone proposing policy X or idea Y and getting piled on by haters who don't actually have a better idea.
It's more like I start spiraling into questioning when anyone is ever truly 'at fault' for something. Say pregnant, hormonal women aren't in control of their actions due to biological reasons (although therein lies another trap - makes it hard to take their grievances seriously, right?). Do we extend the same charity to testosterone fueled domestic violence or crime? How do we decide when someone is at fault, versus when someone isn't in control due to their biology? And finally, if someone behaves a certain way due to their environment (i.e. bad parents, poverty, etc) are they somehow more at fault for those things that are just as outside their control as their biology?
How about something more minor: I've cultivated pretty robust control over my emotions and reactions so I never really lash out at my partners. They still do things that irritate me sometimes, and it always turns into a choice whether I complain about it. But...why? I suppose one litmus test to raising an issue is whether it's actually possible to change their behavior in some meaningful way, and (here's where the autism dials up to 11) I could model myself as being a part of their environment encouraging themselves to change.
Maybe the moral of the story is what you say, and I've rederived the 'just strive to be a better person bro' that the ancients were talking about. And maybe the corollary is to make sure you find a partner striving to do the same so you don't get steamrolled in every argument.
Anyways, thanks for indulging some navel-gazing cringeworthy discussion. Not something that's easy to bring up in real life aside from nibbling around the edges.
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I would be interested in C)...what are those transnational ethnicities?
Likewise
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I'd be interested in this if someone wanted to dig a bit deeper on the subject. In particular I'd be interested to know if some one could figure out how the original BMI based thresholds were set. I'm particularly interested in knowing why a BMI of 25 is considered unhealthy while a BMI of 18.5 is not. I've yet to see an all causes mortality chart where the point at 25 had a higher hazard ratio than the point at 18.5.
This was of particular interest to me when states were rationing COVID vaccine shots. In the state I was living in, having a BMI of 25 made you eligible for the full two shot sequence before people with a BMI 18.5 were even eligible for one. When I tried to figure out why, the state department of health website referenced the CDC. Clicking three or four times and past a circular reference on the CDC site reached a paper that showed minimum risk around 24, if i recall correctly. I don't think this is the same paper, but It seems to show something similar. With the identified minimums in Figure 2. between 23.7 and 25.9. I still can't fathom how the state health officials justified to themselves prioritizing otherwise healthy 18-39 year olds with a BMI of 25 over 49 year olds with a BMI of 18.5.
I'd also be very interested in high quality population level research that controls for body composition as well as BMI with respect to mortality. Surely for a male at 5'10" (178 cm) it healthier to be 175 lbs (80 kg), BMI of 25, with 15% body fat than 130 lbs (59kg), BMI of 18.6, with 20% body fat.
IIRC for males actual best health outcomes are around 26 -- probably the recommendations were just formed based on the distribution of BMIs in the population (ie. mean of 22.5, 1 sigma 2.5?) -- back when people were way skinnier though.
Unfortunately, I don't think it was that sensible. I've never bothered to dig down through all the references (you have to go back to actuarial tables from 100 years ago), but this review paper quotes a 1995 WHO report (internal citations omitted emphasis mine)
I don't understand why you would set the low threshold at the point where the curve turns up sharply, but the high threshold at a point close to the minimum.
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Kinda reminds me of the revelation I had over a common Russian saying, "anyone can offend an artist". I used to treat it as a statement that slyly makes fun of the artists' thin skin, but then I realized it's literally true.
If you are someone who makes art to make a statement and not just to pay the bills, you have a deeply personal relationship with your own work. You've poured tens, if not hundreds or thousands of hours into it. Hopefully, you've made thousands of people happy. But what do you see? Even if you filter out people whose feedback is "ur book sucks fagit" and pay attention only to the well-written and articulated reviews, you are reading mainly criticism, not apologetics. Someone who is 99% satisfied with your game will still try to spend 50% of his review discussing the things they liked and 50% discussing the things they think could've been done better. They are doing this partly because they want to show how deeply they care about your creative work, partly because they want to be "fair" to help those who are thinking about buying your creative work, but the final result is that 50% of what you read is negative feedback.
After realizing this I changed the way I interact with creators. If I like something, I try to not be economical with my praise. Who cares if someone reading this rolls their eyes at my "fanboyism". Creators deserve to experience the joy their works brought their audience before it has been distilled into a soulless number like the Metacritic score or their Patreon earnings.
For a long time I've been thinking I need to make it a rule to tell someone if I enjoyed reading something they wrote. This is another data point in favor of making that a rule.
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Numbered lists in HTML are an interesting feature. They were added very early. They've been in a state of "clearly done wrong but not so wrong to be worth fixing" for decades.
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