site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 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.

40
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

You're applying mistake theory reasoning to a position mostly held by conflict theorists. I'm not aware of a paper previously addressing this exact issue, but there have been several over the years that looked at adjacent "problems," such as women being underrepresented in computer science, and that came to similar conclusions — it's mostly lack of interest, not sexism.

In that case, explanations have been developed even further, such as by illustrating the lack of interest is largely mediated by differences along the "people/things" axis, that women tend to be more people-oriented and men tend to be more thing-oriented cross-culturally, and that differences in career choice are actually larger in more gender-egalitarian societies (probably because those societies also tend to be richer and thus career decisions are driven more by interest than income considerations).

Activists using the lack of women in computing to argue for industry sexism don't care. They continue to make their case as if none of these findings exist. When these findings are mentioned, the usual response is to call whoever points them out sexist, usually while straw-manning even the most careful claims about interest as claims about inferiority. If the discussion is taking place in a venue where that isn't enough to shut down debate, and the activists feel compelled to offer object-level argument, they'll insist that the lack of interest (which some data suggests starts at least as early as middle school) must itself somehow be downstream from industry sexism.

You'll see exactly the same thing happen here. Activists demanding more women in leadership positions will not update on these findings. Most will never hear of them, because they certainly won't circulate in activist communities. When these findings are presented, their primary response will be to throw around accusations of sexism. If they engage at the object level at all, it will be to assert that these findings merely prove pervasive sexism in society is conditioning women to be less interested in leadership.

Charitably, activists in these areas see 'equity' (i.e. equality of outcomes between groups of concern) as a valuable end in itself. Less charitably, they're simply trying to advantage themselves or their favored identity groups over others. Either way, they're not trying to build an accurate model of reality and then use that model to optimize for some general goal like human happiness or economic growth. So findings like this simply don't matter to them.