site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32274 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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.

11
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The UK has an ongoing COVID inquiry. It's probably not going to come to much, but the general consensus I sense now was that the lockdowns and the general pandemic strategy were a bit foolish, yet another error of the Tory government.

It's no longer verboten to criticise the lockdowns, as it was for years. I still haven't heard a remotely sane answer for why vaccines had to be agonisingly slowly tested while the bodies piled up, because mumble mumble bioethics consent, but the whole population could be placed under house arrest on a whim, but there you go.

Realistically, there's not going to be a huge revelation. It's just going to quietly fade away, at best they'll be generally seen as a mildly bad response, and we'll forget all about it.

+1 for my general belief that the lockdowns were motivated more by panic, and monkey-see-monkey-do-ing China, than any actually coherent policy.

FWIW, Germany had a similar analysis done recently, and the results were fairly self-congratulatory for having done a good job, especially with the social distancing it seems, and only a cheeky little addendum suggesting that future measures should consider taking psychological effects into account.

Source: Heard it on the radio.

I wish my arms were so long and flexible that I could pat myself on the back like that.

This is probably a case of Bureaucrats Cannot Be Wrong. That mentality is a troubling thing to be revealed because most prior cases of ten gorillion dead can be traced back to Bureaucrats Cannot Be Wrong.

I still haven't heard a remotely sane answer for why vaccines had to be agonisingly slowly tested while the bodies piled up

I thought the vaccines were developed and approved really quickly?

Really quickly by the criminally murderously slow standards of medicine, yes. But they were developed in January 2020 and took most of a year to be rolled out, while the bodies continued to mount up in the meantime, for "safety". Safety from the illness they prevent just doesn't appear on the balance sheet.

You should have been able to volunteer to take the risk of an untested vaccine in January, after the "well it doesn't kill monkeys" stage - if you're 85 that's a good idea! We could have had mountains of human data fast at very low expected risk, spun up vaccine distribution months earlier (the insanity surrounding that is a whole other rant) and nipped the whole thing in the bud.

Once you have mRNA vaccine synthesis, having a pandemic at all is a fucking embarrassment for the human race.

They were developed very quickly--I believe the first ones in January of 2020. They were approved "quickly" in the sense that a new medicine getting approved in less than a year would be unheard of in normal situations. They were not approved quickly in the sense that quickly by FDA standards is still glacially slow by any reasonable person standards. Also, the testing process was delayed--they were allowed to do phase 2 and phase 3 trials at the same time, IIRC, but those trials took a lot of time because most people weren't getting covid in the course of a month and you need a lot of people in the control group to get COVID in order to have enough data. This could have been worked around with challenge trials, which people even volunteered for, but we can't have that. People might get hurt!

Edit: Since I'm being sarcastic, I should say that manufacturing might have slowed down the process of getting vaccines out anyway. But even with a small number of doses you could prevent a lot of deaths by vaccinating old people and other at-risk groups, which is what we did, so I would guess challenge trials still end up saving lives on net.

Counter-argument: if you roll out a vaccine to the entire population without waiting long enough to see if there are delayed side effects, you could do a LOT of damage.

Probably not as much damage as, you know, the COVID pandemic. The null action also costs millions of lives and trillions of dollars!

We roll out the vaccine to 95% of the population. Six months later, turns out it makes people infertile. Whoops. Civilisational collapse.

Any attempt to roll out a new type of medicine at a civilisational scale should be done extremely carefully. Coronaviruses are to some extent a known factor and are very unlikely to have that level of effect - the mRNA vaccines were very likely to be safe (and mostly were) but it was an entirely new mechanism for messing with the immune system and in my opinion you shouldn't do that for 95% of the population without being very very sure what happens.

Six months later, turns out it makes people infertile.

That's still a good deal for over-65s! You could have rolled it out to all of them and still nearly eliminated the pandemic death toll. That's my whole point - sure, it wasn't worth rolling out an experimental vaccine to everyone at once, but it was obviously worth it for the most vulnerable.

Oh, I agree completely! I argued the same thing elsewhere on the thread.

Covid might also have delayed unknown side effects, so by the exact same logic delaying them could do a lot of damage.

It could. But when I say “a LOT of damage”, I mean the very small chance of rolling out thalidomide to 95% of the population. Covid was, fundamentally, a really bad influenza virus - in my opinion the space of worst-case side effects was much more constrained than that of bad medicine.

(What I would actually have done is a very accelerated rollout for the very elderly who had most to lose and then a more delayed rollout for everyone else.)

What I would actually have done is a very accelerated rollout for the very elderly who had most to lose and then a more delayed rollout for everyone else.

The thing is, if you don't imagine that anything permissible must be mandatory, then you don't have to worry about making those decisions! Instead, you can put the information out there, including the appropriate statements about risk/uncertainty, then you can make it permissible, and your job here is done! People who have the most to lose, be it because they're elderly or because their livelihood depends on not being locked down, or any number of reasons that you haven't even thought of, can just make their own choice about how worth the risk it is! You don't even have to worry yourself to try to come up with a list of reasons why someone might choose to take it or not take it. They'll come up with that list for you, in a beautiful, distributed fashion!

Will some people make the "wrong" choice? Probably! But in the case where you're the one making the choices for everyone, will you sometimes make the "wrong" choice for some people? Probably! Why should society think that your choices for them are better than their own?

if you don't imagine that anything permissible must be mandatory, then you don't have to worry about making those decisions!

It’s a good point, although you’re attributing opinions to me that I don’t hold. I was never in favour of mandatory vaccination, at least not for the new Covid vaccines. There’s a spectrum of action roughly along the lines of:

  • Putting the information out there
  • Advertising heavily
  • An opt-out vaccination program
  • A mandatory vaccination program

Realistically a lot of old people are pretty out of touch (I had a family member of the appropriate age at the time) and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a doctor come and say, “I would like to give you this vaccine, are you okay with that.” Which is probably what I would have done in this case.

Sure, you can do some encouraging for like old people and such. Whatever. But why not make it available to people who might have a reason to take it, but who aren't in your narrow category of people you know have reason to take it (i.e., old people)? Let them know the risks/uncertainties. They know their own circumstances.

More comments

Again, I don't see why any argument that is fundamentally based on uncertainty would favor delaying the vaccine. Yes, it's a bad flu for many healthy people in the short term, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have long-term effects. Getting the vaccine was, at worst, 1 day of flu symptoms for most people, too, but you don't seem to think that means that covid has some unknown long-term risk. There are viruses (like rabies) which hang out in people for a long time with no apparent symptoms but are extremely dangerous. And the whole point of a vaccine is to be similar to the disease it prevents.

(Also, I feel like I should point out that thalidomide is a very important medicine which is only really bad if you give it to pregnant women, which means that you could give it to well over 95% of the population and not have many big problems).

I still haven't heard a remotely sane answer for why vaccines had to be agonisingly slowly tested while the bodies piled up, because mumble mumble bioethics consent

It sounds like you think the vaccine trials could have gone faster by doing challenge trials? I'm not sure that's true, but even if we could have gotten the vaccines approved faster, I'm not sure that would have sped up the rollout much: for several months after approval, they were hard to get because there just weren't enough doses manufactured (first doses in around December 2020, took until May or June to really get everyone access (so by then the prioritized high-risk groups had gotten access); and that was with throwing money at ramping up manufacturing before approval). Maybe there was some way to throw even more money at manufacturing them faster, but my understanding is that really wasn't the case since there were supply chain issues like suddenly needing a lot of specialized machines for vaccine manufacturing, and ramping all of that up could only happen so fast.

And that's not even accounting for the potential absolute disaster of rolling a vaccine out to everyone that didn't actually work, or worse, actually was dangerous, which, in addition to the first-order effects, could have super-charged the anti-vaccine movement.

I disagree. All coverage I see of it, excluding The Telegraph, is framed with the assumption that 200K people died and this is an utterly horrific failure of the government and not an inevitability of a nation state becoming fat and old. I look at all the headline images that journalists choose to run and I Cannot Help But Notice that most of those wearing placards or holding up pictures of the deceased are old people lamenting even older people.

I fear the response to the pandemic has been normalised: when something like this happens again, we will shut down schools and places of free association, we will usher everyone inside their homes to look at screens all day, and we will demonise anyone pointing out the utter disaster of this policy. The operating policy of the country is determined by what is best for the all powerful owner occupier class and the national religion.

I fear the response to the pandemic has been normalised: when something like this happens again, we will shut down schools and places of free association, we will usher everyone inside their homes to look at screens all day, and we will demonise anyone pointing out the utter disaster of this policy.

This is exactly my fear, and why I get so angry when I'm talking about the insanity of lockdowns and the response is "lockdowns are over, you got what you wanted, why are you so mad?" I'll only have "got what I wanted" when the average person and average politician is definitively saying Never Again.

The UK has an ongoing COVID inquiry. It's probably not going to come to much, but the general consensus I sense now was that the lockdowns and the general pandemic strategy were a bit foolish, yet another error of the Tory government.

Really? I had heard that they were pushing heavily for "the lockdowns would have worked, but the selfish Tories delayed for a crucial two weeks because they were more worried about the economy than dying citizens. Next time we have to be ready to lock down immediately".

Definitely the initial phase was lots of crying families and pointed questions about pandemic readiness.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/21/covid-inquiry-politicians-matt-hancock-george-osborne https://www.bbc.com/news/health-66223172

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats