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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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I'm not sure whether this is a troll or not, but given how some people worry about weird things, in the event it's actually real: Anything political that doesn't directly and immediately affect you on a personal level is something that you should be concerned about only to a limited degree.

Nuclear war or invasion by Russia could literally get you killed tomorrow. White replacement can't.

This is absurd. AI transforming society? doesn't matter, it doesn't affect you tomorrow. Lead pollution? Doesn't affect you on a personal level immediately. Iraq war? Doesn't affect me, whatever. Something killing everyone in 40 years is ... still bad, quite near almost as bad as something killing everyone today.

If you want to argue white replacement specifically doesn't matter, do that, but "bad things aren't bad and don't matter if they don't happen this year" is absurd! The motivation is usually "you can't do anything about it and thinking about it feels bad so avoid it" ... but in order to avert bad things like nuclear war or AI takeover, some people have to think about them and 'feel bad'!

It certainly makes sense to have nonzero concern about lead pollution. But if you're so concerned about lead pollution that you have "a lot of psychological distress" and "dread" it as an "inevitable horror", you're excessively concerned about lead pollution and your problem is anxiety, not lead, even though lead pollution is a real thing.

If we take for granted the lead-crime hypothesis, being deeply worried to the point of anguish about lead pollution seems reasonable, honestly.

This approach conflates 'being emotional / worried / upset' and ineffectively doing so. Obviously ineffectively doing anything is bad. But why is it necessarily ineffective to worry about lead pollution? History's greatest ... prophets, reformers, acitvists, whatever, were deeply "emotionally" invested in their cause, and did have "psychological distress" at it. See: slavery.

Anything political that doesn't directly and immediately affect you on a personal level is something that you should be concerned about only to a limited degree.

If white replacement ends in the destruction of your society and perhaps the deaths of you and your descendants in 50 years, as many replacement theory believers perceive, that would be a larger threat than the maybe 1% chance of a nuclear exchange tomorrow.

More broadly I don't think that this kind of 'I should only think about my personal and immediate interests and not give a shit about the broader society I live in or the long-term future' attitude actually holds up that well. It's a recipe for extreme short-termist thinking, a politics that is incapable of solving problems on any kind of significant time-scale. Coming from a country that I believe has been totally ruined by this kind of attitude, I am much more worried about what the country will look like in thirty years than whether someone might randomly invade us tomorrow.

1% per day of nuclear exchange is extremely high. That's in the ballpark of what the per-day risk would be if Taiwan were under attack in earnest and the USA/PRC were at conventional war; it's crisis levels (I think it very likely a Taiwan war would escalate to cities being nuked, but that's mostly because it could last for months without a conventional resolution and the 1-2%/day adds up).

I've been sounding the alarm regarding nukes for a long time - I think a full-scale nuclear war's more likely than not before 2050 - and I'm quite sure we're at much-lower levels of risk at the moment than 1%/day (for the next week I'd say <0.001%/day, though I'm less confident over e.g. the next three months). At 1%/day of nuclear exchange it is entirely correct to not worry about where trendlines are heading in 30 years' time, because unless that risk goes away inside a few months those trendlines are going to get scrambled (demographic trends especially-so - the deaths would be highly-correlated with living in cities which correlates with ~everything).

Your argument isn't entirely meritless, but the number you give is way out of line for that argument.

Yes, I think that 1% chance of a nuclear war tomorrow is high - I am using the word 'tomorrow' figuratively, to mean 'in the foreseeable future'.