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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27882 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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I think ultimately this is a self correcting problem. People cannot effectively run systems that they don’t understand and have no experience with. A bunch of lawyers and other elites who have no idea how food is produced won’t be able to make food production safer, healthier or more efficient. A NTSB director who doesn’t understand how an airplane is produced cannot hope to make good safety rules. Sooner or later, such problems will become obvious and either the liberals will learn to think like conservatives or will have to invite conservatives into the inner circle.

Alternatively, they'll blame failure on "wreckers" and enact ever-more-stringent measures against them, until eventually the entire system collapses and what remains is a perpetually-cursed shithole.

Current progressives are fine mutilating their children because they are told it is good and proper. I'm not sure why they would suddenly balk when they find out the trans otherkin surgeon who shouldn't have passed high school actually has no idea what they are doing.

re: conversation below. This is one of those posts I didn't want to mod, but unfortunately I am usually the only mod around to clean up the queue. Since no one else has touched it in three days, I will go ahead and do so. Yes, it's excessively vulgar, but that's not the problem. The problem is the very broad indictment of "progressives" as being "fine mutilating their children" and then heaping even more hyperbolic scorn on top of that. As much as most people here might agree with the spirit of your sneer, it's still a boo outgroup sneer and you don't make even a pretense otherwise.

This is why I hate meta-moderating. I'm given your comment. It's vulgar mockery is excessive. "Bad" or "deserves a warning"? Being conscientious I check the context first.

Oh! I read the "self correcting problem" comment myself yesterday. It struck me as incorrect. Dangerously incorrect. But how to phrase my disagreement? What would crisply convey the tragic truth that there is nothing to guarantee that it will actually self correct. Everything could collapse, like when the Romans left Britain in 410 AD. I fail to reply to it.

Your comment crisply captures the sense of "Look around you! The people you see running towards the cliff edge may well fail to stop." I go with my gut, tick the "Good" box, and click submit. May God have mercy on my soul.

I do agree that I was, perhaps excessively, vulgar. But as you say, it was mostly in order to get the point across about why I think the self correction may either never happen or happen far too late for it to matter. Could easily see it getting modded though and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with the decision tbh.

I'd rather think that we would end up with bad rules selectively applied. They won't self-correct, they'll just push forward with bureaucrats making up rules for things they barely understand.

There are plenty of hardcore progressives who are very effective computer programmers. I don't see why growing crops or keeping aircraft safe would be any different.

It's because they don't know how to do those things, and think it beneath them to learn.

Further, I suspect the reason there's a lot of effective computer programmers among them is that they become programmers before they become progressives. Because there sure are a lot of progressives outside the field who fit the stereotype (with respect to tech) of "If you can't do, tear down those who can" (Shanley Kane comes immediately to mind)

A bunch of lawyers and other elites who have no idea how food is produced won’t be able to make food production safer, healthier or more efficient.

I would wager that if you took 10,000 random "elites" and 10,000 random "red tribe" people, the eilte person who best understands food production in this set would understand it better than the normal "red tribe" person who understands food production best out of their set.

The knowledge isn't missing on the elite end (I recently watched a talk by a foremost agricultural plant scientist who was very very clearly "blue tribe elite" and she would wipe the floor with any mere farmer), it's just more concentrated in certain people.

When push comes to shove and the blue tribe needs to make food production safer, healthier and more efficient, it will just reallocate its priorities slightly (by e.g. producting more blue tribe plant scientists at the expense of art historians) without needing to become more "conservative" in any way.

I don't think you're completely wrong here, but in my experience in engineering, there is a fundamental, but useful distinction between the guys with the degrees running simulations and making designs and the technicians (frequently with at most a two-year degree) that actually build things and put them together.

This isn't to discount your plant scientists, but they probably won't even think about out-of-specialty things like booking crop dusters and beekeepers six months in advance, or maintaining good relations with the migrant farmworkers that actually pick your apples (agriculture isn't my wheelhouse, so maybe these aren't the best examples.)

Really, I've come to believe that our systems work better when both types work together, and while we probably overvalue the ivory tower types overall (and I say that as one), lots of 20th century attempts to "put the working class (alone) in charge" turned out pretty poorly.

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