site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 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.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

• The poker player. This is the hardest to explain, they they seem to be able to read people, manipulate people and navigate around smart people in a manner that no one can. They aren't immediately obvious as the smartest in any room, but they somehow always get their way. Often end up CEOs or millionaires somehow.

As someone who has actually played poker at a reasonably competitive level, I think this type of intelligence should be broken into two almost orthogonal components.

  • The edge-seeker: Is always tracking many possibilities, always tracking prices, and always looking for small exploitable ways that others are doing things wrong such that this person can eke out some small benefit from taking advantage of that weakness. Think "theory-heavy poker player" or "Jane Street employee" - not necessarily great at textbook math (though probably at least "pretty good"), but excellent at quickly building up very detailed models and ruthless at discarding models that don't provide an edge.
  • The politician: Always tracking the expected mental states of others, viewing things from their perspective in order to figure out what signals to send to maximize the chance that that person acts in a way beneficial to the politician. Think "used car salesman", "politician", or "con artist" (but I repeat myself)

As a note, in actual poker games we call the second type "fish", and the key to making money at poker is to ensure you're sitting at a table with a lot of people like that.

Anyway, in terms of the question at hand I'd add a couple of more feminine-coded types of this kind of thing where excellence really does make a notable difference.

  • The teacher: Like the politician, tracks the probable internal mental models of many people at once. However, instead of using this knowledge to exploit weaknesses, instead seeks to refine their mental models to be more useful to them.
  • The diplomat/organizer: Tracks the motivations of multiple possibly conflicting parties, tries to mediate communication between them to come to a mutually agreeable solution
  • The gossip: Tracks the goings and doings of a significant number of people, and also the interests and biases of those people, in order to share the juiciest news and secrets with the people who will react the most strongly to them (hey, I didn't say all of the female-coded types were going to be prosocial)

Of course instead of calling them "male-oriented" and "female-oriented" it might be more accurate to call them "systems-oriented" and "people-oriented". Systems-oriented thinking does scale much better than people-oriented thinking in the best case, although I think if you look at the median case instead of the outliers that's probably flipped.