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MathWizard

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joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC 

				
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MathWizard


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
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					joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Disclaimer, while I am accepting of trans people as human beings with rights, I am highly skeptical and in some cases openly hostile to the efforts trans activists to dismantle the concept of gender or biological reality.  I'll do my best to explain my perspective on the issue without strawmanning anyone, but given that I don't know your actual beliefs on this, I can only speak for trans arguments I typically see.


It really depends on your definition of "man" and "woman".  For hundreds of years in English, and via translation in the majority of historical languages, and still for the majority of the population, there is no meaningful distinction between "woman" and "cis-woman".  They don't even use the term "cis", because you can just say "woman" when you mean an adult human female.  For anyone who still holds this definition, then to "pass" as a woman means that people to mistake the trans person for a biological female.  This is inherently deceptive, because the trans woman is not a biological female, and yet is deliberately causing themselves to be mistaken as one.


I'm pretty sure this counts as transphobic, despite not really being a normative claim, because it ignores/denies attempts to change language that trans activists have been making recently.  I personally think all of the "-phobe" words are overused and nearly meaningless, but I usually interpret it as meaning something along the lines of "hinders the trans agenda", which this definitely does.


If you take the opposite extreme, and define "woman" to be purely "anyone who identifies as a woman", and if everyone embraces this definition you end up in circular logic where the word becomes meaningless.  Why would anyone care what word they or another person identifies as if the word means literally nothing other than identifying as it.  You might as well identify as a "snurxoth".  This is consistent, it's just no different from having a name.  Someone might identify as "Alex", and it doesn't allow you to infer anything about them at all, it's just a word you can use to pick them out of a group of people with different names.


Under this definition alone, then, it's impossible to pass as a woman or man without wearing your pronouns written visibly somewhere on your person.  If gender is purely a construct of the mind and a person's self-identification with no external foundation, then you can't infer that the person you linked is a woman.  Maybe they identify as a man and just like that style of hair or clothes.  Maybe they're nonbinary.  More importantly, why would you think that hair and clothes are associated with women at all?  If everyone's gender identity were purely internal, then there would be no reason for all of the biological females, who tend to have long hair and wear that type of clothes, to decide that the word "woman" was their gender identity.  If the word doesn't refer to anything physical, then there's no reason for people to divide themselves up into the same two categories that most people are in now.  Rather, I would expect most people would identify as random stuff they like like "Dragons" or "Princess", or just their names.


I'm pretty sure this definition is also transphobic from a different perspective, because if you entirely deny the existence of a biological basis for gender, then trans people basically don't exist.  Or rather, they're not meaningfully different from cis people.  Everyone is just born as a person, has a gender identity, and their physical body doesn't matter at all, so there's no such thing as bodies that men have or women have, because anyone who identifies as a man or woman is equally a man or woman.  There's literally no reason for anyone to try to transition or pass, because even if they do, there's no way anyone could know their gender identity afterwards without reading their mind, or asking, same as before.  On the other hand, there's no way for this to be deceptive, because claiming a thing is literally all it takes to be that thing.  Except in circumstances where someone outright lies (you ask to be referred to as a man but secretly identify as a woman in your mind).


But what I mostly see as the accepted trans activist position is a Motte and Bailey at play.  The Motte is the above position, that gender identity is just self identification, the Bailey is that gender identity means a bunch of things that historically it has meant tied to biological sex.  Most trans women don't want to be perceived as "someone who identifies with the word woman" or the pronouns "she/her", they want to be perceived the same as biological women, with all of the cultural baggage that that perception has picked up over the centuries.  It's only because the majority of the population believe that "women" have meaningful physical and behavioral differences than "men" (a statement which is factually true if gender = sex), that trans women want to be categorized alongside the cis women and trans men want to be categorized alongside the cis men.  Imagine if tomorrow all of the cis women decided that they no longer identify as "women", they have a new word, I don't know "snurxoth", and suppose all the cis men decided to go along with it and the word was quickly adapted to regular use and the old one abandoned.


I highly doubt the trans women would continue happily identifying with the word "woman".  No, they would want to follow suit.  Because at the heart of trans ideology isn't self-identification, it's factual and normatative claims that trans women and cis women aren't meaningfully distinct, and similarly for trans men and cis men.  There's no point for trans women to want to pass as trans women but fail to pass as cis women, because it doesn't truly mean anything.  Or, maybe there is some point.  Other trans activists will use certain pronouns and treat them a certain way because that's what you're supposed to do to be a good ally.  But it seems to me the real Bailey is that they want to be treated the same as cis women, and the only way to do that in a society that treats biological males and females differently is to deceive people into thinking you are a biological female: a cis woman.


I guess a society that treats biological males and females differently would be considered inherently transphobic .  Your specific question of whether it's transphobic for you to think of passing in terms of passing as cis, conditional on already living in this society, are going to depend a lot on what that word even means for you.  Is it more important to advance the trans agenda as a whole by dismantling the gender norms and deny biological differences matter?  Or is it more important to help individual trans people try to slip into the existing categories by imitating the other sex?  Either could be considered transphobic depending on the priorities of the accuser (which is why I don't think the word has much bite).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.




Maybe it's just because lean right in my media consumption, but I've heard a lot of complaints about woke nonsense in videogames.  Horizon Zero Dawn made the main character way less attractive, The Last of Us killed off the main guy from the first game in a disrespectful way.  GTA 6 looks like a woke disaster.  And of course I've seen quite a few games with the weird lefty art-style that indicate them as obviously woke that nobody ever plays or cares about because they aren't beloved franchises (though I don't think it's reasonable to complain about these.  If woke people want to form their own IP and let people freely choose to play or not play, good for them, as long as they aren't co-opting non-woke franchises and destroying them)


I don't know that Sweet Baby Inc was involved in the games I mentioned.  The Sweet Baby Inc Detected only has 16 reviews and those aren't any of them, so either they're not thorough, or something else is involved.  But some sort of woke force has been going around corrupting games just like it has in comics and movies, and people have been complaining about it for the last decade.  Not as much as they complain about in-game transactions, because it is less prevalent, but it's been there.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Oooh this is good trolling.  The "you did this to yourself" aspect is very strong here, despite it being obvious that the poster is creating this combination on purpose, which is precisely the balance that a good troll creates.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Pressuring victims of anything to retract their claims gets my hackles up.  There are forms of "obstruction of justice" that don't outrage me, where people resist arrest, or destroy evidence when they get caught doing something illegal.  Like, you shouldn't do that, but I get it.  But witness tampering, threats, corruption?  That's unacceptable, regardless of what it's in service of.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Since I aim to be sincere in my beliefs with minimal delusions of convenience, I respect such adherents more than insincere mealy-mouthed Cultural Catholics or the "moderate" Muslims who eat pork, smoke and drink while nominally calling themselves Muslim. Do I get along better with such people than a Hamas operative? Of course, doesn't mean I don't respect them less.




This only makes sense if you are assigning respect entirely based on honesty/loyalty/commitment, and not at all on things like caring about the welfare of other people.  That is, the amount of respect I lose for a hypocrite is less than the amount of respect I lose for a murderer.  Even if an honest and committed terrorist Muslim is more respectable for their commitment than a terrorist atheist who just kills for fun, it's less respectable than a Muslim who realizes that murder is wrong and chooses not to do it, even if they reduce themselves to hypocrisy in the process.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm still uncertain of whether this term actually applies to this trend or if there are subtle nuances making it a mismatch, but it might be "Californication", the mechanism by which Hollywood distorts and perverts culture and art and beauty by amplifying its own degenerate tendencies.


People are not actually rational calculating agents, a lot of learning happens implicitly by associations.  So suppose Hollywood gathers a bunch of incredibly beautiful people, suppose they have 3 times average beauty.  And then they get older which drops their beauty by 20%, and then suppose they get botox which counters 10% from the aging but adds a separate 30% loss multiplicatively.  So now you have a bunch of older botox women whose beauty is (3 * 0.9 * 0.7) = 1.89


That is, these botox women are still almost twice as beautiful as a random average person off the street.  In reality, this beauty is entirely from genetic and selection effects: Hollywood finding and collecting the most beautiful people it can find.  But what people see is really beautiful people with Botox.  If enough people do this, then some people may start mentally associating Botox with beauty, implicitly assuming that that's what distinguishes Hollywood women and causes their beauty, rather than it being selection effects.  This self-reinforces especially among people who actually live in Hollywood and encounter these people regularly in real life, which is how distorted memes like this spawn and spread.  One or two beautiful but psychologically damaged people do X, people in Hollywood falsely associate X with beauty and fame and do it more, people outside Hollywood see them on TV and falsely associate X with beauty and fame and do it more.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't think noblesse oblige comes from hard times, I think it comes from a combination of culture, tradition, education, and honesty about privilege.  The nobles of yore were rich and wealthy because


    

  1. 

    Their parents were rich and wealthy.  Therefore their parents could educate them and teach them about how to properly handle being rich and wealthy with the proper composure and respect for each person in their position.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    They happened to be lucky enough to be born into said family.  This makes it clear that their position is one inherited, not earned by their own efforts.
    

    3. 

  3. 

    The peasants underneath them work hard and pay taxes to them.  This makes it clear where the wealth is coming from: the efforts of the peasants under them.  Of course the nobles did their own estate management and politics and whatnot, but the core production and farming is done by the peasants and with no underling peasants the noble has no income.
    

    4. 



Further, the peasant noble relationship is less distributed.  You don't have millions of peasants paying taxes which are combined and then divied up among a bunch of nobles, each noble family is in charge of specific peasants.  If those peasants thrive, the noble thrives.  If the peasants suffer, (at least economically) the noble suffers.  You can't tax what isn't there.  These together create an environment in which noblesse oblige can thrive.  A Lord which makes good decisions will simultaneously benefit their peasants and themself.  A Lord which makes bad decisions will have poor peasants and thus make themselves poor.  A Lord which makes very bad decisions will have suffering peasants who have a very specific target for their anger and can rebel against the Lord specifically, rather than trying to overthrow the entire kingdom which consists of a mixture of good and bad elites.


Modern elites rise and fall in power and influence in a massively distributed system in which increasing your ability to capture larger slices of the existing pie dominates over trying to tend your own garden and increase the size of the pie.  The ability to charisma and politick your way up the ranks causes new elites to rise higher than they deserve, while the competent value creators end up in middle management.  And the high mobility across space means that terrible mistakes are met not with rebellion and death, but with an escape to a new job with a blank slate reputation, or a cushy golden parachute retirement.


I don't see how hard times would change this, there were both good times and hard times in the past, and noblesse oblige was present through both, though was universal in neither.  It's the skin in the game by which peasants and elites shared good times and bad times that enabled and incentivized noblesse oblige at all.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Where Have All the Good Men Gone and Where Are All the Populists?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'd like to chime in here, because although I lean libertarian in general, am very fond of capitalism as a system, and don't think corporations are fundamentally evil to the very core as /u/ScrimbloBimblo states, I do think that in practice most large corporations are evil.  And I mean that in the same sense I would if an individual person behaved the way they do, I would call that person evil too.


Because human beings are not profit maximizing agents.  In-so-far as a person might be described as rational and thus utility maximizing, their utility function is not literally just money.  People value lots of things like friendships and relationships, and honesty, and reputation, and their conscience.  If you leave a bicycle unlocked, most people aren't going to steal it even if they could get away with it.  Obviously if enough people pass it it will eventually get stolen, but the amount of people that have to pass it is more than one.  If you make an informal agreement with someone, most people are not going to obsessively look for opportunities to screw you over.  If your friend lends you $5 they are unlikely to obsessively hound you about paying them back and calculate the exact amount of interest you owe them.  Obviously people like this do exist, and they're assholes, and most good-natured people try to avoid them.  The more greedy, money obsessed, and sociopathic someone is, the more corners they're willing to cut.  And even if they follow the law and restrict themselves to nominally consensual economic deals they still force people around them to constantly be on guard about what deals they make because the sociopath is trying to trick them to get more money.


And a large corporation nonrandomly selects for these people and promotes them and socially and legally insulates them from the consequences their actions would face if done as an individual.  It's much harder to shame someone for scamming an old granny out of her life savings if it's a faceless bureaucrat "just doing their job" than if it's the local small town repair shop run by Tom.  It's much harder to pressure Tom to give the money back, or spread the word that Tom is a jerk and everyone should boycott him, if Tom just acts on behalf of a multinational corporation with only two meaningful competitors, both of whom are equally scummy because they similarly promote sociopaths.


Ethical corporations should seek profit in the same way that you do when selling your labor: as an important consideration that you want to get a fair value for and need in order to survive, but not literally the only thing that matters in the world such that you're willing to tradeoff literally all other concerns for marginal slivers of extra cash.  Technical "consent" is neither necessary nor sufficient to define ethical behavior, though it is an important component.   Corporations, and the people making decisions within them, should be held to the same ethical standards that everyone else is when making economic transactions.  And I think ethical companies do exist, but typically the larger one is the less likely that becomes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Better in the sense of being more competent and thus better able to enact ones will on the world and accomplish desired outcomes.  Not better as in "this person tries to make the world a better place instead of being selfish".  Intelligence is comparable to being physically strong, or talented at piano, or a skilled actor.  It can be impressive, and can accomplish more good things if used for good, but it doesn't actually make you a good person and if you use it for evil then it just makes you a more impressive villain who accomplishes more evil.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That seems like it might be a necessary evil, and why we can't have nice things.  Because of bad faith actors who attempt to exploit simple systems, it's necessary to create stricter regulations that have annoying side effects on good faith actors.  Because it's entirely reasonable for some people to go somewhere, spend less than 2 hours there, and then need to leave, which your stricter regulations will harm.  Might be necessary, but it would be nice if people could just be more ethical and it wasn't necessary.  Like those stores and stands that don't have a cashier and just ask people nicely to put money in a box.  It's efficient, it saves labor and thus enables cheaper prices for customers.  But they can only survive in high trust areas.  It'd be nice if there could be more of those.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Right, but it does have extra charges after 45 minutes to prevent someone with the subscription claiming a bike in perpetuity for free and denying them to paid customers.  You don't get 720 hours of bike rental for $5, you get 45 minutes each time you need it over the course of the month, plus more if you pay more.  Which these kids were deliberately attempting to subvert, exploiting the technicalities to claim bikes for long periods of time, denying them to paid customers.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As a male (but not an especially masculine one), this is also very much not my experience, but I notice that most of the men I know also don't seem to have this either, even ones who are more masculine than me in general.  So clearly something is wrong here.  I only know my own experiences, and I don't ever think about literally nothing.  I don't know what that even means, other than being unconscious.  But I don't think it matches most of the men I know, so I'm mostly just extrapolating from there.  It's probably not true, and if it's is true for some men it's probably not true of people who I encounter in my filter bubble.  I'm torn between three possible hypotheses.  In approximate order of how likely I think they are:


1: This is a made up stereotype based on conversation preferences.  Nobody really experiences nothing in their mind, they just daydream about unimportant stuff and then when asked about it either lose their train of thought and forget, or are embarrassed by how silly it was.  It's easier to tell your wife that you were thinking about "nothing" than it is to tell her you were imagining the broader ecological implications if squirrels didn't have tails, or that you were trying to find symmetries in the patterns on the wall, and then have her judge you and ask questions about what's wrong with you that you'd think about something silly like that.  Or if you were imagining having a threesome with two of your favorite celebrities, and you think she'd get angry if you admitted something like that.  It's entirely possible that enough men (not all men, but a non-negligible number) have negative experiences with women questioning their inner thoughts and starting conflicts over it, or they just don't enjoy having conversations when they're trying to have alone time to think, and they learn to say "nothing" as the easiest response.  And if enough do this, and men do this more often then women, then  it becomes a stereotype.


2: This is an intelligence thing, not a gender thing.  Maybe people with IQ below a certain threshold really do space out and think about nothing sometimes.  I suspect if you were thinking about literally nothing you'd be trapped there forever, you have to have some sort of route for external stimulus to reach your brain, but I suppose your conscious mind could be off while your unconscious is still on.  Or more likely they're thinking about very little which gets rounded off to "nothing" when queried.  This is pretty far from my experience, I suppose the closest I can think of is when I'm really sleepy and my thoughts seem to slow and get muddled.  Maybe some people do this on purpose as a sort of micronap?  I don't know.  If this is the correct explanation, then I can think of two possibilities for why this is stereotyped as a gender thing.  One possibility is that it is socially uncouth to criticize women in certain ways, especially about their intelligence, so if men and women both do this men who talk about women doing this will be criticized for being misogynistic, while women who talk about men doing this will be sympathized with.  The other possibility is the male variability hypothesis.  If this only occurs in people with IQ below 90, and men have higher IQ variance, then more men will have this feature, therefore the stereotype might get applied to men more.  It could even be the case that there is a genuine gender component to this in combination with the IQ thing.  Like, maybe it only happens to women with IQ less than 80 and men with IQ less than 90, so some couples with the same IQ might see differences across gender.  Heck, it could even be the case that it never happens to women, and happens to all men with IQ less than 90, and it would still be consistent with lots of men in general having it, while none of the men you or I interact with have it.


3: This is a genuine gender thing.  Some sort of hormone or brain structure or socially nurtured psychological patterns cause some men to sometimes think about nothing.  That is, there is a common causal source (other than IQ) of many correlated masculine traits, and empty brain.  The stereotypes are right, even if not universal, and you and I are just less masculine than all of the meatheads out there.  Maybe I'm wrong about the inner worlds of the intelligent but not feminine men around me, and they do sometimes think about literally nothing, just not when they're around me.  That seems vaguely plausible, if you actually pay attention while you're at work and socializing and save your sitting around thinking about nothing when you're alone at home.


Again, I think 1 is the most likely, then 2, then 3.  But I suppose any are possible.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
While AI risk is on topic, I don't think relationship drama about internet celebrities is.  I don't much care about EY or Aella's personal lives or relationships or whatever drama goes on between them or whatever other individuals, unless it has a direct tie in to tangible work on AI risk or other projects, or is being related to an interesting aspect of the broader culture war.  This just reads like a soap opera script, I don't think I care.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Even then, I think people underestimate the quality of life you can expect as a poor person with an intact family.  If his entire industry went under and he couldn't adapt and was stuck flipping burgers for minimum wage he could still provide for his family.  They might have to downgrade their home and lifestyle expectations, but they're not going to starve to death or end up homeless.  And I suspect that the actual quality of life for his daughter would be higher poor with an alive father than rich with no father.


If you have serious mental health issues rendering you completely unemployable, then the object level might be unfixable, but for everyone else it's more a question of lowering standards and struggling to do as well as you can and fix as much as you can even if you can never return to the wealthy lifestyle you were expecting.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think I would place less emphasis on the broader knockdown of transgender ideology in its entirety, and more on the specifics of this case.  The kid is five, five year olds are easily influenced by trends, fads, and whims, and do not excel at long term planning.  Even if it were possible to literally be born in the wrong body and change your sex to fix that, a five year old is going to have no idea how to diagnose that and commit to that.  They have no idea what that even means.  It is at least 99% likely that the kid does not have any medically recognizable form of gender dysphoria, so it's important not to commit to any changes that will be hard to walk back, even if those are just socializing as the wrong gender.


I suspect you'll have an easier time selling a plan of "Treat them as a boy for a couple years just to be safe and see what happens" than "transgenderism is entirely bogus", even if the latter is true.  And convincing them of the former is 99% likely to solve the problem on its own.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What would Jesus do?  Jesus would probably sit down and talk to them.  Get to know them, understand them, befriend them.  Go to their house, meet their family.  And then help them out of whatever situation they are in that led them to where they are on the street.  It doesn't matter whether they're genuinely homeless or a con artist or part of a gang: Jesus hung out with criminals and con-artist tax collectors all the time.  If they are con artists, then maybe they need more psychological and moral help than financial help, but they still need help.  In some sense Jesus was an effective altruist, meaning actually help people at the root cause of their issues, not just superficial symptoms.


I don't think most Christians are up to this task.  I'm probably not, though I'm not a very good Christian in practice.  It would take significant time out of your life, especially as building a relationship with people takes many repeated interactions, which would wreak havoc on your busy schedule, probably put you at personal safety risk getting close to dangerous people, and probably require you to spend a decent amount of cash too.  But it's probably the actually correct Christian thing to do.


But I think any weaker more realistically implementable Christian responses should be approximations of this.  Fix the root cause of the issue, help these people effectively, however they actually need to be helped to get them out of a position where they feel like they need to beg.  And if you think they're con men who don't really need financial assistance then figure out how to help them in a way that doesn't enable their behavior.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Except that the primary question here is the banning or lolicon, drawings of fake children.  If the marginal low-value user you're deterring is exclusively looking at drawings while the high-value users look at real CP then you're not actually accomplishing anything by reducing the marginal users.  Assuming the goal is to prevent exploitation of real children, rather than preventing perverts from getting off because they're gross.


The argument that actually matters here is whether lolicon acts as as gateway to real CP, converting marginal users into higher-value over time, or as a substitute that reduces real CP use/production.  I can think of reasonable arguments in both directions, but am not really sure which is really true.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				The Theory of Natural Selection is a tautology.
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The actual mathematical definition of a tautology is a logical statement which is always true.  As opposed to a conditional statement which has some free variables and might be true or false depending on the inputs of those variables.  It need not be "obviously" or "trivially" true: any mathematical theorem, if packaged together with its axioms and assumptions, is technically a tautology because it's always true.


In the context of science then, a tautology is a theory which is always true, not requiring conditional variables from the real world.  Natural selection of some sort is true in every conceivable universe or system with reproducing and mutating life-forms.  I think this makes it more profound as a theory, rather than less.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Steel-manning here, because I mostly agree with you, but theoretically any sort of "told you so" can potentially be used to


1: Convince the other side that you know what you're talking about and they should listen to you on other topics


2: Convince the other side that they're wrong on this particular issue and should change their stance in order to stop digging themselves deeper into the hole.


3: Convince third parties that the other side is wrong and stupid and they should join you instead of the other side.


1 pretty much never happens in politics ever.  It rarely even happens in local personal interactions, although it sometimes does.  2 can sometimes happen, and that seems like the most feasible route here.  Mass immigration and demographic replacement is bad, now the left has more of a reason to agree that it's bad, even if for completely different reasons than the right, and maybe pointing this out will make them more amenable to coming together to solve the issue.  3 seems plausible.  Each person has a reason or a set of reasons why they're on the side they're on, and how wholeheartedly they're on that side.  I'm center-right specifically because every time one side does some insane nonsense I try to distance myself from them, and both sides do it frequently but I perceive the left as doing more damage with their crazy schemes so I distance myself more.  Although most people don't treat things the same way I do, I think there is some of this effect, especially in younger and more undecided people.  Even if pointing out the insane hypocracies on the left is unlikely to change the minds of people who are firmly on that side, anyone on the fence can see that and, if they agree, be more likely to become right, or at least a more intelligent left that doesn't replicate that flaw.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I was always fond of the 90s vision of diversity, AKA the RPG party:  everyone is different and has different strengths and weaknesses, and by specializing, and working together, and dividing tasks appropriately, we can achieve greater things than we could alone or if everyone were the same.


And to some extent this is a fictional exaggeration, some people are just better at nearly everything than some other people.  But even then, comparative advantage is a thing that can provide mutual benefits (I bet Elon Musk would be an excellent fry cook, but the fact that someone else does it means he has more time to do his thing, even if they're not as good at frying as him).  But to some extent it's straight up true.  If you tried to make me be a lumberjack I would be absolutely awful at it.  There are literally millions of Americans better suited to the job than me, many of whom are less intelligent than me.  The fact that they can do their thing and I can do mine is great, and I'm glad they exist, even if a hypothetical version of them with all of their existing talents plus my intelligence on top would be better.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I don't want to outlaw anything. Bans and especially criminal penalties seem like a terrible way to fix this.




We outlaw things for children all the time.  Children cannot smoke, or drink, or have tattoos, or consent to sex with adults.  Because it's bad for them, and any harms caused by restricting their freedom to choose what to do with their own bodies are outweighed by the high probability that they will permanently ruin their life because they don't fully understand the consequences of their actions.


Medical transition is a huge intervention with permanent life-altering consequences.  It is way more harmful than smoking, drinking, or tattoos.  You can even make a strong case that it's more harmful than literal violent rape, because at least then you can heal and go to therapy afterwards and don't have missing body parts (usually).


I don't see how you can make a case for transition of minors on this basis unless you're a consistent hardcore libertarian and believe the government has no right to ban children from doing anything that affects their own body, and no right to prevent other people from doing things children agree to.  In which case the smoking/drinking/tattoos seem like bigger priorities since they impact a higher proportion of the population, and trans issues are a red herring.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Small-scale shower thought, since I don't want to wait until Sunday




You do realize that you're allowed to post in the existing thread, right?  It still exists, it doesn't expire on Monday, it expires next Sunday when the next thread comes out.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the word "marginal" is much better than "pointwise" here.  People already use it to refer to the distinction you're making here (though usually not in the context of "badness", and doesn't require grabbing a tangentially related word from mathematics and abusing it into shape.


Similarly, we can use the word "average" or "group" instead of "uniform"


Additionally, "bad" seems like an unnecessarily loaded term.  We might as well refer to the "marginal" versus "average" contribution people in groups make to society and/or the economy.  From there, the "badness" of people with a net negative contribution to society is left as an exercise for the reader.  This way it's more clear specifically what you're referring to, because there are lots of different ways people can be "good" or "bad".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				In which I pine for a monastic escape from the sexual rat race
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think I agree with your analogy but, rather than say "both are okay" like you might expenct, conclude "Neither is okay, at least if you're being obnoxious about it."  And consistently I support social but not legal sanctions against obnoxious behavior.  Someone simply passively being hot, or being rich, is a positive quality that they should be somewhat proud of, but also potentially humble as it's not entirely due to their own merit.  And to the extent that it is within your own control, you should strive to be more of both and encourage people who succeed in becoming more of either.


But a hot person (of either sex) flaunting their body in revealing clothing should be perceived and treated similarly to a rich person flaunting their wealth with gaudy expensive jewelry and luxury goods.  There might be a time and a place where it's appropriate to display, like at a fancy party or something, and if it just happens to be visible as a side effect of normal behavior that's fine.  But if you're going around showing off in public and deliberately going out of your way to exaggerate it in order to make people jealous that's obnoxious and you should be mocked and shamed for it (in proportion to the level offense).  It should still be legal, because it's not the government's responsibility to codify what "obnoxious" means, but people should recognize it for what it is and discourage it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This is another piece of evidence that if you're going to IQ test your applicants (a very good idea) you should just use Pearson or Wonderlic or another big company that specializes in these things rather than making your own homebrew test.




Except that this is precisely the pro-monopoly incentive structure that causes all the megacorps and ruins the competitive landscape and free market principles. Megacorps snatch all of the rents and economic surplus in many economic niches because they can charge monopolistic prices and any potential small competitors get lawsuited to oblivion.


Which I guess doesn't mean as an individual actor it's unwise to do it, tragedy of the commons and whatnot, but it's more evidence that something structural needs to change that enables this in the first place.