site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27773 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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
Top New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I don't understand the people criticizing Biden for pardoning Hunter. Who would let their son go to jail? Is not a parent's truest role to protect their children?

Maybe you have to let him rot if he had committed murder or another horrible crime. But Hunter was convicted on tax crimes and lying on gun forms. Nothing mortal.

Would anyone here actually let their son go to jail for this stuff. I feel like you would have to be a sociopath to do that to your own kid.

It's Monday. The next thread is going to go up in a couple hours, I think you'll get more eyes on the conversation if you post it there instead.

If I thought the prosecution and sentencing was legitimate then absolutely. How is this even a question?

What about all other dudes convicted on tax crimes and lying on gun forms? Everyone understands that parents want to help their children as much as they can, but imagine a small-town deputy busting a rave and arresting the sheriff's son for drug possession among others. If the deputy let the kid go the scandal would be small. But the son was arrested, booked into jail, everyone arrested accepted the plea bargain, the judge even gave everyone the same jail time. Then the sheriff announced that he's going to build a jail extension. On his property. In his house.

It's corruption, but it's not even a scary form of corruption. He couldn't release him and "lose" the paper trail, he couldn't get the charges dropped, he couldn't threaten the jury. He sat and watched as everyone learned that his son is a user and then exercised his power in the most pitiful way.

I have a level of sympathy for someone trying to protect their family, even in this context. Like Camus said, between my mother and justice, I pick my mother.

But let us not blind ourselves here, Biden did not do this solely because he so loves his son. He did it in part because he wants to prevent the next administration from investigating his own money laundering shenanigans. You don't get credit for sacrifice if you're saving yourself.

Also he broke his own oath not to do this, whilst nobody forced him to commit to that. This should be reason enough for opprobrium.

Because he explicitly said that he wouldn't pardon him.

And because rule of law requires everyone to be subject to the same laws, and not to have members of the ruling family treated differently. America is a republic, not a monarchy where the president has the divine right of kings.

This isn't a case of the president correcting an obvious miscarriage of justice, as pardons are generally used in the free world. This is pure corruption/nepotism. It is, dare I say, Trumpian.

I would love to see a Twitter-style poll with the following options:

A) Keep Jones Act, don't implement Trump tariffs

B) Keep Jones Act, implement Trump tariffs

C) Repeal Jones Act, don't implement Trump tariffs

D) Repeal Jones Act, implement Trump tariffs

I'd love to see not only percentages, but some mental models from the people in different categories. This in inspired by seeing both Zvi's latest on the Jones Act and MR linking one estimate related to possible Trump tariffs.

Zvi doesn't sum it up super nicely, but estimates I see of the value of repealing the Jones Act are \approx 3% reduction in cost of goods (just due to the flagging effect) and a claim that a plausible OOM estimate is \approx 3% GDP increase (I lost the thread the other day on how to put approximately signs in without strikeout). The randomly-linked twitter post estimates price increases due to tariffs mostly around 2-3%, with some specific sectors rising up to 13%.

I suspect that most people just don't mentally look at economic estimates and compare them to each other, but I don't know what else goes on in their heads. If they're trying to justify one or the other position, how do they go about it? Is it at all plausible if we apply their justification to the other question?

Finally, heresthetics. Could an 'omnibus' option (D) bill be pushed, saying, "That old, bad, just banning stuff style protectionism clearly failed; we shot ourselves in the foot and didn't even manage to actually protect an industry in the process. Instead, tariffs will be the way; at the very least, taxes are slightly more pleasing to the economist than specific bans, as they still allow price signals to work somewhat and inspire new solutions, while at least collecting some revenue for a debt-strapped gov't"? Obviously, people would horrifically oppose it, but what would they say when they oppose it? What would the reasoning be? How would that reasoning come across to the people who would respond with a different choice from the list?

Option C) is the choice of Elite Human Capital.

Just good classical-liberal economics 101.

This is really unfair. I think the classic-liberal economics view here is:

  • If shipbuilding is a national security interest, you should fund or subsidize it directly from the public fisc
  • Pushing the costs onto a subset of the population is ineffective, inefficient and distortionary
  • Economics does not at all prescribe what the goals should be, only that once-chosen, the means to achieve them.

Sounds like we agree?

Broadly yeah, but I think there's some nuance here. One can flatten the classically-liberal economic view to (C) but I think most (?) would readily acknowledge that if shipbuilding is a genuine matter of national security then we should do something. Just not either of those things.

IOW, the CLE view here is less about ends and more about means.

I don't really see how one reasons to the omnibus position. If the drag on prices caused by the Jones Act is not worth the benefits then we should repeal the Jones Act regardless of whether we implement tariffs that have a similar effect on prices. Similarly, if we think the benefits of tariffs would outweigh their costs we should implement them regardless of whether we repeal the Jones Act. I don't see how the two policies are linked except rhetorically.

Obviously, people would horrifically oppose it, but what would they say when they oppose it? What would the reasoning be? How would that reasoning come across to the people who would respond with a different choice from the list?

I would say that we should just repeal the Jones Act and not do tariffs. Indeed, if tariffs would have a similar effect on prices as the Jones Act (potentially worse) they undo all the benefits of repealing the Jones Act! Instead of replacing one drag on US prices with another we should just get rid of the bad drag on prices.

What’s so frustrating about this topic is that there is almost Zero chance it’s addressed by the government, even under trump. It’s too niche. Too many incumbents. Someone needs to get this on Elons or Vivek’s radar and hope someone takes interest. It’s the only way.

Someone needs to get this on Elons or Vivek’s radar and hope someone takes interest. It’s the only way.

Why? What would that accomplish? DoGE is a joke, powerless to accomplish anything. Malcom Kyeyune:

In truth, though, the fact that DOGE is being taken even remotely seriously is in itself a cause for concern. Trump, as part of the executive branch, has very little power to tell the legislature what it can or even should do. Whatever (minimal) authority he may enjoy leading a department named after a cryptocurrency and an online meme, Musk is at most empowered to make non-binding suggestions. Moreover, if he wants his “department” to actually receive any funding, it is Congress, not Trump, that secures it. The fact that the US state is split into three branches, each with their own remit, is something American children learn very early on. Neither Musk, nor his new boss, have the power to upend this division of power, nor fix problems outside the executive branch of government.

David A. Fahrenthold, Alan Rappeport, Theodore Schleifer and Annie Karni in the New York Times (archive link):

When Mr. Trump takes office, Mr. Musk’s group will face a daunting reality. An entire apparatus has developed over the centuries that allows the government to keep marching on in the face of economic shocks, wartime hardships, or — as in this case — political vows to diminish its size and spending.

Any effort to slash the federal government and its 2.3 million civilian workers will likely face resistance in Congress, lawsuits from activist groups and delays mandated by federal rules. Unlike in his businesses, Mr. Musk will not be the sole decider, but will have to build consensus among legislators, executive-branch staffers, his co-leader and Mr. Trump himself. And federal rules ostensibly prevent Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy from making decisions in private, unlike how many matters are handled in the business world.

…

A 1972 law says federal open-records laws apply to advisory committees. If a committee does not follow those rules, it could be sued — and a judge could order the committee to stop meeting, or order the government to disregard its advice.

…

Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy said that cutting rules would allow them to cut staff, allowing “mass head-count reductions” across the government.

Yet many of those employees have civil-service protections, meaning they generally cannot be fired without cause, or for their political beliefs. In his first term, Mr. Trump tried to shift thousands of employees into a different category, where they could be fired at will. President Biden rescinded that order, called Schedule F, when he took office.

…

Jonathan H. Adler, a professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, said that many of the ideas mentioned by Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy would be ripe for legal challenges and noted that many of Mr. Trump’s previous efforts to expansively use executive powers had been struck down by courts.

…

Capitol Hill has always been the place where ambitious efforts to slash the budget — from one started by Theodore Roosevelt to the commission under Reagan run by industrialist J. Peter Grace — have run aground. Members of Congress have been reluctant to cut even small programs they think help their constituents, and the law says presidents must spend all the money that Congress allocates.

…

For now, activist groups like Public Citizen, a left-leaning advocacy group, said that there was nothing about Mr. Trump’s victory, or Mr. Musk’s role at his side, that allowed them to ignore the slow legal process set up to make — or unmake — rules.

“We will use those structures to complain — and sue, if we need to," said Lisa Gilbert, Public Citizen’s co-president. “We’ll see where they start, and we’ll use every tool in our tool set to push back.”

Curtis Yarvin:

Excludes bodies that also exercise operational functions! I can’t even. But the good news is, “DOGE” will “dispense advice or recommendations.”

Let me repeat this, since it’s so funny: the “Department of Government Efficiency” is not even part of the government. It literally has no power of its own. Everything Elon will be doing now, he could have done six months ago.

The result of this exercise will be a report which suggests to various agencies how they should save money. Or something. Imagine if Elon Musk had provided “advice and guidance” to Parag Agrawal. I think he tried that first. Lol.

…

In this, DOGE perfectly echoes its 40-year-old predecessor, the Grace Commission, for which the slogan “drain the swamp” was actually coined. The Grace Commission spent $75 million to create a 47-volume report. It identified $424 billion of savings from implementing its recommendations. In the end, twelve of its recommendations were passed into law, saving somewhere between two and five billion dollars. I guess that’s a good return on a $75 million report. Let’s see if Elon and Vivek can match it.

It’s unfair, of course, to laugh. The DOGE guys understand this perfectly and have already announced that DOGE will focus on executive actions.

Executive actions are executive orders. EOs have the legal force of a tweet. You can’t go to jail for disobeying a tweet, even if the President tweeted it. Or an EO.

In real life, EOs work when they order an agency to do something it wants to do. In fact, they are generally written by the agency itself. They are certainly reviewed by the agency. EOs are not written high at 3am by Elon Musk with a sharpie on a Denny’s napkin, even if they probably should be. If you know DC, can you make something happen with an EO? Of course. Depends what, though.

…

Basically, DOGE is promising to save the government money through… bureaucratic trench warfare. If you think an executive order is in any way executive, like private sector executive, like actually executive—read about how the process works.

…

But every recommendation in the “DOGE” report, if it goes anywhere at all, will land on the desk of its natural enemy: the bureaucrat whose budget it is trying to cut. His first action will be to write a memorandum, ten times as long as the recommendation itself, about why this is a ridiculous and disastrous and impossible idea.

Getting something on Elon or Vivek's "radar" will do you no good. It's not "the only way," there's no way at all — at least, not within the system and the confines of the law. DC cannot be fixed, it can only be defeated, destroyed, and replaced.

What else is there to say except "we shall see"? I would note that everything you quoted before Yarvin is well known to Musk and Trump and has been discussed at length, and was a large part of project 2025 - they do have plans to deal with an entrenched and uncooperative bureaucracy.

As for what Yarvin said, I just think it's premature to laugh off Trump's plans before he's even in office, mainly because he won the election, secured funding for the border, escaped impeachment, pulled out of the Paris accords, met with North Korea, put an embassy in Jerusalem - my most consistent recurring memory of the 2016 cycle is "Hahahaha Trump is such a fucking moron, can you believe this chump? He can't just... Oh holy shit he did it!"

secured funding for the border

Only sections of the wall were built, most of the Mexico border wasn't secured.

met with North Korea

The goal was to get them to give up nukes and that didn't happen. Hanging out with Kim Jong Un isn't a big achievement in and of itself.

Both were claimed entirely impossible. I'm not saying Trump can do no wrong, I'm saying actions that are impossible for the blue tribe are not necessarily impossible for the red tribe and vice versa. Also activist media claim the possible is impossible when it impedes their agenda.

He didn't escape impeachment, he was impeached twice.

Apologies, please bear with me while I readjust to the motte's language norms. He was acquitted following his first impeachment is what I meant.

Relatedly, these people also probably said you can’t build a rocket ship company or an electric car company. Doesn’t mean Elon will succeed but…I try not to bet against him.

Hope you didn't lay money on twitter!

I don't know if this is what you meant, but there was actually a lot of money to be made by betting against Musk during the Twitter acquisition saga: What seemed like an open-and-case of "you have to buy the company you committed to buying" was trading at a steep discount, seemingly only because "It's Elon, anything can happen".

I'm referring to the entire twitter saga, but probably mainly the additional value lost under Musk's ownership.

I’m not sure the Twitter purchase was always a financial one by Elon. In any event, most people predicted Twitter would fail after Elon cut a bunch of people. It didn’t. Elon was right on the business aspects. Assuming advertisers come back (which it seems they will) it actually wouldn’t surprise me if he makes a little money off of it.

I don't really see how one reasons to the omnibus position.

Interestingly, I don't think one actually does reason to this position. Instead, someone makes a declaration and it forces people to reason out of it, but the rhetorical linking of the two issues significantly limits how they can reason out of it... and what that will mean for their preference ordering between all four.

This is where the heresthetian thrives. He finds out how to exploit the different groups, who have different preference orders. There's only a small group of hardcore pro-Jones Act folks, yet we still have it, because enough other folks will hold their nose enough at the economic issues in order to not do anything that might seem anti-union (as Biden is portrayed in Zvi's writeup). By linking the two things, even if only rhetorically, the goal is to split the groups with incompatible preference orders. If you can split the A/B groups enough that you can accomplish C (your stated preference after encountering it in this form), then that's a yuge dubya.

Others might have other rationales that end up with them having different preference orders, but if people like you can find yourself having mildly not caring about the Jones Act before but now being willing to throw it under the bus to stop tarifffs, society benefits immensely.

I would say that we should just repeal the Jones Act and not do tariffs. Indeed, if tariffs would have a similar effect on prices as the Jones Act (potentially worse) they undo all the benefits of repealing the Jones Act!

Tariffs would not impact Alaskans trying to export crab to Los Angeles.

I don't quite understand why the Jones act failed, I'll admit. It seems like there should have sprang up in response lots of American owned short haul freighters.

I guess what I'm saying is, is the root causes of the Jones act failing one of those things that can be addressed?

What /u/gillitrut said, but also the interstate system in the US is pretty good and it turns out to be cheaper[1] in a lot of cases to put stuff on a truck.

[1] Cheaper than a Jones Act vessel, more expensive than a notional free-market vessel.

I have the belief that there is a limited amount of ambition and engineering expertise per capita that ultimately caps the technology level. I think a bunch of industrial tech levels have only been maintained by the ascendancy of China. No ambition or real engineering talent has been directed towards building ships in the US since the 1940s.

So basically we have a bunch of people focused on the world of bits instead of atoms?

China still can't build a jet engine the way CFM, P&W, GE or Rolls can.

Generally, yes. There are areas where America does do well enough at physical manufacturing to be an exporter. Weapons, medical devices, cars, planes, etc.

But why can't we own ships that were built in China or Japan or Germany or wherever? The USA has money and shipping companies.

On top of being American built, the ships must also be crewed by Americans.

The Jones Act requires the ships be built in the United States.

What is the actual definition of 'built in the United States'? Does it actually prohibit towing in a ship from a Chinese or Japanese shipyard and installing the transponder in LA or wherever and calling it 'American Made'?

There are detailed and specific rules. Their way around it usually involves assembling a kit of stuff made in other countries.

Yes, Zvi's post links to an article that discusses it some. There's a certain (large) percentage of the ships parts that have to be fabricated in America. It also discusses a court case where a shipping company tried to buy a pre-fab "ship kit" from South Korea and just assemble it in America. A court ruled that was not Jones Act compliant.

Apparently, the law does not provide a definition, so the Coast Guard's regulations control.

To be considered built in the United States a vessel must meet both of the following criteria:

(a) All major components of its hull and superstructure are fabricated in the United States; and

(b) The vessel is assembled entirely in the United States.

It turns out that it's cheaper to hire whatever vessel to do a journey like domestic port -> international port -> domestic port than it is to hire (or build) a Jones Act vessel to do domestic port -> domestic port.

That would be cabotage and is illegal under the jones act. Fortunately goods are fungible and we can just import a foreign produced equivalent of whatever we just exported.

I'm going to take a very controversial stance and support keeping the Jones Act. If the goal is to develop US shipbuilding for security reasons, there needs to be an actual shipbuilding industry. US shipbuilding is currently so horrendously inefficient that it will be instantly vaporized by Korea, Japan and... China most of all. US shipbuilding is not 50% less competitive, they're 500% less competitive. Instant loss. And if you nuke your shipbuilding sector who is going to build warships? Why would you want to make your warships within the Chinese missile death zone? Real great powers know how to make their own ships.

It makes zero sense to do all this onshoring and neo-mercantilism in microchips, strategic materials and leave out shipbuilding. There are all kinds of things you could do to introduce efficiencies and market discipline without razing the industry to the ground. Shock therapy is not the answer, there needs to be careful, judicious reform. Import technology and best practices from allies, reform regulations, bring in technical experts, break up cartels or cozy price fixers. Nationalize - China State Shipbuilding is the biggest shipbuilder in the world and is profitable too.

How is it that the US can build rockets, jet fighters and cars but ships are beyond them... because they protected their own market? The Chinese protect their own auto industry - lo and behold they produce huge numbers of cheap cars. The Koreans protected their auto industry for decades and turned it into a competitive export industry. The EU protects its agriculture and isn't a famine-stricken wasteland. Americans aren't some alien race that has an inherent -500% to Shipbuilding, there must be other problems than protection.

What do you think about the Trump tariffs? I'm really curious about how these things interact.

This doesn't really seem like a good argument for keeping the Jones Act. If we're not good enough at making ships, why not just throw in the towel? You wouldn't pooh-pooh the nation of Haiti for importing computer chips instead of trying to make their own, it'd be foolish to expect them to just magically have the physical and human capital needed to do so.

Haiti is a small shithole country that, last I checked, was controlled by a cannibal who barbecued people. They're so incompetent and disorganized that the Presidential Palace still hasn't been repaired after an earthquake struck in 2010.

The US is a huge, highly developed country with aspirations to world hegemony. They produce plenty of advanced technology. Why can't they find the physical or human capital to build ships efficiently? How hard can it be?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ship_exports

The Italians can do it. The Germans can do it. The Finns can do it! White people spent about 500 years clobbering the rest of the world because we had better ships, the US relies on its navy for relevance in world affairs. This planet is 75% water. Shipbuilding is not something that can be sacrificed.

My point is that you can't simply will your way towards robust institutions and the necessary human capital through saying "Be Tough" on the subject. Either you have an actual plan to achieve the thing you want directly, or you admit it's beyond you for lack of time or resources and turn to alternatives. We have allies who presumably do know a thing or two about how to build ships and maintain the industries needed to build those ships, and if needed, we can just rely on them. Hell, why not let the Europeans build us some warships and we can count that towards their contributions towards NATO, assuming that's still a hot subject?

There's a strictly superior solution: repeal the Jones Act and use the resultant economic gains to fund shipbuilding directly. 3% of the US GDP, the top level estimates; $880 billion. This is 27 times the navy's current shipbuilding budget; 22 times the total US shipbuilding market. (Yes, the vast majority of it is already warships.) Oh, and it's 3.4 times the entire budget of the US Navy. Needless to say, this would completely eliminate any issue of decaying capacity. For that kind of money, we could build 60 new aircraft carriers each year (and then sink them all because it'd be impossible to man them) and have enough budget left over to nearly triple our normal construction.

Of course, if such a proposal were put to the public, I believe we'd rapidly find we do not value our shipbuilding capability at $880 billion. The Jones Act is a near-total failure in its stated aims, but even if it were a fantastic success, even if it only cost the US economy a tenth as much as it actually does, it still wouldn't be worth it, and it only survives by hiding its true costs.

(Not a fan of tariffs either, of course.)

Jones act came was passed 104 years ago. Clearly it isn't working to make American shipbuilding great again at the moment. How long are you prepared to keep it and wait around for it to cause the golden age of American shipbuilding - 104 years more?

We currently have the Jones act. We currently do not have a healthy shipbuilding industry. The Jones act appears to have been passed in 1920. The Jones act is not doing anything to get us a domestic shipbuilding industry. I do not see any prospect of state intervention at the scale necessary to get us a healthy shipbuilding industry. Given that, we should repeal the Jones act.

I would gladly consider supporting the reintroduction of the Jones act as a section of a bill that would, in fact, revitalize US shipbuilding. Until then, all this attitude - and it's an attitude that's shared by many people in GOP policy, it's not just you - does is hurt our economy for precisely no benefit. I do not see any harm in repealing it until that happens.

The US had a healthy shipbuilding industry in 1940, such that it could produce the biggest fleet in the world, fight and win huge wars against rival great powers on the other side of the world. 20 years of Jones Act protection didn't do much harm. I think the Jones Act is a symptom, not a cause. High US wages were already making it difficult to man a large US merchant marine back in the 1920s, hence protection. The problem is not enough protection, not smart enough protection, insufficient and inefficient subsidies, insufficient automation.

Why don't companies move into shipbuilding on the basis that there's huge latent demand? Is a wholly protected US domestic market seriously too small to support shipbuilding? The US has the second longest coastline in the world, a bunch of islands and hundreds of millions of consumers! Does the US lack the capital to build shipyards? Is there a shortage of skilled labour? Is there some huge thicket of laws preventing efficient shipbuilding? Unions? Some combination of these?

I doubt the root causes of the problem will be resolved by killing the Jones Act. All that will happen is political backlash from massive job losses and a modest increase to economic efficiency. But without protection, there is no chance of competing against North East Asia (who have the capital, economies of scale, labour and best practices already established). Without protection, there is no chance of ever revitalizing US shipping since there will be nothing to revitalize.

Shooting the patient in the head does reduce medical costs but it's not really a cure.

Okay but I think we should be realistic and note that a massive and unusually competent policy intervention targeting American shipbuilding is really probably just not going to happen. So in the meantime, the Jones act is just unneeded loss. And if it did happen, it'd necessarily be a much larger undertaking than putting the Jones act back in place, such that additionally reimposing the Jones act doesn't make it much harder to do. So I think in the meantime we should repeal the Jones act and gain the 'modest increase to economic efficiency'. And, from what I've read though I haven't checked it, the benefits really aren't that modest relative to other policy interventions. It's really hard to move gdp even by .1%

As far as I know river and coastal shopping in the US has been in decline for a long time. Particularly the great lakes: we don't move iron ore and coal (and limestone) like we used to. River shipping in the Mississippi is mostly barge these days I think.

We just don't do all the river and coastal hauling of manufactured goods like the Europeans do, not sure whether it's because we have better rail shipping or some other reason.

I do know that the US coast guard has gotten absolutely retarded about crewing requirements, at the same time as crew recruiting and training is going to pieces in the same way it is for air traffic control.
Europe on the other hand has a lot of cheap hulls and crew from eastern Europe.

We just don't do all the river and coastal hauling of manufactured goods like the Europeans do, not sure whether it's because we have better rail shipping or some other reason.

No, it's literally the Jones act. Look at how energy gets into the northeastern US. A huge part is provided by Canada, just because that bypasses the Jones act (and because they have legacy pipelines and transmission lines - and the blue states up there keep killing any new projects of that kind). Which, by the way, makes energy prices kind of a problem for the Northwestern states when the tariffs come.

Us shipyards already pretty much only make warships, and only ocassionally pop out a hulk for making trips to hawaii and puerto rico. Maybe the problem is that shipyards only know how to make warships and transfer that waste over into their civilian vessels.

According to google:

As of January 2023, there were some 56 tankers and 23 container ships in the Jones Act fleet.

That's the total number of vessels in operation, and China builds that many ships in a week.

I also fully support US shipbuilding for security reasons.

I do think we can do a lot better in terms of crafting a policy that does so without the distortionary effects that the Jones Act does and in a way that's fundamentally more fair.

Part of the issue to me is that the Jones Act imposes the cost of maintaining a national shipbuilding industry in a completely non-uniform fashion. And because it applies only to domestic routes, it effectively penalizes domestic trade within the States (especially Alaska, which is ridiculous given its criticality) in factor of foreign trade with other countries.

I generally agree. Reform is a far better option than repeal. But the Jones Act is a meme and virtually all discussion of it is unproductive signaling. There's about a hundred other things that are equally or even more important for renewed US maritime self-sufficiency, but which are one or more of the following:

  • Massively capital-intensive and a gigantic gamble on a long-term investment that very likely will never pay off (mega scale dredging projects along natural US waterways; construction, maintenance, and repair facilities for expanded fleets)
  • Contingent on the existence of domestic industries that have been hollowed out and off-shored (what use is dredging waterways if no one uses them; are there enough US steel producers, assembly firms servicing shipbuilding needs, and domestic manufacturing volumes to make large-scale interior shipping profitable)
  • Third-rail line items for the affected constituents, against which running a political platform is electoral suicide (port automation in particular is DOA; see also the Dockworkers Union mafia boss video)

There's also a few extremely critical differences in the manufacturing sectors you highlighted where the US is competitive:

Rockets: There was a massive, underserved market that wanted to put payloads in space, but which could only do so at incredible expense, with extremely limited launch frequency. SpaceX commoditized and accelerated payload delivery, granting them near-total monopoly on world demand for space launches, before the competition even got out prototypes. They give high-status nerd jobs to an extremely overproduced market of estranged aerospace engineers, and use their status to pick top talent away from low-pay positions in government that are regularly threatened by cyclical party politics. Most of their flights are uncrewed, and the crewed flights carry literal astronauts - that talent pipeline isn't running dry any time soon, particularly when global demand for astronauts is countable on one hand (provided you count in binary on your hands... which is a normal thing that other people definitely do). The military isn't making demands that SpaceX build their rocket entirely out of US unobtanium, because they tried that with NASA and it went well enough to result in SpaceX existing.

Contrast with shipbuilding: the market has many competitors with decades of experience, most of the market has no comparable binding restrictions on material or labor sourcing, and no one enters the industry for nerd street cred. It's now a massive uphill battle just to gain a foothold in the market, and anyone trying has to face pressures that just don't exist for SpaceX.

Fighter Jets: The US spent decades pouring money and talent into the production of fighter jets and selling them to allied nations, justifying the expense by pointing at the hostile foreign superpower doing the same; then the hostile foreign superpower collapsed. It has taken decades for any credible competition to re-emerge in the market, and arguably we're still not there. Notably, fighter jets are also unambiguously weapons, in fact high-tech weapons, with all purchasers being militaries trying to gain substantial competitive advantages over adversaries - it's not a race to the bottom on cost. Even if the materials and technologies are highly exotic, the cost is currently bearable, the volumes of exotic materials required are relatively small, and the procurement process is at least partly designed around this requirement.

Contrast with shipbuilding: we don't sell aircraft carriers, we might sell a handful of submarines for the first time ever to Australia in a decade as an explicit attempt to block Chinese naval dominance in the Pacific, and we don't even have enough capacity to build or maintain our existing fleet well. Recent military shipbuilding efforts have been somewhere between a total mess and an absolute disaster, with projects running over-budget, over-schedule, and suffering from early cancelation or non-functional key armaments. We just flat out aren't competitive on non-military vessels.

Cars: This one's easy - a big chunk of the manufacturing is done outside of the US. When competitors got better at cars, we forced them to manufacture those cars in the US or face steep import tariffs. Cars are multiple orders of magnitude less expensive than ships, creating economies of scale. They are commodities for domestic transport, and are indispensable for a substantial fraction of the country.

Contrast with shipbuilding: if the US demanded that all ships docking in a US port had to be made in the US or face steep tariffs, I predict exactly zero foreign shipbuilders would set up shop in the US. There's no economy of scale without volume, and there's just not enough US ship volume to justify that expense compared to the global volume of shipping. The tariffs would just be passed on to consumers, either directly at ports or indirectly overland through Canada and Mexico.

A closer analogy might be nuclear power plants. We used to build lots of those, but the one-way ratchet on the regulatory framework imposed some frankly ludicrous requirements on new and existing projects, making it almost entirely unprofitable to bother in the present time (even after a majority of the national security concerns have evaporated). We subsequently lost all industry knowledge and experience, except for a tiny military niche. A handful of startups have concluded that the only way forward for the technology is to deliberately eschew the major advantage of nuclear power - scale - because it is no longer economically possible to scale. And now a competitor superpower is credibly focusing national effort on generating their own nuclear power industry.

I'm reasonably confident that the legislative gridlock and ephemeral executive alignment of the US has rendered us structurally incapable of ever solving this problem again - by the time we figure out how to set a national agenda that is durable to half-decade pendular political cheap shots, we will have been thoroughly eclipsed by China, and on the way to our own steady decline and stagnation much like most of Europe. My best-case reform package for the Jones Act is too heavily dependent on so many other reforms and re-industrialization efforts that will simply never be.

We just flat out aren't competitive on non-military vessels.

So true. I spent 2007 to 2011 on board a two decade old Navy minesweeper that was supposed to be replaced by the littoral combat ship (LCS) which entered service in like 2012 I think.

But LCS was such a disaster that it was not capable of any of its basic missions, and the first few have already been decommissioned while my minesweeper is still in service!

port automation in particular is DOA; see also the Dockworkers Union mafia boss video

It's critical to distinguish 'DOA as a result of contingent political arrangements / coalitions in today's politics', and 'DOA under most possible political arrangements / coalitions'. I don't think port automation is the latter!

What are the "world issues" of our age?

I am a high school social studies teacher (lame) and our curriculum is very old. As such, it is adamant that kids learn about the AIDS crisis, SARS, the Millennium poverty reduction goals, UN peacekeeping, third-world debt and the IMF, etc. It's all very Naomi Klein, Michael Moore-type stuff, and feels like teaching in 1992 with books written during the Cold War.

Most of those issues are still around, but they are obviously no longer as relevant to the globally-minded. Other than stuff like SARS, which has an obvious analog in COVID, what issues SHOULD we talking about. In 2007 you could pretty easily list the things that were considered "world issues" by the bien-pensant class. Has wokeism bulldozed all that? Are there constituencies out there who are still worried about this type of stuff? If so, what are they worrying about?

Tikkun Olam.

  • -12

Speak plainly, and refrain from low effort Dark Hints.

what issues SHOULD we talking about

  • Environmental issues
  • Wealth inequality
  • How AI will impact your students' lives
  • The Mindfulness Revolution
  • The rise of secular wisdom traditions like Authentic Relating
  • The Psychedelic Renaissance, including communities that use psychedelics in a spiritual/religious setting.

The common theme is that these are developing issues that involve a lot of uncertainty about the near future. They are salient to young people today and learning to navigate these issues will be helpful to their futures.

Wealth inequality is a made-up issue. To the extent that we care about economic inequality, our primary concern should be consumption inequality, because consumption is ultimately what really matters. The whole point of accumulating wealth is to allow you or your heirs, or the beneficiaries of your charitable contributions, to consume more in the future. Consumption is what you've taken from the economy, and wealth is the difference between what you've contributed and what you've taken.

For various reasons that should be fairly obvious if you think about it, consumption inequality < income inequality < wealth inequality. That is, in any given year, consumption is most equal and wealth is least equal. Lifetime consumption is even more equal than consumption in a given year, because at least some of the inequality in consumption is just due to life cycle effects. This is also true of income, and even more so of wealth.

Egalitarian ideologues started out talking about income inequality, because it's easiest to measure. At some point they should have realized that it makes more sense to talk about consumption inequality, but instead they went in the opposite direction and started talking about wealth inequality.

Why? Because, as I mentioned above, consumption is more equal than income, and wealth is less equal. This makes it much easier to sensationalize. The top 1% might do 5% of all consumption in the US, but they earn 20% of all pre-tax income, and own something like a third of all wealth. US billionaires may have more combined net worth than the bottom 50% of the population (If you say this, a lot of people will incorrectly assume that it means that billionaires own the majority of wealth, which is why Oxfam releases a statement to this effect every year), but they probably consume less than than the bottom 1%. There are fewer than a thousand US billionaires and 3.3 million bottom one-percenters; to consume more than the bottom 1%, billionaires would have to consume 3,300 times more per capita. If the bottom 1% each consume $20k per year, that's about $70 million per capita for billionaires. Likely some of the richer billionaires hit that at least some years, but $70 million is quite a lot to spend in one year if you only have a net worth of $1-2 billion.

So if you're trying to promote hatred of the rich and build a consensus for more redistribution, obviously you want to talk about wealth, and not consumption, so that's what we get.

our primary concern should be consumption inequality, because consumption is ultimately what really matters

Even if the first premise is true (big caveat), we'll have to look at how an increase in consumption scales when isolated from wealth. Because we'll run into fun non-linearities pretty much immediately.

  • For a very slight increase in your "consumption of housing", you can get a massive increase of your living standard - because for close to the price of rent for a shitty apartment, you can afford the interest on a mortgage. Sometimes, this could even mean a decrease in consumption allowing you the quality of live jump of renter --> home owner.

  • For another increase ("only" double digit percentage) in "consumption of housing", you can decrease your commuting time by >100 hours per year.

  • Especially at the lower end, food quality also scales non-linearly.

And of course, when comparing two subjects with equal consumption, the presence of wealth makes a huge difference in the feeling of security in life.

billionaires would have to consume 3,300 times more per capita

In all three metrics (consumption, income, wealth), statements like that make little sense. In the end, only quality of life matters. But that's notoriously hard to measure.

Due to diminishing marginal utility, quality of life is even more equal than consumption. The difference in utility between a $100,000/month home and a $1,000/month home is not 100 times as great as the difference between a $1,000/month home and living on the street. A meal at a three-star restaurant may cost a hundred times as much as a cheap, nutritionally adequate meal, but the difference between them is less important than the difference between the cheap meal and starving.

Anyway, the monetary value of goods and services are important, because, unlike income, wealth, and subjective quality of life, consumption is rivalrous—it reduces the availability of goods and services for others to consume. The monetary value of the goods and services you consume is a measure of how large a share of total output you consume.

Why? Because, as I mentioned above, consumption is more equal than income, and wealth is less equal. This makes it much easier to sensationalize.

A few years back, there was a "splashy" "study", which surveyed people, showing them three pie charts. One was a depiction of the wealth distribution, by quintile, in the US. Opposed to it was a completely equal distribution, 20% for each quintile. Conveniently, in the middle, they put "Sweden", and they asked folks which wealth distribution they'd prefer. People were at least smart enough to realize that a totally equal distribution makes no bloody sense, as an indebted fresh medical school grad is not going to have the same amount of wealth as a nearing-retirement saver-of-forty-years. Nevertheless, it allowed them to blast in the media that however much percent of the population surveyed would prefer a wealth distribution more like Sweden, heavily implying that the US should adopt some unspecified set of policies that people associate with Sweden.

...but of course, this sensationalism was entirely built on a complete lie. "Sweden" was not Sweden, at least not its wealth distribution. They called it "Sweden", with quotation marks attached in the original survey, because they simply lied and substituted Sweden's income distribution and compared that to the US's wealth distribution. If you looked at Sweden's actual wealth distribution, it would be extremely visually similar to the US, so they needed to lie and make people think that there was the magical possibility that is totally magically achievable that is visually clearly different if we only let them implement whatever haphazard collection of policies they want.

The average person's intuitions about what a "reasonable" wealth distribution should look like are totally unmoored from reality. Imagine a country full of people who all earn the same income, save the same percentage of it, earn the same return on their investments, retire at the same age, spend down their retirement savings at the same rate, and die at the same age. Literally just people living the exact same life with staggered birth years. Show the average subject in that "Sweden" study a pie chart of that wealth distribution, and he'll say it's way too unequal.

I could go on for pages and pages about how stupid wealth inequality discourse is and how little sense the way people think about it makes.

Dan Ariely, the lead author of that study, was recently at the center of a huge fraud scandal for some unrelated research. The data he used were definitely manipulated, but I guess he managed to convince the investigators that someone else did it and he didn't know. I have no basis on which to doubt that finding, but I haven't seen the evidence.

Just out of curiosity, I wanted to calculate the wealth Gini coefficient that comes from your life-cycle only model, and got numbers around 0.35. Interesting.

Climate change.

I didn't used to believe in this, and I'm still, say, maybe ambivalent? But I do think there's a real chance that we start seeing some serious shit in this regard in the near future, trends that happen slowly and then all at once.

There's no real chance we start seeing some serious shit - we are already seeing serious shit. 2024 is the hottest year on record, beating out... 2023 for the top spot. Corals all over the world are bleaching and dying and we're already seeing temperature zones marching away from the equator and towards the poles.

I highly recommend the following article, because I think it is the most reasonable take on the issue that I've seen. https://www.ecosophia.net/riding-the-climate-toboggan/

I recommend reading 'Apocalypse Never'. The coverage of climate-related injuries to ecosystems in the media is inadequate. Journalists are not neutral at all, nor are they competent.

we're already seeing temperature zones marching away

And? That article itself notes planet used to be much warmer and there were no real issues with that. The fantasies of runaway greenhouse effects are obviously just that- fantasies.

Perhaps so, but at those times there probably weren't cities of millions of people lying more or less at sea level.

There are entire countries built below sea level now.

If the sea level were to raise by 50 m over a few centuries, people could deal with that.

Did you even read the article?

The points you're raising have already been brought up and dealt with. I'm not familiar with Apocalypse Never, but from reading the back of the book and how it talks about climate activism not being effective that's actually a point raised in the article itself:

Protest marches and virtue signaling do nothing to keep the resulting carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Nor do the wind farms, rooftop solar panels, and other pork barrel projects that have been marketed so heavily using climate change as a sales pitch Nor, for that matter, do any of the other gimmicks that have been so heavily promoted and praised by corporate media. If you doubt this, dear reader, take a good look at the chart of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and see if you can find any sign that any of these things have slowed the steady increase in carbon dioxide one iota. If the point of the last three decades of climate change activism was to slow the rate at which greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere, the results are in and the activists have failed. Nor is there any reason to think that doing more of the same will yield anything else; what’s that saying about doing the same thing and expecting different results?

Furthermore...

And? That article itself notes planet used to be much warmer and there were no real issues with that.

Compare that to:

Second, an equable climate may sound great in the abstract, but getting there’s not going to be so fun. To begin with, melting the polar ice caps will raise sea levels three hundred feet. While it will take centuries for this process to complete, even the first steps along that route will play merry hob with the global economy, flooding most of the world’s large cities and a vast amount of other real estate, erasing entire nations from the map, forcing mass migrations, crippling ports and other trade facilities, and the list goes on. Meanwhile the weather isn’t simply going to pop right into an equable condition; to judge from what’s currently happening, the climate belts will keep on lurching unsteadily toward the poles a little at a time, causing droughts, floods, famines, and other entertainments. A thousand years from now things may be great, but that’ll be small consolation to you, or to the generations who have to deal with the rest of the change.

If you want to have an actual discussion about the merits of the article and Greer's position I'm here for it 100%, but you have to actually argue against what he's written rather than just some imaginary gestalt of all the articles on the climate you've read in the past. Telling someone that "fantasies of runaway greenhouse effects are obviously just that" doesn't even reach the level of being wrong when the person you are talking to has explicitly criticised apocalyptic fantasies of runaway greenhouse effects in the essay you're trying to attack.

I skimmed it.

world’s large cities and a vast amount of other real estate, erasing entire nations from the map, forcing mass migrations, crippling ports and other trade facilities

And is that a big deal? 'Erasing entire nations from the map and mass migrations' is just history. Unlike the US which has 300 years of not much happening, we've got like 2 millenia of actual history in Europe. It's pretty much mostly forgotten by everyone normal. People are capable of dealing with history. Worst case they die out and are thoroughly forgotten. Not a problem for anyone involved in said history.

Reason I skimmed it is because I find him to be a noise generator.

He's just another primitivist engaged in wishful thinking about how this stinking complex industry he doesn't understand is all going to end, wholly ignoring that heavy industry is the source of state power and as such, indispensable. Short of some devastating bioweapon killing enough people to prevent sufficient populations to survive until the last book rotted, nothing can end industry. Even a devastating nuclear war would only result in a decline to late 19th century level in the unaffected parts of the world, followed by rapid rebuilding.

Greer's problem is that he is just way, way too pompous and takes himself too seriously. Whatever he says that's novel is wrong. Recently he has ticked off a particularly angry British man and .. yeah.

but from reading the back of the book

Well you should read it. It goes over, in sometimes tedious detail, about how the present-day environmental movement evolved. It's a pretty infuriating book and it makes very clear environmentalism is actually not about the environment.

I skimmed it.

You didn't read it and your critiques have no value because you do not understand the position you're attempting to argue against. You're not engaging with the material being presented, and you don't even seem to understand the underlying reasoning. Even beyond that your position is an incomprehensible joke - "Worst case they die out and are thoroughly forgotten. Not a problem for anyone involved in said history." Did you even read your own post? Dying is actually something most people consider to be a problem!

Well you should read it. It goes over, in sometimes tedious detail, about how the present-day environmental movement evolved. It's a pretty infuriating book and it makes very clear environmentalism is actually not about the environment.

Sure, I'm willing to read it - though I probably won't be finished by the time this thread is dead, which is why I gave my reply after reading about the book and not after I'd finished reading it. But John Michael Greer has been making this exact point for decades now! He has written multiple articles explaining why the environmentalist movement has failed, how it failed and what people can do to move on in a world shaped by that failure. He explicitly and overtly attacks a lot of the scams like Goldman Sachs' carbon pricing scheme and even in the essay you refused to read he explicitly points out that the entire environmentalist movement has done absolutely nothing to change the trajectory of carbon emissions.

If you're going to complain about someone being a noise generator, take a look at yourself - you spouted a whole bunch of nonsense because you couldn't even be bothered reading a single essay while expecting me to go read an entire novel.

I'm going to raise the flag again by saying we can massively prevent the impact we, as a species, have on the climate if we nuke every single industrializing nation and ensure nobody ever goes past subsistence farming. During COVID, China saw relatively clear, pollution-free skies.

I mean that's a non starter, especially when the climate feel-gooders realize how it looks when you notice all the people that would have to accept an energy-poor non-industrialised serf future are various shades of brown, but, you know. The planet's at stake.

John Michael Greer is like Zeihan. Someone who says wrong things with great conviction and never apologizes or express remorse at having said that.

If you don't believe me, go back and read his Peak Oil stuff. He has been wrong for decades.

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2008-08-31/review-long-descent-john-michael-greer/

I was half convinced that Peak Oil would have required actually investing in coal to liquid and increase oil prices and could cause a slowdown.

Would have been a problem, as it's dirty and investment heavy, requiring coal mining and vast chemical plants of the kind Americans and their provincial subjects aren't really good at building anymore.

Luckily, fracking came into use and Americans turned from net importers into exporters.

This was JMG back in '08

Drawing on the theory of catabolic collapse touched on earlier, Greer next outlines in detail how our predicament is likely to play out during the decades and centuries ahead. Greer’s theory of catabolic collapse—well-known within peak oil circles—shows how civilizations headed for collapse tend to decline in a gradual, downward stairstep of repeated crises and recoveries. They don’t undergo the sudden, catastrophic free fall envisioned by diehard peak oil doomers. This theory makes for truly fascinating reading, and is included in its entirety as an appendix.

How will our own society’s catabolic collapse proceed? Greer sees us on the verge of a couple of decades of economic contraction, chronic energy shortages, declining public health, political turmoil and vanishing knowledge and cultural heritage. This crisis period, he predicts, will be followed by a respite of perhaps 25 years or so, during which industrial civilization’s newfound relief from the lavish energy demands of universal motoring and electrification, climate-controlled buildings, modern medicine and other present-day amenities will buy it a little breathing room. But this respite will, in turn, be followed by another round of crises that will rid our civilization of further layers of social complexity, and so on.

Eventually, the developed world will assume an agrarian lifestyle built around local communities and sustainable resources. But this change will happen so slowly that no one alive today will be around to witness the end result. Thus, Greer maintains, our energies should be focused not on surviving the end of industrial civilization, but on making it through the imminent crisis period that will be but one brief interval within that larger context.

It's hard to overstate how absurd this is.

which industrial civilization’s newfound relief from the lavish energy demands of universal motoring and electrification

Without electricity, everything gets a 100x less convenient and harder. Even if somehow oil production collapsed and we returned back to street cars and trains and expensive EVs, electricity could never go away. Without it you're back in 1850s.

Nobody can afford to stop making electricity.

There would have to be some sort of discontinuous break for climate change to have a serious effect on human civilization.

People keep on predicting that climate change will cause more famines and storm deaths. But, over time, human deaths from famine and storms have been going down, not up. Human capacity to deal with the climate increases far faster than the climate changes. Unless the world deindustrializes, there will never be another Bhola cyclone which killed 300,000 people in 1970.

Climate change predictions often call for a 1 or 2% decrease in total global GDP due to climate change in the next 50 or 100 years. Frankly, this is small potatoes. And furthermore, it's quite easy and cheap to mitigate the worst effects of climate change if we cared to do so. (We don't).

That's not to say climate change isn't bad. It is. It will have many negative consequences for the natural environment and may cause some species to go extinct. This is bad and we should strive to prevent it.

But humans will be fine.

The Migration Period starting 300 AD ultimately resulted in the fall of Rome and a massive decrease of technology on the European continent. A billion people moving away from the equator (after the first wet bulb events), and later several billion people moving away from coastal areas (after they're sick and tired of rebuilding after getting flooded every year) easily have the capacity to "seriously effect human civilization".

It doesn't have to. Unprecedented development of infrastructure for those people and an unthinkable change of culture (both of the migrants and the native people they join) could mitigate this. So could unprecedented violence at the borders.

I'm a pessimist. The west doesn't have the capacity for either of those options.

Yeah, climate change isn't a "threat of human extinction" type of problem (unless we're missing something big and Venusy, which is far-fetched), but I could see 1 or 2% decrease in total global GDP being a serious underestimate. The theme I keep seeing in climate change predictions is devaluation of land. A large number of major coastal cities having to simultaneously move inland would be pretty bad, even if it was a relatively gradual process.

A large number of major coastal cities having to simultaneously move inland would be pretty bad, even if it was a relatively gradual process.

It's going to be very gradual on a human time scale. How gradual? Think 1 meter of sea level rise in the next 100 years, assuming no mitigation.

The cities won't move, but lower lying areas will see marginally less development over time, so the population center of the cities will gradually shift inland. In extremely valuable areas like lower Manhattan, there won't be any retreat, just more money spent on land reclamation. Amsterdam and New Orleans are already below sea level.

Think 1 meter of sea level rise in the next 100 years, assuming no mitigation.

Sea level has been rising (possibly slower than that) for several thousand years. We know this because there are underwater archaeology sites like Doggerland and Heracleion (that one may be more a matter of localized geology) where people at one time lived on dry land.

Admittedly the rates of rise may be changing, but assuming a null hypothesis of completely static sea levels seems wrong too.

Climate Change policies are a series of scams.

Politically, the European version uses climate fearmongering to push through renewables and energy austerity because the end result was purported to be energy autarky and an end to being easily blackmailable through hydrocarbon blockades.

The American version is the same, except the motivation is more along the lines of keeping people poor because poor people are less likely to build stuff.

The climate modellers of course have their institutes and their salaries and budgets.

It's a harmful policy being pushed under false pretences and is of course wholly ineffective because people will be merrily burning coal elsewhere by the gigaton. Since 2007, world coal use has increased by a gigaton despite all the efforts.

The emerging second Cold War?

AI. Can relate to how students should be taught to write given AI, and what work will be available when AI gets even better and we get cheap robots.

The energy transition, with a discussion of peak oil. Low TFR and population aging. Mass migration, populism, social media.

Peak oil

The experts were just so wrong about peak oil, weren't they?

Not only did the world not reach peak oil in the late 2000s as predicted, but US production grew so much it is now 30% above its prior 1970 peak.

I'll venture that we really will reach peak oil in the next decade, but not because of lack of supply (we are discovering oil faster than we are burning it), but because of lack of demand.

We never ran out after all.

The experts were just so wrong about peak oil, weren't they?

Kind of. The increasing and more volatile price of oil motivated the development of fracking technologies, which have a higher upfront cost but about the same marginal cost as previous wells, allow previously unexploitable fields to be made exploitable, and allow wells to be turned on and off with macroeconomic realities. So increasing prices signalled need, and the technology was developed to fill that need.

Which is probably a good estimate for the trend that will occur in other domains of resource exploitation, as long as we allow price signalling to work.

As a side note, it looks like gasoline prices are almost monotonically decreasing when adjusted for inflation. I suspect this is because the price of energy is basically what sets the value of the dollar. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/gasoline-prices-adjusted-for-inflation/

There's an author I like (David Mitchell) whose novels are all loosely connected and part of the same universe.

His first big hit and arguably his opus, Cloud Atlas, had a section set in a post-apocalyptic earth. Within the book, the end of industrial civilisation comes about due to peak oil. In 2004 when the book was written this wasn't an unreasonable thing for someone like Mitchell to believe.

Unfortunately, since all his books are within the same universe, he then revisited how the end of civilisation came about in his 2014 book The Bone Clocks.

This leads to the situation where the characters watch civilisation die around them in the 2050s because they are running out of diesel.

The big thing that the environmentalists got wrong is that it's basically impossible to run out of a resource. Nothing that we extract gets annihilated.

The resource simply gets more and more expensive, in the worst case, or you find new ways to extract it more efficiently, in the best case (as what happened to oil). And in the worst case, the higher prices lead to development of substitutes and more efficient usages - as always, high prices are the cure to high prices.

To be fair to peak-oilers their argument was always that peak is different from running out and the danger is what oil getting more and more expensive would cause to the global economy and society.

This seems like saying the same thing in more words (not always a bad idea!).

Assume that technological progress will not gift us Pareto-optimal replacements for anything that we need more of. In that case, the different between ‘running out’ of something and ‘no longer being able to do many tasks that require it because it’s too expensive and there’s no good replacement’ is essentially semantic.

Assume that technological progress will not gift us Pareto-optimal replacements for anything that we need more of.

That's kind of assuming the conclusion. The fact is that high prices incentivize finding substitutes for lower value applications of expensive commodities.

It is assuming the conclusion, that’s what I mean. The peak oil argument is that we were given a limited gift of irreplaceable resources and we’re splurging it all on junk. The tech optimist argument is that we can basically use as much stuff as we want (indeed more is better) and if there are supply problems we’ll find a way.

Obviously, in the former view, you will eventually run out of everything that is not self-replacing. In the latter, you can never run out of anything. But the existence of appropriate substitutes is a factor beyond our control.

Those are all still excellent subjects - just not in the ways the authors envisaged. Talking about the failures and successes of AID efforts in Africa; of COVID policies, of the persistent backfiring of foreign aid, the corruption of the UN, BRICs strategizing and world supply chains, etc.

AI, mass immigration and cultural fragmentation, the power of political Islam, low birth rates, the risk of biologically engineered pandemics, the effect of social media on population psychology. Not stuff most high schools are going to want you to spend all your time discussing in class.

She also cynically accused Mace of trying to exploit the issue to get her name in the papers. Mace responded by calling AOC dumb and her suggestion disgusting, but she didn't offer any alternative enforcement mechanism.

I think this is one of the dumbest possible critiques of this policy. The simple answer is, "whatever happened when a man went into a ladies room in 2000." Which, quite simply, is if they did their business in a quick and non threatening manner, nothing happened. Maybe some women would look at him askance or ask him if he is lost. Only when said man started ogling women and girls, whipping out his junk, etc would security be contacted. And such is a perfectly reasonable enforcement mechanism. On top of that the bright line rule, is very convenient as an escalation or extra charge for the police/prosecution and as evidence of criminal intent.

Think you responded to the wrong top-level.

Assuming you're not allowed to go completely off the rails from the curriculum, each of the topics you mention can be a natural hook into more current issues.

  1. AIDS/SARS of course leads to covid and other public health concerns, which in turn leads to global trade, supply chains, the recent inflation, etc.
  2. Millennium development goals are done now, so the discussion of which succeeded and which failed can lead to the development of China and the massive fall in poverty there, but also the pivot to the SDGs and the greater proportion of diplomatic effort being spent on climate issues. (I see the debate about climate below, but I don't think it can be denied that lots of people consider it the "world issue" and ignoring it just lets your students be fed less rational stories about it by other people.)
  3. UN peacekeeping leads to current peacekeeping efforts in Israel/Palestine, but also why no one really talks about "UN peacekeeping" anymore, and how the idea of peacekeeping has changed from the Balkans through the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine how the balance of global power shifted with the fall of the USSR, the rise of China and the expansion of NATO.
  4. Third-world debt and the IMF leads to the PIIGS and the Great Recession, which leads to first world sovereign debt, the recent inflation and global trade and telecommunications. Your students probably don't appreciate how new and remarkable it is that you, a private citizen, can sit in your bed with your phone and just buy something from someone in China. Or how expensive it used to be to call other countries. Which in turn leads to how much those capabilities depend on international infrastructure that turns out to be pretty vulnerable to sabotage, or satellites, which is a good time to bring up the changes in the space industry and how that might shape the world going forward.
  • Current existential threats: AI, pandemics, nuclear proliferation (and Lybia, Ukraine, NK, Iran show the incentives for/against a country pursuing nuclear weapons)
  • The rise of global trade: semiconductor markets, shipping lanes (compare to Roman Roads), global financial markets / how and why the USD is the global currency
  • Global telecom and instantaneous communication
  • Geopolitical balance of power, the fall of Russia as a power and the rise of China (as economic powers). Since ~2017, chinese GDP has been higher (PPP) than US GDP.
  • Chinese demographics (and the big question of economics in a shrinking population), China and Taiwan/Hong Kong (back to its origin in opium wars)
  • Chinese dependency on the West: China imports fuel and food, exports manufactured goods.
  • US military build-up in the Pacific vs. South China sea as a barrier to US containment
  • Hybrid warfare
  • Not current issue, but a fun thing for me to think about: "how to raise a country into an economic miracle" (Korea) vs. "how to destroy a country" (Venezuela, Gosplan). The relevant point I would emphasize is that you need some unit of value (money) which signals the amount of resources which go into a product, and which signals how many resources people are willing to give up for that product. This distributed computation cannot be efficiently centralized!
  • Within the US, the financialization of corporations and rising power of private equity/monopolies: downfall of Boeing (funneling money into stock buybacks), PE firms buying real estate and setting up local dental monopolies, market power being abused to add junk fees and raise prices (Ticketmaster), etc.

I think for me a big issue is the polarization of the United States. It’s probably not completely unprecedented, but it’s crazy to my self raised in the 1980s and 1990s that we live in a world where half of the country views the other half as subversive if not dangerous. I don’t think if you’d go back to 1985 and said that in 2025, people would consider the president elect a danger to democracy— especially given that such a sentiment is not a fringe thing, a major political party, hell the current president, have said so. I don’t think, other than the American Civil War, you had something quite so polarized.

The 70’s saw left wing bombing campaigns on U.S. soil.

I don’t think, other than the American Civil War, you had something quite so polarized.

The 60's and 70's were absolutely that polarized, as were the '50s for some conservative groups. Things were always both wilder and more normal than you think in the past.

The problem is that the woke-vs-Trump split is absolutely impossible to discuss dispassionatly in a classroom. My own position ('a pox on both your houses!') (which is obviously very dispassionate, neutral and objectively correct) would likely earn me fire from both of the big factions.

It has been said that Politics is the Mind-Killer.

The thing about elephants in the room is that sometimes, acknowledging them will cause them to rip your head off (metaphorical elephants, at least, I think actual elephants are mostly peaceful), so it is much safer to tiptoe around them and confine your lecture to elephants which are safely in another continent.

Of course, you want your students to engage in political discussions about stuff which actually affects them, not the politics of of the French revolution, but you also want them to have civilized disagreements and arguments, not to start killing each other.

Pick a topic which students have feelings about, but which is not partisan-politics-coded. i.e. daylight saving times -- it is safe, if slightly boring. Every student has to deal with them (or their absence), but few will pick that as their hill to die on. Local issues.

I think actual elephants are mostly peaceful

No they are not. Elephants are very dangerous animals.

Way I remember from the last time I did research, elephants are in the top 20 (or is it top 10?) killers of humans, but a lot of those are accidental. Some elephants (especially adolescent males) deliberately target humans, especially in retaliation for humans killing elephants ... but I remember one story where some young elephants drank from some barrels of fermenting alcohol on the outskirts of a village, got super drunk, and destroyed the village in their drunken rampage.

So, uh, mostly peaceful but simultaneously way more dangerous than the majority of animals humans are likely to interact with in general.

Fiery but mostly peaceful elephants

I honestly don’t think at least at present, that politics is polarized because it’s so important. Political in the past was important because the people who generally discussed them were important people, and thus it mattered to them. In most systems, other than signaling loyalty to the regime, there’s nothing much at stake here. And even if it did, from an evolutionary standpoint, democracy is extremely young— 250 some years since the American and French Revolutions. 250 years from an evolutionary perspective is nothing. Furthermore, even in democratic systems, the average Prole has almost no actual power. The legitimacy of the system requires his consent, but he himself has almost no power over any of the decisions that actually affect his life.

So from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, there’s no reason to care about politics. Even from a practical perspective, there’s no rational reason to care about politics. The opinion of the proles has never mattered on those kinds of politics. And weirdly enough, as you bring up local politics, it’s long been my personal observation that the more power a person has on a political system, the less interested people actually become in learning or talking about it. You can get millions of engagements talking about trans issues that you can’t affect. Nobody but the die hard political junkies know who sits on the school board or the county board or even the state legislature. The people in those seats can still be affected by local citizens. Nobody really cares, and those politics are boring.

In my view, the reason for politics being so divisive is just how little power most people have over the direction of the country. It’s basically a topic that lets you feel powerful, important, and smugly right. At the same time anyone rational knows that if you’re talking about national politics, their opinion doesn’t actually matter. I want to dump the entire science budget into building an albucurre warp drive. It’s not happening because nobody actually cares what I think. The only reason that I matter is that I’m supposed to buy into the idea that because we all voted and that guy won, that “We The People” have spoken and “We” have decided that giving Ukraine the go ahead to fire long range missiles into Russia is a good idea. “We” decided no such thing. Biden did. And this is the way politics works in democratic societies— you must follow the news and vote correctly even though you actually don’t have any power other than giving the system legitimacy. Thus political issues become nothing but identical signaling and pretended power in a place where you don’t have to worry about being right, just making a lot of mouth-noises.

I would honestly contend that you could easily turn down the temperature of politics by giving people actual skin in the game. If voting had consequences beyond the draperies in the Oval Office or which mug you’d see on TV for 4 years, people wouldn’t use it as an identity for social networking purposes. They’d actually care who wins because they want specific things to happen.

I agree with one of your main points--people don't engage in the local politics where they have the most impact--but I disagree that political discussions are powerless. Let's take the trans issues in particular:

You can get millions of engagements talking about trans issues that you can’t affect.

In my experience, whenever trans issues come up in person (so not with strangers online), the discussion serves a very important social function: my social circle is coordinating understanding of how to appropriately act/react if someone we know says they're trans. If my social circle cannot come to a single view on the matter, at least we get to identify who feels strongly about the issue and in which direction, and then act accordingly.

And, in my experience, the way such conversation don't start out with "So and so is trans, how should we react?". They start out as "I heard [some news item about a trans-person]...", followed by a qualified personal reaction. Talking about people who we don't know provides an important emotional distance, even if it's a topic someone is passionate about (one way of another), to feel out where other people stand.

Take my Liberal suburbanite friend Judy, who has a twelve-year-old daughter. Judy starts the conversation with "I heard about that High-school teenager in [another state] who assaulted a girl in the girl's bathroom." Then we do a verbal dance around trans rights / sexual assault. Once Judy is satisfied that I know that she's in principle for trans rights, and she heard me make appropriately qualified noises about protecting girls from predators, only then she brings up how there is this trans kid in her daughter's class and her daughter now doesn't go to the bathroom between bells but instead keeps asking for a hall pass during the class after lunch, and the math teacher brought this up and an issue during the parent-teacher conference last Wednesday.

Geopolitical balance of power, the fall of Russia as a power and the rise of China (as economic powers). Since ~2017, chinese GDP has been higher (PPP) than US GDP.

Perhaps more important than Russia falling and China rising is Russia and China getting friendlier with one another. The Sino-Soviet split was a major factor in the Soviet loss of the Cold War; now, Russia and China are becoming a single anti-American bloc again.

Both yes and no. There is still popular anti-Chinese sentiment in Russia, and as American missiles strike targets in Russia, you find American rap playing on Russian radio stations, not a single Chinese song can be found

I mean, does China have pop music that's popular anywhere in the world outside of China? I can go on youtube and find videos of rap, rock, country, and pop music concerts aping American artists in most major countries, speaking a variety of languages; American artists are extremely popular in Europe, Latin America, Africa, etc. I'm unaware of any Chinese equivalents.

China. The world issue is China. In 1600 China was 29% of world GDP. By 1913 it was 8%. A small island nation on the fringes of Europe was capable of crossing the entire globe and imposing it's will upon the Heavenly Kingdom. Austria-Hungary, that corpse of an empire, would send troops to fight the Boxers. Germany had concession near Beijing.

Today the Chinese fraction of world GDP is back to ~20% and rising. It has aircraft carriers. It's the number one trading partner of almost every nation on earth. It's over 50% of world steel production. Over 50% of concrete production. Every single supply chain in the world interacts with China. In 1990 Shenzhen has 800k people. Today it has over 17 million. An entire NYC greater metro area has been birthed between that book in 1992 and today. And every country in the world has to adjust. The entire globe has gone from treating China as a non-issue to having to reconcile the return of China to global affairs. A world stage unseen for literally hundreds of years. What does the Chinese leadership want? How integrated should each nation be with it? How can any global treaty be efficacious if China is not on board?

Do you want to affect climate change? China is over 50% of global coal consumption. Chinese domestic coal consumption is a World Issue.

Do you want to affect global poverty? Chinese development alone has done the majority of lifting the global poor out of poverty, by sheer population scale. Any growing market today has to consider China as a factor, whereas previously the only game in town was the West.

Global security? World Peace? China. Now that Russia has torn itself asunder in Ukraine China is the last source of Great Power conflict.

For the longest time 'global issues' were just a proxy for 'concerns of the global community'. which in turn just meant this map. Now every country, on all issues, has to deal with sheer scale of the factor that China is back.

I think China is a self-limiting issue. Its population is aging and shrinking. Its diplomacy is nonexistent: you can name multiple countries in the G20 that consider American problems their own. Does China have any friends? Russia and Pakistan are allies of convenience at most.

Does China have any friends?

North Korea kinda sorta?

Now that Russia has torn itself asunder in Ukraine China is the last source of Great Power conflict.

We are literally in a proxy war with Russia right now and regardless of whatever happens with their conventional forces, they still have thousands of H-bombs.

Though I agree fully with your main point, China does overlap into everything else - tech, energy, trade, politics...

Now that Russia has torn itself asunder

100,000 dead or so the Russians have isn't the end of the place. Arguably the 300-500K dead isn't perhaps even the end for Ukraine, as they're largely older people and they'll be able to preserve their independent western/central Ukraine without a doubt.

I...kinda feel like by the same logic that China is The World Issue one could argue that The United States is The World Issue.

I definitely think it's good for people to know about China and whatever they happen to be up to, and I agree that whatever it does impacts the world. But that's also true of the United States, the EU at a minimum, and I'd think Russia and India as well.

PS –Russia conventional [ground] forces now are stronger than they were before the conflict (as per statements from US DoD officials.) It's plausible that they will end up being more important to the Course of the Next Century than China.

I would completely agree that the World Issue is also the United States. I consider the important difference to be that of familiarity. Countries have been navigating a world with the US as a Great Power for 100 years, and as a Superpower for 30-60 depending on your definition. China is relatively new, and every country, ngo, and ethnicity has to navigate that space of what it means for them now that China's back.

In the 50's China was still 80%+ farming. In the 70's it was still 77% farming. Today it affects every single industrial chain in the world and the Pentagon is tearing it's hair out trying to figure out how to build anything without it relying on Chinese firms at some point. The Great Divergence was an assumed global condition.

Behold this comparative composition of world GDP by country over time.

The world has known a what it means on a daily basis to deal with European & American global dominance. But that Chinese trendline? That collapse 200 years ago and sharp rise to today? That's something new. Because it's one thing when a country is massive but it's pre-industrial. Zheng He sought tribute, not Naval bases in Djibouti. This is a genuine arrival of a new industrial power on a world scale. And every country from Colombia to Kenya has to account for it.

I'd love to read those US DoD comments if you can drag up the link. Not challenging it as wrong. Just enjoy reading this kinda stuff.

Yeah – I think all of these are good points. I guess "China" and, I dunno, "global warming" strike me as different sorts of issues, although as you point out they are all intertwined.

I'd love to read those US DoD comments if you can drag up the link. Not challenging it as wrong. Just enjoy reading this kinda stuff.

Oh sure, same here. Not that I mind being challenged :)

Here's an example from September from Voice of America: US Air Force general: Russia military larger, better than before Ukraine invasion

Here's another example in the Hill from March, that I think is a bit more in-depth: US general says Russian army has grown by 15 percent since pre-Ukraine war

Main takeaways:

  • Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the head of U.S. European Command, said Thursday that Russia’s army has grown by 15 percent since before the invasion of Ukraine, raising the alarm that Russian forces are reconstituting “far faster” than initial estimates suggested.
  • In written statements, Cavoli said Russia has also lost about 10 percent of its air force and more than 2,000 tanks on the battlefield. Moscow has also been beaten back in the Black Sea by Ukraine, but he said the Russian naval activity is at a “worldwide peak.”
  • Cavoli said in his written testimony that Russia is expected to produce more ammunition than all 32 NATO allies combined per year and is on track to “command the largest military on the continent and a defense industrial complex capable of generating substantial amounts of ammunition and materiel in support of large scale combat operations.”

(Note that the written testimony is doubtless floating around on a .senate.gov website somewhere, I just haven't bothered to track it down.)

My thoughts, fwiw:

Historically, militaries that are not defeated during a conflict often (maybe even typically) are stronger after the conflict than before. It seems to me that Russia will be much the same, with the largest army in Europe and the most experienced army in the world (with relevant experience defeating frontline NATO technology) after the war in Ukraine is over. I think it's true that a lot of their Soviet inheritance will be spent, but I'm not sure (as per e.g. the statement above) they couldn't stock back up more aggressively than the West – which, likewise, has spent much of its Cold War inheritance.

I also don't think the injuries inflicted on Russia are "minor" – Russia has lost a lot of modern armor, and huge portions of their rotary and fixed-wing aviation. For instance, Russia is estimated to have lost about a quarter (40ish out of 150ish) of its Su-34 strike aircraft. Based on past orders, it probably will take at least two years to reconstitute their forces, assuming no more are lost. But on the flip side, the war spurred innovation, such as the production of much-needed glide bombs, that make the remaining Su-34 fleet much more lethal.

From the American perspective, I continue to believe that the true threat to American hegemony is more likely to be China. But I think Russia continues to be a live player, and its actions in Ukraine, rather than dooming it to irrelevance, seem on balance poised to make it more important and relevant in the future.

Plummeting fertility rates.

I think this is probably the one. I'd put space travel in there. Suspect that pollution (microplastics!?) might come around to being a Big Deal Again, at least in The Discourse. Same with Climate Change. But not sure if either of them will be as important as fertility rates, or even space travel.

As an old, I don't really play video games. But it's weird to me that the video game industry is so woke considering that the user base is so anti-woke. Why aren't there anti-woke game publishers?

Proposed answer: Political selection of devs.

Video games companies need developers who are competent, willing to work for low wages, and willing to tolerate long working hours. This is a tough sell. Competent devs in the US can easily earn 200-500k with cushy working conditions. Why get paid less than half as much and be subjected to semiannual death marches?

As a result of this rotten bargain, the men who choose this field will tend to be young, not have families, and be fixated on video games. Frankly, this is going to select for autists. To the extent that autism and MtF trans are correlated, I would expect that video game developers are trans at a rate at least far above the norm. This might explain a lot of the soy-type politics espoused by major game studios.

There's clearly a market opportunity for non-woke game publishers. But could they get devs? Conservative men tend to work in the field that pays them the best, allowing them to support their family. They aren't out there making children's toys.

Does this explanation make sense? Or is this just a $20 bill sitting on the sidewalk?

Do you consider Slay the Spire to be woke? Elden Ring? Bloodborne? Mario? Pokemon? The Persona series?

Where is the line drawn?

Dude I don’t know. I assume none of these games have explicitly anti-woke themes. Correct me if I’m wrong.

"Anti-woke" as criteria is the trouble.

The main game series we can consider "explicitly" anti-woke is the Postal series, and that devolved into cynical, low-complexity slop immediately. If the criteria of "anti-woke" was clearer, it would be easier to find a game that fits.

2016 Doom's main antagonist is a lesbianesque woman, and only the Doomguy can stop her, and Eternal even makes a few digs at hr wokeness with lines akin to "we like to think of the demons destroying earth as mortally challenged".

Relaxing it to 'games conservative white males can enjoy without feeling attacked for existing' widens those horizons dramatically.

Yeah, I mentioned this before, but it seems like the best we ever get are games that are accidentally "based". As in, they might have a conventionally attractive woman with a pleasant personality. Or they depict a happy, cis heteronormative family. They might not even be mixed! Maybe they depict men as capable protectors and providers, or wise sovereigns, without some fucking girlboss with zero flaws who's just obviously better than them in every way because woman.

Basically totally ubiquitous shit from before 2012, which is now so atypical and rare people push them up on pedestals as "based" or "anti-woke" just for normal. Meanwhile game journos are praising a game where you get butt fucked by a bear as game of the year.

"Anti-woke" as criteria is the trouble.

Sure. But the same should apply to woke games. Why are (apparently) some huge percentage of games pushing a failed, corrupt ideology on consumers?

If the games matched the consumer they would be like this:

  • 10% woke
  • 80% non-woke
  • 10% anti-woke

Instead, it's apparently more like this:

  • 50% woke
  • 45% non-woke
  • 5% anti-woke

Seems like an obvious fix right?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about why this happens in Skin in the Game. You can read the relevant chapter here.

Basically, the most intolerant minority tends to win, when there aren't high transaction costs to cater to them. Jews won't drink non-kosher beverages, but gentiles will drink kosher beverages, so most drinks in the United States are kosher. Back when restaurants still had smoking sections, a non-smoker could sit in a smoking section and not smoke, but a smoker couldn't sit in a non-smoking section and smoke. Etc., etc.

Relating this back to woke, anti-woke and non-woke. I suspect most people who are anti-woke will still buy most woke games. They might grumble about female protagonists, unappealing female characters, and every romancable character being Schroedinger's bisexual, but most of them will still buy a triple-A game that has all these features. On the other hand, the woke and non-woke will not buy a game whose explicit purpose is to reinforce anti-woke ideas (anti-trans, anti-cosmopolitan, conservative, trad, anti-LGBT, etc.) As a result, games end up either woke or non-woke, with a vanishingly small contingent of anti-woke games catering to a tiny segment of the market.

They used to buy those games. But increasingly “woke” games are now associated with fundamentally broken or derivative technical/design aspects and are starting to flop. For example:

-Concord: a game you have to pay 60 dollars for that’s worse than a free game that came out 10 years ago

-Star Wars Outlaws: broken AI and particle effects that look like they came out out of a 1996 Tomb Raider game.

-Assassin’s Creed Shadows: the 400th derivative remake of the first Assassin’s Creed game from 2007.

There are exceptions, like Baulder’s Gate which was pretty woke and had solid underlying mechanics, but increasingly AAA games are just a garbage fire of slop.

I would build out the model as something like: If there is a genuinely good woke video game with solid mechanics and few competitors, most anti-woke people will still buy them.

I think most slop isn't bought by non-woke normies, let alone wokies themselves. The question is whether "it's woke" is being advanced as the whole reason for the game's marketability, or is just a big part of the story.

Though arguable, video games are already one of the most gender egalitarian artistic mediums. Plenty of strategy games like XCOM make no distinction between male units or female units, and there's plenty of Amazonian protagonists in the medium.

Note that all of those but Slay the Spire come out of Japan.

Mega crit is An american group (of 2 guys) Anthony Giovannetti and Casey Yano, who live in Seattle.

That's what he said?

yes I was just adding more details as to who they were!

It's consistent with what I said, but adds more details. I think it further weakens the objection to the original post as well: Every game on the list is either Japanese or made by a team small enough not to be infested with entryists.

You just named 5 Japanese products and one indie title? That's almost an argument in favor of the DEI-ification of western media. Japan hasn't become woke yet.

And even then the international consultants will recommend changing Male/Female to body type A/B. The localizers will further censor it (particularly Nintendo).

Am I remembering correctly that @ZorbaTHut is a dev for video games? If that's right, he might have opinions on the things in this thread.

He probably does, but talking about them too much could also be a career limiting move...

The fundamental problem of being a typical software developer, in my opinion, is that it's essentially creative work that in practice runs like factory assembly line work because of business pressures, Darwinian pressures, Moloch (in the Scott Alexander sense), whatever you want to call it. I am not sure that "autists" do better at it because they have some special hyper-ability at it, I feel that it is more that "autists" (when I use that term I do not mean the psychology definition, I mean the pop culture one) do better at it because they care less about other ways of spending their time than someone like I does, so they just simply have more time that they are willing to devote to this often interesting but also often very dry activity, whereas I get bored and want to go do something that does not involve looking at a screen.

Being a software developer in a typical CRUD software company is kind of like being a novelist whose job depends on being able to write 12 decent novels a year. It doesn't psychologically work unless you're one of those rare people who lives and breathes engineering.

The fact that tech people have gone from being seen as geeks to being seen as billionaires is more meaningful than some people understand. This did not happen because the geeks developed better social skills, although they did. I agree with Marxists about little, but I do agree with them that politics is usually downstream of economics and technology. The geeks are taking over the world in part because the technology that they have helped to build has changed the calculus of the kinds of jobs that pay a decent living. On a deeper level, the reality is that the geeks are not any more in control of what is happening than anyone else is. The world situation is racing towards things we can barely predict, not so much because any people or groups of people are guiding it, but because there is a cold calculus of power that follows its own Darwinian logic. The global techno-human organism is stirring. Speaking of which, where is IlForte/DaseIndustries nowadays? I disagreed with probably more than half of his viewpoints, but I kind of understand his bleak outlook that values technological development over everything else when trying to comprehend the future.

I think that at some point the increasing development of technology will bump against some fundamental limits of Homo Sapiens and its ability to tolerate increasing techno-cyborg extensions of itself beyond its original nature. The "autists" of the world often do not understand this, they seem to have largely grown up in peaceful suburbs reading science fiction and fantasy novels in which the heroes they identify with generally win, and the current level of techno-cyborg extensions are not yet past their own abilities to master them, so they do not understand that total calamity that is possible, not from any particular fault of theirs - if they refused to play their role, others would be found by Darwinian force to do it eventually - but I do think it is interesting to see how the very people who are driving tech forward the most generally do not realize that what is happening is not that the geeks are finally winning... what is actually happening is that the geeks are just the instrument of a Nick Landian gigantic paradigm shift that cares nothing about the particular human beings that make up a part of its slow grasping forward. The "autists" are better able to be the inadvertent foot soldiers of all this because they are less affected by how being a human with emotions rubs up against the cold logic of power, they can compartmentalize it better than the average human can.

And so evolution grinds on. The good side of it is that living conditions for the average person in the West are much better than they were a few hundred years ago. It is much better to be a modern Westerner than to be some serf in the year 1200. That is a real phenomenon. The problem is that we're still going to die, so people still care about meaning, not just statistics. Knowing that you will die makes you want meaning, and meaning is something that software and geeks cannot deliver. Nor can Moloch. Indeed, Moloch is an antithesis of meaning. Western humanity marches forward to existences in which we are much physically safer than we were in the times of roving warlord gangs, which was the reality for most of human history. But that is perhaps little joy for an aware person in a world that is rushing by the cold calculus of Darwinian logic into a future in which the things that make being a human worthwhile are becoming less pragmatic.

There are a lot of good video games made by teams (or individuals) that don't go out of the way to alienate their fans.

I think that a lot of the Discourse is generated by big games that are put out by relatively big companies that are very vulnerable to being targeted and controlled or influenced by activists (some people talk about "skin-suiting" in this context.)

I generally don't play your typical AAA or AAAA games and focus more on strategy/4X or other even more niche areas of gaming and I very rarely or never feel like I would be interested in a game but am concerned that it will be "woke."

I agree that there might be a market out there for an "anti-woke" vidya game manufacturer, and I think the raw talent is there (or could be gotten together eventually) but I suspect that simply not attacking parts of your player base is a perfectly fine solution that is practiced by large parts of the industry.

Proposed answer: Political selection of devs.

I mean, it's the political orientation of devs.

From personal experience, the vast majority of competent and brilliant software engineers are either progressive or turbo-liberals. It's an unfortunate truth, but conservatives have to face reality here -- there is no hidden trove of right-leaning engineers waiting in the wings to take over.

I thought that the Grey Tribe also had its share of good programmers. But perhaps I am typical-minding here.

Personally, I see modern progressivism as largely performative, you keep your pride flag up to date, do land acknowledgements or whatever is en wogue right now to signal tribe membership.

A few of the great coders I know are conservative at least in their choice of tools. Rather than eagerly awaiting the next release of their IDE, you would have to pry their vim from their cold dead hands and like to compile their code in hand-crafted makefiles using gcc -std=c89 or some such.

While the one behavior does not necessarily preclude the other, a combination of both would nevertheless feel a bit incongruent.

But perhaps this is my own perception, or my own bubble.

It does, but it's not the majority. Brendan Eich was clearly brilliant as was Bill Gates, but there's a lot more Gates' just due to programmers largely being the kids of the PMC and inheriting their political affiliations along with the high IQ.

Also, I don't think political/social conservatism and appetite for change are all that correlated. I knew a cracked engineer that was extremely right wing but was always eager to try and asses new technologies and trends. Of course, if it was shit, he would say so, but if it was good he would be the first adopter and bring everyone along as well. YMMV, anecdote != data.

There is an old saw that says that a man is often most conservative about what he knows best.

From personal experience, the vast majority of competent and brilliant software engineers are either progressive or turbo-liberals.

By "turbo-liberal" here are you including libertarian types? They have existed as a consistent minority within software development since at least ESR's day, but I don't think they're as party-aligned as they might have been at the time.

I do think there's probably a poorly-researched difference in political alignment across the software spectrum: there are big differences in how front-end, back-end, embedded, and medical/aviation/automotive/defense (validation!) developers are tasked with thinking that probably selects for political persuasions. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if more left-leaning developers are prone to be more involved with public development (open source, conferences, etc), while self-driven solo developers (Linus circa 1993, Carmack, and such) have a different bent.

By "turbo-liberal" here are you including libertarian types? They have existed as a consistent minority within software development since at least ESR's day, but I don't think they're as party-aligned as they might have been at the time.

Turbo-lib here meaning the PMC version of limousine liberal -- performative and extra.

The libertarian streak is definitely present -- although it took a bit of a backseat during COVID -- but it's not as defining of a feature as liberalism. Moreover the rise of FAANG has lead a lot of those with libertarianish sentiments to think of government as the agent for vindicating liberty against the excesses of private power. I tend to think that's rather a silly view, but here we are.

there are big differences in how front-end, back-end, embedded, and medical/aviation/automotive/defense (validation!) developers are tasked with thinking that probably selects for political persuasions.

By “tasked with thinking” you mean what they think about/do on the job?

I’m curious as to what your perspective is on how that influences the politics of these groups, but IMO defense developers skew much further right than the others not because of the type of engineering work, but rather because working for the military/MIC codes as Red Tribe

Yes, that's what I was trying to describe. Front-end web development is a lot heavier on "user experience" and, for lack of a better term, art, while something like fintech C++ developers are concerned about absolute minimal latency (processor cache misses, pipeline hazards, memory access patterns), and your automotive embedded developers are tuning physical control systems. My guess would be that user-facing developers, especially for non-business users, are more likely to lean more progressive because they really do need to worry more about accessibility (internationalization, screen reader support, color-blindness-friendly palettes) than kernel developers, which seems to me to at least loosely fit the people-focused vs. thing-focused spectrum that seems to already have a bit of a political valence.

I agree that the further backend/lower-level you go, the more systematizing, as opposed to empathizing, engineering becomes.

However, I think this maps to the greater autistic-ness (in the colloquial sense) of backend/low-level devs (and I wouldn’t be surprised if this held true even for the strict medical definition of autism). It’s not obvious to me that greater autistic-ness maps cleanly to more right-wing political views; for example, anecdatally, transwomen represent greater percentages of engineers as you go deeper into backend/low-level infra work, but I’d be shocked if any of them identified as Red Tribe in any way.

Perhaps there is a case to be made that autistics tend towards individualist rather than collectivist views. But neither Red nor Blue can be rightly deemed the tribe of individualists, per se.

But neither Red nor Blue can be rightly deemed the tribe of individualists, per se.

I would argue that they are both quite individualist, but don't get marked as individualist because invididualism is so baked into American society that it's invisible to Americans. Both Republicans and Democrats discuss their ideas in terms of individual rights ("2A! Religious freedom! Freedom of speech! Right to life! My body, my choice! Constitutional right to an abortion, that SCOTUS took away! Trans people's right to exist! Civil rights!") and while there are grumblings of genuine collectivism in both parties, such views don't have much power.

Collectivism believes that rights come with duties -- and even the French Revolution's great document included disussion of "the rights and duties of man and the citizen." When's the last time American discourse had a real discussion of "the duties of man and the citizen?"

I mean, read some of the stuff even the French Revolutionaries wrote:

The obligations of each person to society consist in defending it, serving it, living in submission to the laws, and respecting those who are the agents of them.

Every citizen owes his services to the fatherland and to the maintenance of liberty, equality, and property whenever the law summons him to defend them.

No one is a virtuous man unless he is unreservedly and religiously an observer of the laws.

And my favorite two:

The one who violates the laws openly declares himself in a state of war with society.

The one who, without transgressing the laws, eludes them by stratagem or ingenuity wounds the interests of all; he makes himself unworthy of their good will and their esteem.

But of course American discourse involves no discussion of such things; they're anathema. Even the farthest of the far right would shudder at saying such things out loud! Even our legal system involves many complex financial instruments designed "by stratagem or ingenuity" to avoid taxation, and a major theory of American legal thought argues that there is nothing immoral about breaching a solemn contract!

Pure libertarians are definitely individualist, but also marginal, because most Americans have some level of collectivist ideals even if they fall well short of the global and historical norm.

Yeah, the defenestration of Brendan Eich was one of the first big moves of the Awokening. High level devs just tend to be lefties, it doesn't have to be all of them just enough to make it SEEM like its all of them and keep righties in the closet (and Damore the ones who don't), and the unaligned will mostly go along with whichever group seems to be in the majority.

At the time of Eichgate Eichpot Dome Eich Mobilier Let's go Brendan whatever we're calling the matter, I was just beginning to follow the rationalist sphere; the wokists, then called 'social justice warriors' or 'SJWs', had not yet burned all their credibility, and I still looked with favour on the movement, despite dis-agreeing with it when I felt it was wrong.

I thus held the following Views on their actions:

  1. Desiring that the State offer privileges to opposite-sex couples that are un-available to same-sex couples, ceteris paribus, constitutes animus against gay people.
  2. A person who harbours animus against gay people ought not be the CEO of a company, as they cannot be trusted to take sufficient action should gay employees face discrimination from their supervisors or harassment from their colleagues. (The same applies to the head of the HR department.)
  3. However, such animus ought not be dis-qualifying for other positions; had Mr Eich been dismissed as CTO, CFO, EIEIO, Assistant Regional Manager, Assistant To The Regional Manager, or Deputy Assistant Head Of Purchasing For Custom-Colour Office Supplies Such As Red Staplers, despite not having acted on his animus while on the job, one could reasonably argue said dismissal to be an act of injustice.

Accepting (2) here is really wild. For one, it's quite hypothetical -- perhaps such discrimination never even occurs. Or perhaps it occurs and some lower-level management handles it appropriately. Or perhaps it occurs and Mr Eich recuses himself from the response and delegates it to his COO or other suitable entity. There are a half dozen ways that any putative animus need not have any impact on gay employees at all.

And even if it does come to Mr Eich to decide on the response (for whatever reason the CEO really handling such mundane personnel decisions), it's hypothetical that he would not conclude that he had to set his animus aside and decide on the merits. Either for his own ethical sense or at the advice of counsel.

hypothetical

Many bad things are hypothetical, but we guard against them anyway. It's quite hypothetical that Mozilla headquarters catches on fire, but we still insist that they have fire-alarms, sprinklers, and stairwells with doors and walls that won't burn through in less than two hours.

Furthermore, the CEO having given support to government discrimination against gay people signals to gay employees 'You Are Not Welcome Here', to homophobic employees that they are more likely to get away with mis-conduct aimed at gay people, and to managers dealing with said mis-conduct by sub-ordinates that a vigorous response to said mis-conduct might not be appreciated.

Yes, but fire safety equipment doesn't require excluding anyone for their political views, which is itself its own negative.

Anyway, you could run the entire argument in reverse except signaling that folks can get away with discrimination based on anti-marriage-equality views. Or anything. At this level of hypothetical one could justify excluding anyone.

Furthermore, the CEO having given support to government discrimination against gay people signals to gay employees 'You Are Not Welcome Here', to homophobic employees that they are more likely to get away with mis-conduct aimed at gay people, and to managers dealing with said mis-conduct by sub-ordinates that a vigorous response to said mis-conduct might not be appreciated.

This seems like the kind of thing that one would actually need to prove with empirical evidence. As best as I can tell, there's no evidence that someone donating to a mainstream cause against gay marriage would lead to any such downstream effects in their professional conduct in their workplace, or that gay employees in general (versus gay employees of a certain ideological stripe) tend to interpret their boss's political views against gay marriage as being a signal about how welcome they are in the workplace.

Affirmative Action is discrimination against jews, asians, and whites (in that order). Should someone who has contributed a few hundred bucks to the democratic party which works in favor of that ALSO not be allowed to be a CEO? Or does this just apply to causes lefties care about?

Desiring that the State offer privileges to opposite-sex couples that are un-available to same-sex couples, ceteris paribus, constitutes animus against gay people

You made a version of this argument when we were discussing immigration. It seems that you have a strong belief that there is no acceptable reason (without animus) to treat one group of people separately from another. Is this correct?

Heterosexual and homosexual people cannot be regarded as literally exactly the same. There is a clear characteristic that distinguishes them: having intercourse with members of the same sex vs the opposite sex. Likewise, a heterosexual marriage is not literally exactly the same as a homosexual marriage: in one, two people of the same sex are marrying, in the other, two members of the opposite sex.

Anyone can regard this distinction as being relevant or as being irrelevant. Someone who believes that marriage is primarily about financial cooperation, or about publicly celebrating subjective affection, may regard the distinction as irrelevant. Equally, someone who regards marriage as being the joining of two complementary sexes to form a well-rounded whole, or as the basis for the creation and nurturing of genetic offspring, will see the homosexual / heterosexual distinction as highly relevant. No animus is required, though of course it may be present.

And this applies in all sorts of cases. Consider paraplegic sports. There is a distinction between an able-bodied person pedalling a bicycle, and a paraplegic operating an electrically powered bicycle. Depending on what you think sports are for, one might regard this difference as important, and split these cases into separate leagues, or one might not. Discrimination between them would not necessarily indicate animus against the disabled, but instead, say, a belief in the importance of fair competition as opposed to the importance of building community spirit.

In short, I do not believe it is sensible to maintain a moral system that regards evidence of discrimination as evidence of animus or unfairness, because people differ on so many axes that a reasonable person may find relevant.

It seems that you have a strong belief that there is no acceptable reason (without animus) to treat one group of people separately from another. Is this correct?

I believe that right and wrong consist in how one treats individual human beings; 'committing a wrong against a group' is an abstraction of wrongs committed against individual members of that group. Thus I would phrase it more as "Membership in a group is not an acceptable reason to treat one person worse than another."

Likewise, a heterosexual marriage is not literally exactly the same as a homosexual marriage: in one, two people of the same sex are marrying, in the other, two members of the opposite sex.

Anyone can regard this distinction as being relevant or as being irrelevant.

The distinction is irrelevant with regard to the State. For legitimate government purposes, 'same/different genital configuration' of the persons marrying is approximately as relevant as 'same/different astrological sign', or 'same/different final digit in Social Security Number'.

Someone who believes that marriage is primarily about financial cooperation, or about publicly celebrating subjective affection, may regard the distinction as irrelevant. Equally, someone who regards marriage as being the joining of two complementary sexes to form a well-rounded whole, or as the basis for the creation and nurturing of genetic offspring, will see the homosexual / heterosexual distinction as highly relevant.

The government's interests in marriage largely involve 'financial cooperation', along with things like 'this person is in hospital, unconscious; whom do we ask about their wishes: the person with whom they have lived for two decades, or their parents who kicked them out when they were 16?'.

'The joining of two complementary sexes to form a well-rounded whole', being, if not a religious belief per se, at least religion-adjacent, is not a legitimate foundation for government policy. 'Nurturing of genetic offspring' is also, while easily pattern-matched to the legitimate government interest in ensuring that children are cared for by someone, not a valid argument against same-sex marriage, as a same-sex couple can adopt children or conceive via surrogacy or gamete donation, and opposite-sex couples in which one or both members are infertile are not excluded from government marriage.

This applies to civil marriage; a church which teaches the doctrine of 'complementary sexes forming a well-rounded whole' and thus only solemnising opposite-sex marriages is a different matter. There were proposals made that the State withdraw from the business of marriage entirely, issue 'civil unions' to couples without regard to gender, and leave 'marriage' to religious organisations, which could set whatever criteria they darn well pleased.

If such a proposal had been on the ballot, support thereof would not constitute animus against gay people.

'The joining of two complementary sexes to form a well-rounded whole', being, if not a religious belief per se, at least religion-adjacent, is not a legitimate foundation for government policy. 'Nurturing of genetic offspring' is also, while easily pattern-matched to the legitimate government interest in ensuring that children are cared for by someone, not a valid argument against same-sex marriage, as a same-sex couple can adopt children or conceive via surrogacy or gamete donation, and opposite-sex couples in which one or both members are infertile are not excluded from government marriage.

Everything about this is wrong by the standards of any civilization in western history. The government has always had a sacral function and the sacred rites aren’t always theological in nature but always have a foundation in ideas of right ordering. Every western government has been very concerned with the legitimate propagation of citizen children. Etc, etc.

Thus I would phrase it more as "Membership in a group is not an acceptable reason to treat one person worse than another."

I don't believe "group membership" was ever a significant factor of the issue. It was always the characteristics of the specific individuals involved. E.g., nobody ever campaigned against allowing a gay man to get married to a woman.

'The joining of two complementary sexes to form a well-rounded whole', being, if not a religious belief per se, at least religion-adjacent, is not a legitimate foundation for government policy

This is only true if you take for granted a very modern libertine view of the role of government. In reality, "religion-adjacent" concepts like morality, justice, and the promotion of human flourishing have more or less always been the proper aim of law, since prehistory. The movement for gay marriage won not by persuading some people that these are illegitimate ends but by persuading them that gay marriage does not in fact have any negative consequences along those lines. However, not everyone was persuaded by that judgment, and it is not an act of hatred to be skeptical, a mere handful of years hence, that that foretold negative consequences will never manifest.

The distinction is irrelevant with regard to the State. For legitimate government purposes, 'same/different genital configuration' of the persons marrying is approximately as relevant as 'same/different astrological sign', or 'same/different final digit in Social Security Number'.

That's simply not the case. The state has a vested interest in stable family configurations that produce children that grow up to be healthy citizens, and that's exactly why marriage is a recognized concept in the first place.

"Membership in a group is not an acceptable reason to treat one person worse than another."

But worse ceteris paribus, yes? I’m saying that the ceteris are not necessarily paribus, and which ceteris you consider relevant is a matter of judgement and of individual conscience.

From where I am standing, you have asserted a set of conditions for what the government’s legitimate interests are, and what information it may or may not consider when dealing with people. On what basis do you make these assertions, and why should I consider them compelling? Do you truly believe that nobody could disagree with you on any of them them except through hatred of those involved?

Proposal: Had Brandon Eich been CTO, CFO, EIEIO, etc when he got the boot, and been just as famous, the content of your comment above would be basically identical except the substitution of his counterfactural position for "CEO" and some slightly different rationalization in item 2.

Is the video game industry woke? Or are you just updating on a few high profile titles?

As others have pointed out, Japanese games are largely not woke. The big mobile titles and Mihoyo stuff coming out of China are very much not woke. Indies are rarely woke. Eastern Europe and similar nations largely don't produce woke stuff.

So we're largely talking about AAA/AA titles from the larger publishers in NA and Western Europe. How many of their titles are woke? Is Call of Duty woke? Fortnite? FIFA/Madden/NBA?

Before we dive into other titles, we need to define what is and isn't a woke game. Something like recent (indie) flop Dustborn is clearly, explicitly woke, but most titles aren't nearly so clear cut. The biggest seller of 2023 was Hogwarts Legacy. Is this a woke title? Supposedly it had a very diverse cast for 19th century England, but Rowling's reputation has become poison amongst woke-types, so much so that there was a big backlash against the game.

How about Battlefield V? I recall there was a furore around the announcement trailer because one of the main characters was a 'girlboss' in WW2. But as far as I'm aware there wasn't much else that would be woke in there. Is a single character enough to make a game woke or not?

What some of the big GaaS titles? LoL's character design branched out from big titty anime girls years ago, but are a handful of 'diverse' characters enough to deem it woke? Rainbow Six Siege has get some shit recently because of a character in a wheelchair, and I believe the much criticized recent 2B design was a skin from that game. But again this is just a handful of characters available.

Here's the top selling US games from 2023, 22, and 21 (with duplicates/yearly entries removed). Which ones are woke?

Hogwarts

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Spider Man 2

Diablo 4

Jedi: Survivor

Mortal Kombat 1

Starfield

Call of Duty

Elden Ring

Madden

God of War: Ragnarök

LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga

Pokémon

FIFA

Horizon: Forbidden West

MLB: The Show

Battlefield 2042

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

Resident Evil: Village

Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury

Horizon: Forbidden West
Spider Man 2
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Mortal Kombat 1 ( heard they are covering the women up, haven't played it myself)

Mortal Kombat 1 ( heard they are covering the women up, haven't played it myself)

One wonders if this is done by region-specific graphics, a la gay pride flags being replaced by black flags in the Middle East release of the latest Spider-Man game (or was it Assassin’s Creed?)

I can't figure out whether Diablo IV is woke because it has a non-binary boss (Lord Zir), or anti-woke because ze's monstrously unattractive and ill-tempered.

That would be anti-woke by the current paradigm, in which negative representation is generally considered worse than non-representation for the same reason that 'don't concede the existence of excesses since it will give the bad people grounds to continue criticizing' is a norm.

A paradigm of prioritizing beneficent representation doesn't go well with making light (or villains) of it. The viewpoint of 'any representation is bad representation' being replaced by 'you must endorse' is one of the distinctions between liberalism and woke.

I was just joking about the name. Lord Zir is not actually canonically non-binary.

Hogwarts Legacy. Is this a woke title?

Yes, JK Rowling is very progressive, and only differs from woke orthodoxy along a single axis.

I recall there was a furore around the announcement trailer because one of the main characters was a 'girlboss' in WW2.

LoL's character design branched out from big titty anime girls years ago, but are a handful of 'diverse' characters enough to deem it woke?

Rainbow Six Siege has get some shit recently because of a character in a wheelchair, and I believe the much criticized recent 2B design was a skin from that game. But again this is just a handful of characters available.

Yes, all of these seem like central examples of the kinds of things people are complaining about when they complain about woke in video games.

If individual characters or elements are enough for a game to be woke, and thus the industry, then the OPs question has a very simple answer. Companies are putting these things in because they want to make more money. Adding a women or similar is a very low effort way to make a game more appealing to a wider audience

Adding a [certain style of] women or similar is a very low effort way to make a game more appealing to a wider audience

I don't think that's the case. Rather, I think it's a low effort way to convince oneself that the game is more appealing to a wider audience, assuming that the oneself in this case buys into a certain ideology. The question then becomes why so many decisionmakers buy into this ideology, to such an extent that it overrides their greed.

You could ask this about millions of bad business decisions: I think the consensus is that there is a bias to action in corporate settings, because people need to be seen to be doing something. In a lot of media, not just games, this ends up as "Put a chick in it and make her lame and gay"

The bias to action is orthogonal to the question, though. There's no limit to the types of actions they could have taken in order to expand their audience, but for some reason, they chose to "put a chick in it and make her lame and gay" instead of one of the other options, such as, say, making the chick sexy and gay (a tactic that was likely more common a couple decades ago, though the expansion target was a different group than women).

The answer to that is pretty obviously their ideology, but then the question becomes, why this ideology in particular, and why follow the ideology off a cliff?

I don't think the woke additions do all follow the one option though, that was just an expression. In some responses below, people are complaining about minor changes like using "Body type" instead of Sex or Gender. Plenty of female characters added into games are good looking and the bizarre non-binary examples from Dragon Age are much rarer.

So I'd say corpos are deciding they need to do something to attract wider audiences. And then the developers themselves are choosing implementations as simple as body type and a female protagonist to full blown Dragon Age. I'd imagine explaining these would need to focus much more on individual studio effects.

So I'd say corpos are deciding they need to do something to attract wider audiences. And then the developers themselves are choosing implementations as simple as body type and a female protagonist to full blown Dragon Age. I'd imagine explaining these would need to focus much more on individual studio effects.

The beginning of this paragraph seems true enough, but I don't think we'd need to focus necessarily on individual studio effects. The various things people are complaining about might not all be specifically "add a gay lame woman to it," but they all still fall within the same one ideology or tight cluster of ideologies. Why that specific cluster of ideologies and why follow that off a cliff are the questions at hand.

More comments

This is the stated theory. Does it actually work? Are they actually successful at drawing in a wider audience? And if so, is the incoming audience large enough to offset losses from the previous one?

I've never been convinced on this.

Just getting regular sales data for retail games is difficult enough, let alone trying to parse out how an ongoing GaaS title is affected.

I think League has probably done well out of it, research suggested female players overwhelmingly played female characters while men played an equal mix - indicating that the male playerbase was unbothered while attracting new female players.

Battlefield V sold less than its predecessor according to Wikipedia, but still sold more than 7 million copies. Presumably there is some percentage of regular players who decided not to buy the game due to the woke marketing, alongside some percentage of new players who were attracted by it. 2142 looked a lot more regular in its marketing, so perhaps EA decided it wasn't worth it overall?

Women overwhelmingly play attractive female characters, the kind riot was always making. They are not champing at the bit to play Rek'Sai or Ambessa.

The pervasive myth that women want fat ugly characters in video games is so out of touch with the revealed preference of women who play games. If you want to know what kind of 'diverse' characters women want in games, look at the character designs coming out of Hoyoverse, not Firewalk Studios.

If we're talking about LoL specifically, I'd say female preference appears to tilt towards pretty/cute rather than attractive/sexy. Lux rather than Miss Fortune. And I think Riot's redesign of some earlier characters and move away from the high level of sexualisation (and general huge tits that a lot of the early female champs had) was probably a big deal for potential female players.

Nah, they don't play MF because she is an adc. Sona is just as busty, and is probably the number one most played character for women playing league. You can just look at the games that women actually play, they only play games where they can play as a hot girl, and they more or less exclusively play as hot girls*. In fact, I would say Lux (and Zoe, specifically these two) preference, codes trans woman more than woman, as far as league players go. There is probably a line where your game goes too far into the male gaze, like, Nikke is in theory a waifu collector like Genshin, but with no husbandos and outfits that look like they came from a slutty Halloween shop, it has basically no women playing it.

Of course, this is all miles away from woke injections, which look like Ambessa (Buff Old Black Girl Boss Brusier), not Lux. If Concord was full of characters that looked like Mercy, nobody would have complained about how Woke the character design was.

*Edit, this is overstated, they will also play cute games, like Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, Pokémon, etc.

More comments

It's not about the individual characters or elements though, it's about the philosophy behind them. The idea of having a character in a wheelchair in your fps about elite spec ops units is bugnuts retarded and can only come from a brain warped by a perverse concept of inclusivity. World war 2 was not won by girlbosses and jamming one in your game immediately demonstrates a fealty to diversity over anything else like pleasing your fans or historical accuracy.

But yes, the justification used to do all that was easy money. It was an overly simplistic perspective that equated to cooking the golden goose to smuggle in the progressive agenda, but that was the justification.

Hogwarts

Definitely woke, even if it was inspired by the works of a woman who later became a wrong-thinker. 1890s rural Scotland having the same demographics as UCLA, plus the deliberate inclusion of a wizard in a dress witch with a croaky voice.

It's worth remembering that JKR was very politically correct back when it was called that. She retroactively made Dumbledore gay, and in the stage show made Hermione black (and then tried to gaslight her fans into believing she always was).

Of course, the success of the game in spite of the attempted woke boycott probably strengthened the belief among dev companies that they can just ignore an angry twitter X Bluesky mob and sell games anyway.

and in the stage show made Hermione black (and then tried to gaslight her fans into believing she always was).

It wasn't actually Rowling who decided to cast a black actress. She did praise the choice, however, and then said "The books never specified Hermione is white." Which is technically true, but while I wouldn't go so far as to call it "gaslighting" (Rowling didn't actually claim that canonical book-Hermione was black) she was pretty obviously taking the piss out of people who were complaining about the casting.

I wouldn't call Harry Potter "woke" in general, unless anything liberal is woke. It's got some multiculturalism and very tepid feminism, and nothing else that would offend your average conservative. Rowling is a standard liberal feminist Gen-Xer with slightly heterodox (by today's standards) views on trans people. You're right that gay Dumbledore was a retcon. (Rowling claimed he was always gay in her head; whether or not you believe her, she clearly knew it wasn't something she could put on the page in the 90s/early 2000s.)

The movies and games have been much woker than the books (no doubt with her approval).

Regardless of whether Dumbledore was gay in Rowling's head when she wrote the first book, I think it's worth keeping in mind that she had pretty clearly already decided on it by the time she wrote the seventh, which seems to be designed around the gay Dumbledore even though it doesn't make it explicit. I think the common suggestion that she more-or-less invented it on the spot in the interview where she announced it is clear copium.

I think the common suggestion that she more-or-less invented it on the spot in the interview where she announced it is clear copium.

Sure, but that's the [classical] liberal argument where "it doesn't actually matter, it never actually says in the books, Just Like You (angers the traditionalists), It's Not Special (angers the progressives)".

Which, I'll point out, is generally how those who are feminist-but-not-gynosupremacist treat womanhood in general (because that is how they were raised). It's common in media properties created by Gen Xers (because they were the most exposed to that viewpoint); that's why 4chan loves My Little Pony (G4 only), for instance.

Most “anti woke” consumers still enjoy woke media. Marvel movies attracted hundreds of millions of moviegoers in red states. The new Gladiator movie is extremely woke and lib and yet box office data suggests it’s attracting a primarily white male audience (unlikely to be mostly progressives).

Most gamers don’t even play games for the story and don’t pay attention to it, so the relative ‘wokeness’ of the writing is irrelevant. Among those who do care, I’d guess a disproportionate number are women, gay or lib.

Video games companies need developers who are competent, willing to work for low wages, and willing to tolerate long working hours. This is a tough sell. Competent devs in the US can easily earn 200-500k with cushy working conditions. Why get paid less than half as much and be subjected to semiannual death marches?

This is a misunderstanding. Most game devs aren’t software engineers / programmers, for whom this is (sometimes) true. Most devs are QA, artists, level designers, 3D modellers, writers, sound engineers, producers, cinematic designers, and system/game designers. Those jobs can’t be ‘easily’ found at much higher salaries elsewhere; in fact if you’re a professional artist or writer who doesn’t want to write non fiction (ie be a technical writer / copywriter) being a game dev is probably one of the most secure, highest paying roles.

There are lots of non-woke games literally so many

It's just that you focus on some weird niche of american games, but the Japanese and korean studios make plenty of interesting ones. There are also american indie titles which... are actually pretty woke (I'm a member of many indie game publishers private discords and the politics channel is like Bluesky)

So it is the devs who are super woke then?

Yes. I think it's selection bias on the kinds of people who make games compared to other types of programming.

While Japan is an entertainment superpower, and mostly doesn't make woke games, I don't think it's that strange that people want non-woke stuff from American studios. It's not like telling people that India is making a bunch of awesome action movies that aren't woke will suddenly make them feel good about the fact that Star Wars has a Mary Sue as the main character. (Though seriously, people should check out some good South Indian movies like RRR, Karnan or Baahubali. Some of my favorite movies of recent vintage, and very trad.)

Yeah that's fair. The thing is that disney owns many of the highest grossing media franchises and we may quibble about how much that correlates to "large media franchise" but it's really hard to find other measurements and this one is an easily accessible wikipedia page. of the 17 that are bigger than $20 billion 7 are from disney. of the 10 that are not Disney franchises

3 are japanese (Anpanman (Yeah wtf is that), Pokemon and Hello kitty)

2 are toy brands (Barbie and Transformers) (is transformers Japanese it originally is but the main seller now is Hasbro the american company, I'd probably count it in Japan but hard to say)

2 are western video games (Candy Crush, Call of Duty)

2 Warner bros Franchises (harry potter, Batman)

1 Korean Video game (dungeon fighter online)

basically once you exclude disney you're looking at a group that is 50% east asian franchises anyway, (counting transformers as Japanese). If you estimate like me that roughly 1/3rd of the media landscape is woke to some degree then the 2/3rds that are not are going to lean more heavily in the direction of the 1/3rd of the media landscape that is not western.

2 Warner bros Franchises (harry potter, Batman)

JK Rowling still has a significant amount of creative control over Harry Potter (both legally, and because the fandom care about not letting her setting become American-generic) so I wouldn't say it is culturally a WB franchise. Rowling is, of course, a basic woke leftie apart from her heresy on trans issues, so that doesn't change the big picture.

Throwing Rowling into the pit over her "transphobia" and having one of the nice rightists with cookies who hang out there befriend her would be a world-historical self-own for the left. Fortunately, the British left is less dogmatic on trans issues than the Americans so it didn't happen.

I'd say Transformers pretty much belongs to Hasbro now. For a decade-plus, they've taken the initiative on Transformers media, on top of printing money with the toys. It's not like the old days anymore, where they could rely on the Japanese side conveniently making content for them.

Uh, not an expert on the video game industry, but isn’t the US tech industry far less dominant in video games than in other fields?

That would make sense. US devs are overpaid to a ridiculous degree. Good luck getting them to work 80 hours a week on some video game for 50k a year.

Well yeah, and my understanding is that Japan, Poland, etc are a lot less woke.

Rule of thumb for me is game devs make 50-66% of what they could make doing boring enterprise dev work, with 50-100% longer hours

I think that rule of thumb only works for the US and a few other western countries with very high-paying enterprise dev sectors, especially the countries with a booming financial sector. It is not the case in Japan, Korea, or China, where game devs can make as much or more than enterprise devs.

Potentially related: Elon Musk just claimed xAI will start an AI game studio to make games great again!. Not sure if it's a serious announcement, but it came in response to another tweet by Dogecoin creator Billy Markus:

i don't understand how game developers and game journalism got so ideologically captured

gamers have always been trolls, anti-greedy corporations, anti-bs

gamers have always rejected dumb manipulative bs, and can tell when someone is an outsider poser

why lean into the bs?

Reversed stupidity is still not intelligence.

Since you don’t play games, let’s talk movies. Assume you have to choose between a perfectly neutral film and one that flatters your politics. How much is that flattery actually worth?

We don’t really have to imagine this, because the Christian film market exists. They’re still trying to tell compelling, entertaining stories, but they’re doing it without the talent, funding, or awareness advantages of Hollywood. As a result, they are generally worse on technical and social metrics. The audience is there because they think the messaging is laudable.

soy-type politics

Come on, now.

Are you implying that a Christian would perceive Holywood movies as "perfectly neutral"? Because from my understanding of US Christians, they would think a more accurate analogy would be between political movies with politics you like, but cut off from major funding vs political movies with politics you hate, but with budgets in the nine digits.

I think that there's something to be said for a movie's thinking that it's neutral (because it's part of the hegemonic culture) actually making it somewhat more neutral. Sure, I'd rather that movies comported with my values rather than values I find noxious - but I'd also rather have movies take values I find noxious for granted rather than try to sell their noxious values to me.

Better a movie written by someone who thinks gay people are normal than a movie written by someone trying to make them normal.

There's a common refrain among the "woke" that all art is political/ideological, and if you don't notice it in some work of art, then that's just because it's pro-status quo, and you're just comfortable with the status quo. What I've come to realize is that, buying into this framework, art that is political/ideological in the pro-status quo perspective is better than other art. Not categorically or anything like that, but that a work of art having a pro-status quo political/ideological message is something that meaningfully improves that work of art compared to the alternative of it having some non-status-quo (i.e. overtly noticeable) political/ideological message.

What's your point? Because in the real world we observe a lot of overly woke games and movies that just flop and lose a lot of money. And we see some that make money also. It's usually when they take a pre-existing franchise that has built an audience that likes what it already was and then change it to be more woke that, although might appeal more to more progressive audiences, annoys the existing audience and then makes way less money than a faithful continuation would have.

You can't explain this by just claiming they're flattering the politics of the audience for monetary gain. They're literally doing the opposite on both counts.

But it's weird to me that the video game industry is so woke considering that the user base is so anti-woke. Why aren't there anti-woke game publishers?

(1) Ethan Strauss's "Undecided Whale" effect: The majority of money spent on AAA videogames is spent by young men. However, women control far more total discretionary spending than men overall, and can be spurred to spend on some games. Therefore, there's a significant incentive for executives looking to expand their sales figures to try and appeal to women, which given the recent massive leftward political shift of young women, often results in the insertion of hamfisted political messaging.

(2) Overrepresentation of Trans and other sexuality/subculture minorities in STEM. This one isn't complicated; transwomen, furries, and other nerds with odd subcultural affiliations around gender and sexuality are overrepresented in programming and among the type of monomanaically-focused near-autist who are more likely to go into intense knowledge-work professions like game design and creation. Thus, they're perfectly positioned to influence products from within.

(3) Standard labor law and NGO pressure-group tactics. See Hanania and Rufo.

Uh what. Women already control 75% of discretionary spending, and the encouragement is to... empower women?

From that link:

By 2028, women will own 75% of the discretionary spend, making them the world’s greatest influencers.

Is that with or without an AI-caused extinction event, if we are talking hypotheticals?

89% Of women globally say they have shared or primary responsibility for daily shopping, household chores and food prep.

Wait, so daily shopping is discretionary spending?

Per wiktionary, that is defined as:

The amount or portion of a person's or group's expenditures which is used for non-essential or voluntary disbursements; the amount or portion of one's expenditures which one may make as one sees fit.

Whoever does household shopping might decide to go for beef, pork or tofu, but if they decide to spend their budget on video games and feed their family rice for a week that decision will likely be brought up in the divorce hearings.

Also, that sentence again:

By 2028, women will own 75% of the discretionary spend, making them the world’s greatest influencers.

Assume that women and men make roughly equal amounts, that half of each are single and that half of them are in hetero relationships where the women do most of the shopping for the pair or family. Would it not be fair to say then that women will own half of the discretionary spending, but control 75% of it, rather than that bold claim above?

I think the idea is that relatively little of the 75% of discretionary spending by women is being captured by games while a lot of the 25% of discretionary spending controlled by men is captured by games. This makes appealing to women relatively more attractive as a vector for making money. You don't need to convert as many of them as you do men for a similar payoff, which in theory should be easier.

You don't need to convert as many of them as you do men for a similar payoff, which in theory should be easier.

My guess is that this is the correct explanation. 10+ years ago, when I was all-in on social justice, the prevailing belief was that the primary reason women didn't play video games in exactly the same amounts as men was that the video games hadn't been designed to appeal to them, with most of the rest of the reasons being the video game community being misogynistic and hostile to women. Thus, by changing the way the games were designed, the theory went, video game companies could tap this untapped market and make even more massive profits, all the while also making the world a better, more Socially Just place. How convenient it is that we live in a world where doing what matches my preferred ideology also results in making more money! You'd have to be a complete idiot or an extremist bigot not to pick up that free money that's just sitting there on the table!

I think the recent high profile failures of "woke" games (arguable if "woke" is the same as "trying to appeal to women," but one of the core arguments for uglifying women in "woke" content is that such things are more relatable/appealing to women) such as Concord, Star Wars: Outlaws, or Dragon Age: The Veilguard show that many of the people in charge of the purse strings were true believers of this theory.

I believe that the lesson that those people will learn is that this proves that the video game community is even more misogynistic than they thought, and also that the content directed at pulling in woman customers in these games didn't go nearly far enough, and therefore next time they need to double down and also bully the existing toxic primarily-male gamer fanbase even more, so as to make the space more friendly to women. After all, when you're on the right side of history, you cannot fail, you can only be failed by all the bigots around you who have just not caught on yet that they're headed for extinction.

How convenient it is that we live in a world where doing what matches my preferred ideology also results in making more money! You'd have to be a complete idiot or an extremist bigot not to pick up that free money that's just sitting there on the table!

Ironically this might actually be true (eg, Candy Crush), but at the same time the autists and transgenders that primarily pushed this reasoning at AAA game devs and were tasked with designing them were uniquely unsuited to designing games actually appealing to the modal woman.

Well, no. Part of the ideology is that the notion that women tend to be more into games like Candy Crush than games like Battlefield is a misogynist, conservative, right-wing idea dictated by The Patriarchy rather than a reflection of true preferences of women and, as such, doing stuff like putting ugly girlbosses into competitive FPSs or fighting games is how to attract women to your games rather than making games like Candy Crush or Stardew Valley or the Sims or the like.

I think the best version of this sort of argument is demonstrated by Genshin Impact, which IIRC has a fairly high proportion of female players for a 3rd person action gacha game, and which accomplished it through... putting tons of conventionally attractive, sexualized female characters with a diverse range of personalities from tough girlbosses to meek wallflowers. And also male characters sexualized in ways that tend to appeal to straight women, i.e. having attractive personalities that show things like competence, assertiveness, stoicism, confidence. Of course, these also contradict the ideology pretty directly.

I remember, back in the GamerGate days, that there was actually a statistic claiming that (slightly) over half of gamers were women--however, that statistic rows against the belief you described. The under-publicized explanation for that statistic was "women prefer simple, low-time-investment mobile games like Candy Crush and aren't playing COD or AssCreed,*" and I think failing to understand that is why bigger companies and gaming-related insititutions have spent the past decade flailing and floundering about with progressivism--the classic "things vs. people" gender divide.

*Not that there aren't women who are into traditional "hardcore" games at all, mind you.

On a somewhat less culture-war-ish note, consider the other primary impact of the low-time-investment Candy Crush mobile set on traditional gaming - the rise of microtransactions, games as a service, whale hunting, the transformation of the gaming industry into a bizarrely legitimized clone of the gambling industry. There clearly is actually a lot of money in chasing the success of Candy Crush.

Precisely! I mean, there's no point in empowering chumps who don't spend money, right? A business genius looks at that situation and says "women spend money like crazy, but vidya is male dominated! If we could only get women to buy our wire monkey of masculine development we'd be rolling in dough! I know, let's paint it pink!"

You're correct that the rate of autism is quite high among programmers, but I think there's even more competent non-woke programmers. So yeah, these companies hire people who are woke, and non-woke people do not apply at these companies.

Here's my personal intuition-based view: All larger companies are political, and often woke and generally left-leaning. Smaller companies and individual developers tend to be neutral or at least non-woke. To escape the bullshit, and the producers who have a hostile relationship with their producers, you just need to avoid mainstream products. It's not just video games, it's basically everything. A personal rule of mine is "everything sucks once its gets big and popular enough". It seems to tie into enshittification, in that companies only initially try to please users. After a while, they try to please investors and business partners and shareholders - not the users who consume the product.

Non-woke publishers can get devs, but it's politically dangerous to not be woke, since there's a constant pressure against you, and the media is likely to harass you, you might even get in legal trouble. See for instance how Steam is accused of allowing hateful content because some users have Pepe profile pictures. So it's not that there's too few non-woke developers, but that there's too few non-woke companies, especially at the top.

There was some murmuring of Elon, who is the #1 global Diablo 4 player, starting some publisher for gaming. (Edit: it happened https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1861801046949191686)

Gaming studios seem to need ESG dollars which come with strings attached like requiring narrative review by DEI SweetBabyInc-like consultants.

Ubisoft and others are on a run with bomb-after-bomb releases underperforming massively. Real financial losses.

It may just be a matter of time has the market adjusts post-election.

Yeah that’s kinda what I was getting at. Elon has joked about buying MSNBC but he should save his $$$ and buy some game publishers instead. For a couple billion you could flip the political polarity of the games market which reaches hundreds of millions of people.

Yeah, but you'd make a lot of money doing so which might not be so good for Elon's tax bill. At least with journalism the write-off is nigh-guaranteed.

The number of people who want to bet against Elon grows larger. So far their record is pretty dismal but good luck.

I'll take the opposite bet. Elon will make money on Twitter.

I'll take the opposite bet. Elon will make money on Twitter.

Elon would have made a massive profit if Twitter went completely bankrupt today and charged him another ten billion dollars for nothing on the way out.

He used it to buy himself a seat in the halls of power, not just embedding himself in a brand new government but doing so with an explicit mandate to fire the people who were in charge of regulating his various companies. I'm honestly not sure you could put the value of that trade into dollar terms.

Hard agree. And imagine the influence Elon could buy for just a couple billion invested in video game studios.

Somehow we allowed far left activists to dominate video games. It's bizarre. Video game players lean conservative. Why is there no conservative content being made for them? It's as if Mormons in Utah were forced to watch gay furry porn on TV because that's the only thing available. Sure, they'll watch it, but that's only because nothing better exists.

Once anti-woke video game studios appear, they will quickly displace the incumbents.

Take a look at CNN's ratings and see the future of current game devs who refuse to pivot.

Once anti-woke video game studios appear, they will quickly displace the incumbents.

They won’t because to the average Call of Duty or League of Legends player the ‘lore’ and any associated progressive politics are completely irrelevant to their enjoyment and these franchises have $10bn moats in terms of brand value and built up expertise.

This isn't exactly true. People are getting banned in these games for writing "faggot" or even "gg" because of wokeism. The political pressure leads to censorship, self-censoring, the dilution of art, the decrease of player freedom, and even competitive games modes (since hierarchies are seen as evil in leftist morality). I'm not sure how much the average console player understands these dynamics, though.

More comments

There's clearly a market opportunity for non-woke game publishers. But could they get devs?

I think the problem with any endeavor like this is that you end up with the "Christian music sucks" effect. You're hiring from a smaller talent pool, and so the works that get created are going to be, on average, of worse quality, and if a work gets too preachy it can be a turn off to some people.

Just as I'm sure there's not many non-Christians earnestly watching "God's not Dead", I assume that most non-anti-woke people wouldn't line up for an explicity anti-woke game.

You're not wrong overall, but FWIW there absolutely are non-woke devs. Very few are explicitly anti-woke, though, that's a very small niche. And either way, they try to keep their politics out of the public as an issue of self-preservation. The userbase being anti-woke isn't entirely true - there are elements of it, but numerically I think the vast majority of players are actually just plain not interested in politics. There is a sizable group of vocal anti-woke players, but they're a drop in a bucket compared to the many more who just want to grill game.

One problem is that even anti-woke devs need to cooperate with woke publishers, influencers, reviewers, community managers, contributors, and of course a sizable woke customer base. Very few anti-woke people who work in game development for reasons you have pointed out. It's better for devs to try and be apolitical than to risk suffering sabotage, bad or no publicity, uncooperative business partners, negative reviews and alienating a large number of potential customers. It's a woke ecosystem; you can't thrive in it by swimming against the current. And given how ridiculously oversaturated the market is, it's hard enough to make a profit without making yourself a public enemy.

As a result, non-woke games made by non-woke devs do absolutely exist. Take any game without controversy about it, and chances are it's one of them.

But who can make an anti-woke game? It might have to be someone who doesn't care about an uncooperative environment and doesn't care about making a profit, i.e., an indie hobbyist. Those games exist, but they usually don't gain much traction, visibility or longevity, because this type of dev has very limited resources with which to make an actually good game. Alternatively, a serious game development company that managed to associate itself with politically indifferent influencers, publishers etc. might decide to market a game as explicitly anti-woke...but it would still have to be a good game, else they're just shooting their cause in the foot and ruining their own future prospects on top of it. But here's the rub, for a hobbyist or a company: if they can make a good game, then why not market it to everyone instead of just the small anti-woke minority? Ultimately even anti-woke gamers are gamers first and anti-woke second, that's why they play games at all, and will play a good game over a politically appealing game.

In conclusion, game development is a woke world with very little breathing room to spare, and trying to fight an uphill battle in there just has you run out of oxygen.

I'm not convinced that the SWEs they hire in the video game industry actually are all that woke, that's at least not my experience with swedish video game developers. They're not anti-woke but they aren't really woke either.

The people that are woke and who are able to insert woke inte video games are the writers, artists and designers (and game journalists but that's outside of the developers), and i believe its that pipeline thats really rotten if any. What percentage of writers with a "relevant degree" are even non-woke? Anti-woke?

Furthermore even if you're non-woke, if the only acceptable culture in your industry is woke what are you going to do? You'll at the very least put in performative nods towards wokeness like "body type a/b" and inserting a girlboss here and there.

Devs overestimate the importance of Devs and a lot of non devs do as well.

To launch a game you have to pitch to investors and get millions in funding. Your game has to appeal to the funders and be something that they believe they will make money on. The biggest challenge is post launch . There are a bunch of games launched every day. The market is saturated to an insane degree. In order to break through you need to have influencers, journalists and other people pushing your game. The youtube algorithm promotes woke gamers.

Another underrated aspect is that in cut throat industries people will try to outmanoeuvre each other. If knocking out the opponent by discovering a transphobic tweet gets you ahead people will do it. The gaming industry is dirty.

You're right, and it's such a shame, and it's because marketing has grown bigger than the product being marketed. So for every dollar spend on making something of value, 9 dollars are spend trying to convince others that it have value. This tendency generalizes to most of society, which is why most things have become so fake.

marketing has grown bigger than the product being marketed

There are reasons for this. A friend of mine is a VERY successful indie developer and publisher, and his business thinking is as follows:

The vast majority of people buy very few games every year. Even most ‘gamers’ might play five to ten.

So if you’re in the top ten in your market, whatever it is, you’ll rake in money. If not, you’ll make almost nothing.

Therefore, it’s worth spending whatever you have to on marketing, celebrity cameos, etc. Anything to shift you from 11th on the list to 9th.

I see, this feedback loop is to blame again. Viral content gets more viral, and less viral content disappears. This is because popularity is made out to be a metric of quality. All modern algorithms generally work like this, but it's a huge mistake. Merely changing the way the rating works from "Most plays" to "Best ratio of postive and negative reviews" should balance it better.

I actually want to make a game of my own. Guess I'll have to jump into a moral and social dilemma. Thanks for the answer by the way!

Ratio of positive/negative reviews is easily gamed and also selects for very niche things that has a loyal fanbase, rather than something with a wider appeal. I'd go as far as to say that positive/negative ratio on its own is worse than a pure view metric.

What you want is some kind of Bayesian weighting.

I don't see how it's easily gamed, but it does select for niche things. If these niche things are high quality to those that it appears to, isn't that fine? If less than 20% enjoy jazz, the better conclusion is "Of people who like Jazz, this one album is really good", rather than "Only 19% of all people like this album". Everything with a wider appeal has less depth, there's a sort of trade-off. I'd go as far as saying that everything good is niche. There's more people towards the middle of every standard distribution, but the best things (which are still popular enough to survive) are a few standard deviations to the right. And, if you allow those outside the niche to change what's inside of it, through the power of numbers, they will just destroy it or turn it into what they already like (which is plentiful everywhere). Hence why communities (like this one!) protect themselves with gatekeeping and rules and try to stay under the radar of outside political pressure.

I think the reason that votes aren't visible for a while on here is exactly to avoid starting a feedback loop (this one is the social one where people are influenced by other peoples votes). I also think that comments are sorted by "new" by default rather than by "best" (but I could be wrong), and that the "controversial" rating exists because the alternative is that the first decent comment to be made on a thread ends up being #1 simply because it started its exponential growth earlier.

Would your proposed weighting account for these things? (I don't know much about bayesian weighting)

You game it by controlling who gets access/early access to the game.

You can also review bomb other new games released close to your own release.

Given the quantity of games released this sort of score manipulation effectively turns that particular metric into a view of what has been released very recently, what is sufficiently niche to not attract non-fans and non-shills and what has most ratio manipulation behind it.

More comments

The main gaming that happens is review bombing. Even a few negative reviews can push your game out of the profitable peak and into the dead tail, so there’s lots of opportunities for bad actors to threaten devs into submission.

More comments

As a result of this rotten bargain, the men who choose this field will tend to be young, not have families, and be fixated on video games. Frankly, this is going to select for autists. To the extent that autism and MtF trans are correlated, I would expect that video game developers are trans at a rate at least far above the norm. This might explain a lot of the soy-type politics espoused by major game studios...

Does this explanation make sense?

Not really. It runs into similar problems as most attempts to explain wokeness, especially the first one:

  1. "Overrepresented" is not enough. The claim is that woke politics is overwhelmingly dominant to the point where there're no antiwoke studios. Trans devs would have to be overwhelmingly dominant to match that claim or something else is going on to give even an overrepresented minority this outsized say.
  2. The idea that young gamers who want to be devs will naturally be woke doesn't pass muster to me. Gamers tend(ed?) to be irreverent shitbags and were a target of woke whining from feminists for a reason. Even if they were woke today, they'd eventually find some way to piss off the keepers of the revolution because the ideology doesn't stand still (the same way progressive, "science, bitch!" atheists pissed off their feminist fellows). They'd end up on the same trajectory as Elon Musk basically. There have to be some disagreeable autists that go the other way.

Something else has to be happening.

"Overrepresented" is not enough.

But it is. Trans women are already, typically, fairly loud and visible influences. If you double or triple their representation in a given population, they'll help drive direction in a game studio's writing, especially if the corporate overlords are looking closely at leadership position diversity. Not to mention, many trans women are excellent programmers, and so therefore valuable to placate.

Trans women are already, typically, fairly loud and visible influences.

Why? There are no loud, visible anti-wokes? Why don't they win, if a minority can seize all the spoils? Surely the presumption should be on their side since until comparatively recently unwoke things like "objectification" of female characters and jokes that punched down were common.

The "trans priestly caste" explanation simply doesn't work because someone is going to say "no". Someone is going to find trans people changing their plans offputting (or the trans themselves tbh -- they were a punchline in living memory). Why is it that small percentages of people are able to swing entire organizations across the entire industry? No one wants to pick up the $20 bill?

And what about industries that don't attract people with programmer socks? Why did they go woke?

they'll help drive direction in a game studio's writing

I'm actually not sold that random devs, even good ones, can do this. There's plenty of work that doesn't involve the story.

especially if the corporate overlords are looking closely at leadership position diversity.

And there we go.

There's always some other element that explains the "and then the entire organization bent the knee". Seems to me that, as with woke more generally, whatever that is explains why the vidya game industry is where it is more than the trans priestly caste.

I think what people around here are missing is that trans people in tech are more important as a long-term byproduct of feminism than they are as their own specific hot-button issue. There are so many of them in tech because they're an end-run around demands to load he industry up with mediocre authoritarian women and restructure everything to cater primarily to them. There are some women who excel in STEM, sure, but as a demographic, women are so uninterested in the field that it turns out that the easier way to comply with the demands of feminism is to convince a significant portion of the actual male talent (who were kind of incel-y anyway) to take up the trans thing. For culture war reasons (to put it charitably), we get a warpedly negative sample of the trans population around here. In fact, transgender "women" are obviously much more culturally compatible with tech than their cis counterparts; they aren't attractive but they're more pleasant to be around. They aren't going to call HR to have you written up for having an anime figurine on your desk, they aren't going to try to have math devalued as a racist skillset, they aren't going to get pissed off and go scorched Earth on the company and have everyone fired on trumped up sexual harassment charges and replaced with the Gestapo. "Loud exhibitionist Chris-Chan-type autist" is the common model of the situation on the culture war right, but it's the wrong model; the ones who succeed professionally in tech are meek intellectual rationalist-type autists. They think like men and it's a field where you need to think like a man to make money. They aren't a real priestly caste, they're a fake priestly caste, a stopgap to prevent the installation of a female-feminist priestly caste, and to be frank, I much prefer things this way over the way things were going about a decade ago. (Of course it would be better if relations between the sexes weren't falling apart in the first place.)

Why? There are no loud, visible anti-wokes?

They tend to be fired if they don't shut up. If they get into a dispute with the visible minorities, management can't fire the visible minorities so they fire the anti-wokes who rile them up.

"Overrepresented" is not enough. The claim is that woke politics is overwhelmingly dominant to the point where there're no antiwoke studios. Trans devs would have to be overwhelmingly dominant to match that claim or something else is going on to give even an overrepresented minority this outsized say.

I think politeness and not wanting to get in trouble with HR plays a big role.

I work with some trans engineers. Luckily there's no intersection between their identity and what we work on. It wouldn't make sense to inject the concept of gender identity into storage drivers.

But if I worked in some area that involved storytelling, and the trans engineers wanted to insert their identity into the stories, I'd be incentivized not to speak my mind. I'd want to say things like this is a vanishingly small portion of the population, it's harmful to children to encourage gender identity navel gazing, etc. But then I'd certainly be upsetting all but the most extreme high-decoupling autists among them, and I'd end up being told by HR not to say those things.

Does this explanation make sense? Or is this just a $20 bill sitting on the sidewalk?

No, there's no $20 bill.

Big companies are woke and will mandate woke BS. People who climb the greasy pole in corporations are socially adept conformists with sociopath traits. Not the kind of people who care about truth or beauty or get disturbed by woke shenanigans. They read the room and act accordingly.

This will change as US business and political elites become anti-woke which they must. According to Thiel, in SV in '16 they thought he was crazy, by '20 people were telling him he was right. People got fired over activism since then. So the tide is turning.

MtF devs, rare as they are, or woke devs in any normal company would simply toe the line or be told to go elsewhere if they acted out.

But then, you're not missing anything because big companies make games for big market shares and big market share require games made for the average person, who are not that interesting.

But could they get devs?

Yes. For example, Factorio devs are anti-woke to the point there was a minor scandal when someone called out one of them for recommending a programming essay by Uncle Bob, he was told to shove his opinion up his ass..

Another anti-woke game is Kingdom Come, whose developer is notorious for talking back at liberals, unapologetically told people to get lost after they wanted blacks in medieval Bohemia and is even mildly politically active in Czech Republic having founded a small NGO called Society for the Defense of Freedom of Expression which has of course been accused of spreading 'disinformation' by the arbiters of truth working for the Ministry of Interior. (for Americans, that's the guys who run the national police, jails and so on )

It's a matter of funding and publishers culture moreso than the raw talent. Factorio was self-funded, Kingdom Come got funding for development from a local oligarch. Not sure how KC2 will be, there were rumors but the guy in charge is not the kind to let himself be overruled, so I expect no wokery even if publisher/funder is no longer local.

After all, there are roughly 2 billion people from high-average IQ populations like whites, east Asians where people with an IQ of 120 are likely to become devs. Only cca 500 million of these live in countries where woke is the official culture.

(If you're black with that IQ, you can get paid much, much more by being a businessman etc)

Glad someone mentioned Factorio and Kingdom Come. I think Factorio shows the most likely path out of the mess: non-woke, not anti-woke. Contrast explicitly anti-woke games like Hatred where you just trigger a new wave of thinkpieces that probably hurt your cause more than they help.

After all, there are roughly 2 billion people from high-average IQ populations like whites, east Asians where people with an IQ of 120 are likely to become devs. Only cca 500 million of these live in countries where woke is the official culture.

Is that true? Europe is 500 million, Japan+Korea combined is about 200 million. Brahmins roughly similar, we can probably guesstimate another 500 million whites and Asians in the western hemisphere. Arab Christians are about 15 million, add African whites to get to 20 million, and Russia is about 1/3 Muslim 2/3 Christian- if we assume all Russian Christians belong to high IQ groups(and most of them are ethnic Russians so this is probably close enough for government work) that’s 100 million. Add Oceania and the Ashkenazim. So we’re at 1.5 billion before we account for China, which might be lying about either its population size or its IQ scores, but we can probably say at least another billion at an average similar to other East Asian countries. That’s 2.5 billion before we start trying to chase down every Tutsi and Igbo and Yakut, but there’s so few of them that it doesn’t matter very much.

Of those, woke is the official culture for the western hemisphere(hate to break it to you, but Latin American elites are not based, although some of them are racist and woke on every other issue), plus most of Western Europe(Italy and Austria seemingly the only partial exceptions) and Oceania. This is probably closer to a billion out of 2.5 billion than than .5 billion.

Japan at least is already over represented in game design.

The video game industry became "woke" because of a combination of factors.

First, the whole tech industry is woke and video games are technology. Input/output, California, etc. Austin is a video game development hub, the blue-ing of it followed. Hell, look at AI.

Second, video games were considered an endless growth industry, "recession-proof" and with infinite potential for monetization and expansion. They made more money than Hollywood a while ago and the trend has continued ever since. The more money you get, the more investors salivate at the thought of unloading their capital cannons at something and flakking it to death. You also tend to attract vultures who see opportunities for easy grift or coasting. A diversity consultant at a video game company doesn't do much in the way of actual work but can get a good salary when times are good and potentially infinite growth means lots of opportunities for free money.

(Creative industries awash with cash don't tend to make very good use of this cash; this is not unique to video games either.)

Third, it's known that DEI/ESG investing makes it easier to get loans. Triple-A video game development is lengthy and very expensive. Why fund your own development when you can get a low-interest loan to do it for you as long as you DEI a bit? Better yet, you can use it to hedge against your failure, because you, personally, didn't lose money. Blackrock did! Roll hard left and die, or die and roll hard left etc.

Finally, there's something that Steve Jobs famously identified; as companies grow, product guys get sidelined in favor of marketing guys. Marketing guys end up running the company, and marketing guys are very sensitive to how their companies are perceived. Everyone swallowed the meme about how consumers don't like supporting companies or brands that don't share their values, and the loudest people that end up giving marketing guys the most input on the internet with the most social reach tend to be very loud about social justice in particular.

Video game development is very, very hard. The modern SDLC can occasionally write functional software or simple CRUD apps to spec, but very rarely will it make a genuinely fun game. The fun in a game requires near-autistic levels of dedication to design, interaction with players, and a wealth of technical knowledge to even implement, let alone test. Hand-adjusting animations frame by frame for simple actions or interactions, hours spent manually adjusting the lighting for areas, design documents written in arcane notes over napkins, walls and coffee tables, playing and iterating again and again.

It's pretty apocryphal that during Blizzard's golden age they knew they were onto winners when their own employees would put off working on the game to play the game they were making some more.

Mark Kern talked about this: https://www.geeksandgamers.com/video-game-producer-mark-kern-talks-sweet-baby-inc-and-esg-in-gaming/

Basically the issue is how games are funded. The studios get investors to front money for game development.

When companies like BlackRock were pushing ESG hard, ESG money was cheap money. Companies like EA saw the cheap money with the only condition being that they had to hire a bunch of DEI storyline consultants.

Now games are failing, but it's hard to fire the storyline consultants. They know how to work the system.

Also the various left wing activists they've hired over the years are trained to form a block and not back down, so it's a giant fight where just getting rid of the new hires isn't an option.

Of course you're right in that part of it is the devs. Trans women in particular tend to have issues with women's hips in games.

On a bit of a tangent, a surprising amount of game development is done in Canada as it's harder for devs to find other jobs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_games_in_Canada#Studios

Assassin's Creed 4 has it's modern day sections set in Montreal. Mass Effect 3 has Shepard's trial take place in future Vancouver.

On a bit of a tangent, a surprising amount of game development is done in Canada as it's harder for devs to find other jobs

Actually this is because of a massive tax credit scheme which meant that not opening a game studio in Canada meant you were actively paying a big premium for the privilege. Any large company which could open an office there did, because any employee on a salary under 100k a year was effectively subsidized by the local government.

When companies like BlackRock were pushing ESG hard, ESG money was cheap money.

Why were companies like BlackRock pushing ESG hard?

It's hard to know all his motivations. I think part of it was that hiring a bunch of leftists to run funds kept Elizabeth Warren and her ilk off of his back.

Larry Fink simply believes in it, and it's not his money he's wasting.

Why do I keep associating BlackRock with Erik Prince instead?

That's Blackwater, the private military contractor.

There's also Blackstone which is a different asset management company.

In the cyberpunk future, we will see a news headline stating that BlackRock hired Blackwater to put the hurt on Blackstone.

Larry Fink has no major politics beyond being a mainstream Democrat, at most he’s a centrist neolib. He strongly resisted almost all activist demands for Blackrock to divest from arms companies and fossil fuels firms. Blackrock isn’t primarily or even substantially responsible for DEI in corporate America and its influence on firm culture at board level is minimal. Fink is likely in the 65th percentile, no more, on the right-left scale among Americans. ESG was always a fake movement and the amount of money invested in ESG-focused funds, while high in nominal terms, was tiny compared to aum in the global asset management industry. What little was done was often under pressure from big institutional investors who do care, mainly universities and progressive pension plans (like teachers and academics), along with some progressive sovereign funds like the Norwegians. Blackrock promoted ESG under pressure from these institutional clients, not because of Fink’s own politics.

Fink is on video talking about forcing behaviors which was pretty infamous and is probably something that those who talk about ESG and Fink, one way or the other ought to be aware of.

"You have to force behaviors. If you don't force behaviors, whether it's gender or race or just any way you want to say the composition of your team, you're going to be impacted. That not just recruiting, it's development," Fink said. "We're gonna have to force change."

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/blackrock-ceo-slammed-force-behaviors-dei-initiatives?intcmp=tw_fbn

The guy wanted and still wants to throw his influence around to transform or lock in social governance goals which are DEI goals. It isn't a credible argument to claim he didn't do nothing, only a little and he was just pressured into it.

ESG was always a fake movement and the amount of money invested in ESG-focused funds, while high in nominal terms, was tiny compared to aum in the global asset management industry

Global Assets under management is set to rise in 145 trillion by 2025
https://www.pwc.com/ng/en/press-room/global-assets-under-management-set-to-rise.html

And ESG assets were according to bloomberg 30 trillion on 2022 to reach 40 trillion by 2030 https://www.bloomberg.com/company/press/global-esg-assets-predicted-to-hit-40-trillion-by-2030-despite-challenging-environment-forecasts-bloomberg-intelligence/

This isn't a tiny part of global assets.

Larry Fink has no major politics beyond being a mainstream Democrat, at most he’s a centrist neolib.

This is like saying that apart from the shooting, Lincoln's theater experience was uneventful.

I agree that he is like a mainstream Democrat which puts him firmly in the cultural far left.

Centrist is one of the most abused words in the motte. Sure he fits with the kind of people who tend to get the title centrist neolib here, but it is often people who are in fact quite culturally left wing and very willing to push an agenda on that direction. In addition to those, at best those who do so on some key issues and are also zionists, but might not be leftists on some other issues also are too easily inaccurately called centrist. Which doesn't make them centrists since on the issues they are converging with the left and hardcore about, because they aren't really anywhere near the center. For example pro mass migration types such as Hanania fail at being centrists too.

The numbers seem completely wrong. Bloomberg found that $7tn in AUM was in funds where ESG was “mentioned” in the prospectus. That could be three lines in dozens of pages at the height of the ESG boom. A much smaller fraction. In any case, that a prospectus contains the buzzword ESG doesn’t mean for one second that core allocation / portfolio management decisions are made for ESG / DEI reasons.

The video I mentioned above of Fink directly talking of forcing companies to have change effectively counters the idea of the guy as an inconsequential centrist.

The reality is that Fink is still pushing ESG and also he responded to the backlash by limiting to an extend how much he pushed it.

Downplaying the ESG issue and excusing Fink helps the DEI agenda.

It isn't happening and it isn't (much of) a problem is how the real ESG problems enlarge. There is a woke/stockholder capitalism model that promotes a DEI agenda where there is pressure to be ESG compatible.

With all the downplaying and accusations of people being conspiracy theorists and all in their head, it is as if things change just magically. It isn't Moloch. It is people like Larry Fink. In fact things change more if people don't notice and downplay and less in that direction and can even reverse if they notice and oppose it.

The numbers seem completely wrong. Bloomberg found that $7tn in AUM was in funds where ESG was “mentioned” in the prospectus. That could be three lines in dozens of pages at the height of the ESG boom. A much smaller fraction. In any case, that a prospectus contains the buzzword ESG doesn’t mean for one second that core allocation / portfolio management decisions are made for ESG / DEI reasons.

Maybe I am wrong but it seems to me that ESG funds means ESG etfs while the bigger figure is ESG assets. For example, if Microsoft is considered ESG then it counts fully in the bigger figure but only to the extend it is part of ESG funds in the smaller figure.

If ESG assets are a sizable part of the global assets then that matters however. ESG corporations are at least much more likely to have DEI but also policies such as with the AI if big tech companies that are culturally far left.

Moreover, if a pro ESG organization like Blackrock manages assets in a fund that isn't ESG, that doesn't necessarily mean that they wouldn't be bringing their influence in a pro DEI direction. Influencing things in such direction doesn't mean they need to call this ESG To be doing it. And due to backlash they have made statements of rebranding as the term has become too charged, they say.

There is also ESG lending incidentally given to companies that pass these criteria.

Additionally that 7 trillion can matter too because organized minorities that are pushy can often get people to go along with them over larger groups that are less forceful and don't push a singular agenda. Which is why backlash and institutions turning away from Blackrock is useful in stopping the likes of Fink from forcing the changes that he wants to make.

With all the downplaying and accusations of people being conspiracy theorists and all in their head, it is as if things change just magically. It isn't Moloch. It is people like Larry Fink. In fact things change more if people don't notice and downplay and less in that direction and can even reverse if they notice and oppose it.

This. Recently I was thinking about all the effort that various "intellectual" movements put into basically saying that any thing that happened was the inevitable result of material conditions, technological progress, or whatever else that can be invoked plausibly and give the explanation an aura of inevitability. It's like a whole bunch of people internalized that quip about "creating other new realities, which you can then study too", or are repeating it deliberately so that others internalize it.

That could be three lines in dozens of pages at the height of the ESG boom. A much smaller fraction

So? We know from academia that merely having a sponsor with a particular interest is enough to bias a study, even if the money ostensibly comes with no strings attached, which is why we require to disclose conflicts of interests. But suddenly, when in comes to the corporate sector of all places, the standard of evidence is supposed to be set at direct funding for specific activities?

"...resisted almost all activist demands for Blackrock to divest from arms companies and fossil fuels firms..." Which has nothing whatsoever to do with pushing Woke.

"...money invested in ESG-focused funds..." This is just hilariously missing the point. Blackrock doesn't just "invest" - it provides day-to-day funding for businesses. You don't get access to those funds if you don't meet Larry Fink's requirements on diversity, which is why I had to sit through interminable videos of my CEO (and other bigwigs) verbally fellating Fink's (Fink is praised by name) diversity initiatives and how vitally important they are, never mind the obvious negative impacts it has had to our company's performance.

edit: also, what makes you think that only the funds specifically marketed as "ESG-focused" get your money? Look up your company's 401(k) plan information; I assure you, even if you're not chosing to invest in ESG funds, your money is still going there.

Look up your company's 401(k) plan information; I assure you, even if you're not chosing to invest in ESG funds, your money is still going there.

Can you elaborate? My 401k tracks SPY almost perfectly.

Making a video game is an extremely risky proposition. Wokes coordinate to credibly threaten increased risk for those who resist, and can at least plausibly promise reduced risk for those who cooperate. Up until recently, the other side wasn't even on the field as they had to build an entire information economy from scratch. This is not all of the picture, but it's a big part of it.

If you think game devs & video game designers sit in a room together, then you're dead wrong. Devs are the exploited labor. If devs were the problem, then indie games would have been an even bigger woke fest. That opposite is true.

The problem is lack of cartelization. Or : "Tech dudes are pussies".

Here is the day to day in the life of a developer:

  1. Report your progress to your VP who decides if you get promoted. MBA.
  2. Report your progress to a product PMs who decides what needs to get done. MBA.
  3. Build the software to the exacts design created for you. BA Painting.
  4. Submit legal review to the legal team who decide if you're infringing on external IP. Lawyer.
  5. Rinse and repeat

They have no agency.

Have you ever worked in a law firm ? The partners, managers, associates....all lawyers. Everyone else reports up to them. Hospitals : Admins, Head of departments, Regulators.... all doctors. Everyone else (nurses, insurance, etc) must report to or work with them. Same is true for heavy engineering or any industry that needs deep expertise.

Tech prides itself in being anti-credential. But in the process, it has become anti-expertise. When the door is open for everyone, the politically savvy are going to run rounds around the meek devs.

The problem started with Steve Jobs. Steve portrayed himself as the cool 'designer' who figured out how to take socially inept coders and transform the world with it. This set the narrative for the tech industry as it exists today. It is exacerbated when a startup CEO sees massive growth, and must hire people to 'manage' all the growth. Rather than promoting socially competent senior devs, they hire 'ready made' MBAs. This sets up empire-building MBA culture in the entire middle management (VP - Director) band.

Tech guys created an industry, and MBA types stepped in to make all the money from it. MBAs understand all products as a supply chain. Create more, create faster and more time pressure. Ofc, that's a terrible combination for anything that needs the slightest bit of expertise. So, that's how you get the modern game dev industry.

To be direct:

  • Arts grads (writers, designers, directors) come up with woke stories
  • MBA CEOs follow the money & NYT. NYT tells them more woke. Money tells them more Fortnite.
  • Tech see major issues. But, are pussies so they build what they're told at insane time pressue
  • Thing doesn't get made in time because in any high-skill job - more time pressure is worse quality is broken game
  • Deadlines keep slipping for reasons any dev could have explained. But to MBAs, whippings must continue until morale improves
  • Devs keep getting abused
  • Game releases as a broken unplayable mess
  • Consumers give shit reviews. IGN says 10/10 because video game journalism also isn't run by gamers or devs.
  • Art grads and MBA CEOs have never played a video game in their life. So they don't know the video game is shit. IGN must be right. Gamers are sexist.
  • MBA CEO says numbers must go up. So, burn all good will by overselling cosmetics exploiting gambling whales.
  • Shit game but breaks even. Convenient explanation so board-of-directors doesn't fire MBA CEO.
  • CEO gets bonus. Art team gets credit. Dev team gets fired. (cost cutting measure to show good quarter)
  • 2024, good will runs out, gamers out of touch with companies. Customer rebels. No sales.
  • -> WE ARE HERE

All the recently successful game companies are run by hardcore tech dudes. Epic and Roblox are obviously having a moment minting money. Both their CEOs were hard core tech dudes who built the core tech that underlies their companies. The 2 games that recovered from shambolic launches (No man's sky, Cyberpunk) are both run by hardcore tech people.

When looking for tech people running game studios, I found this quote from the founder of No Man's sky's studio.

My degree was straight Computer Science which generally frowned on anything games related

Tells you everything you need to know about Gaming as an industry.

All the recently successful game companies are run by hardcore tech dudes.

The most profitable franchises in core gaming (FIFA, GTA) were made as profitable as they are by an Australian grifter with no real tech skills (Andrew Wilson) beyond html (they hired him because he was a jock, unironically it’s on Wikipedia) and the Houser brothers, who were two London rich kids with no technical skills who started a music label.

What happens when you don’t have the MBAs? You get SAP, run by German autists who missed out on 30 years of technical progress. Epic would be toast right now if they didn’t get lucky with Fortnite, they only had the money to pivot unreal into film because of it.

It's not so much that non-tech people are bad for games. But that their utter dominance means tech nerds rarely get their voices out.

When doctors & lawyers take on secondary leadership roles, they don't turn into narrow minded autists. They learn the ropes of their new role, and apply those to their profession. Tech people should be able to do this too.

A company must have at least one of - love for the product, love for the tech or love for the user's identity. The counter to that is love for the money, love for the optics & love for the media. The nerds are most likely to have love for the tech, love for the user (because they're gamers themselves) and love for the product (because they want to make good games).

MBA types usually love the latter. But, media, optics and money are downstream from success. You can game media + optics and temporarily identify a money extraction strategy. If the MBAs don't play the games, don't care about the tech and don't identify as a the user (a gamer), then they'll inevitably crash and burn. In the woke era, many video game art-people hated gamers & gaming, and were using it as a way to tell their own woke story. This doesn't work. GTA was the Housers' baby. They may not write code, but they surely loved the product.

Andrew Wilson

Wilson definitely revolutionized the monetization of gaming as EA CEO. It's not to say that people like him shouldn't be hired or given important roles. But the CEO is the lifeblood of a company. Give bean counters the reigns, and they destroy the whole company for better quarterly results. Ballmer is the classic example.

The counter to this is Google and Facebook. Susan Wojcicki and Sheryl Sandberg turned them into the world's richest companies. But, because the CEOs were technical, the focus of the company remained technical. Even Tim Cook's peak MBA personality (in the best way possible) was balanced by Ive & Craig as two people who loved the product. It's cliche to say you need a balance. But, you need a balance. For instance, look at the EA board. 2/11 people have technical backgrounds (2 CTOs). One of them is a forever program manager without game-dev experience and another is a head of security, who while technical, has nothing to do with game development. This is the lopsidedness I'm talking about. 0/11 people are hard core game dudes.

don’t have the MBAs? You get SAP

I guess I'm in the Bay Area where technical people are fiercely business focused. I can't relate to the SAP situation

Say what you want about Elon, but he quickly reaches a 201 level technical knowledge in the companies he runs. Your CEO doesn't need to be an expert. But they need to be good enough to smell bullshit when it stares them in the face. Listen to Elon's reasoning about major strategic decisions. It is simple first principles reasoning on top of the core technical primitives of his company. (and I don't even like the guy).

Ballmer is the classic example.

How much of a bean counter was Ballmer, really? I truly believed he loved Microsoft, probably even more than Bill.

I truly believed he loved Microsoft, probably even more than Bill

Their respective portfolios certainly seem to imply so

"bean counter" isn't exactly the right word. But he instituted the "rank and yank" system which pitted employees against each other in a brutal competition for survival. From a distance I can sort of see the logic, but in practice it completely destroyed their teamwork and cohesion as everyone tried to make sure someone else was below them in the pecking order.

It’s hard in big tech where so many senior developers work hard in their 20s then have a family, coast, rest and vest, though. There’s no truly fair way of getting rid of them.

…yes and no.

Devs are overworked, underpaid, and lack creative control. Yes. They are politically oblivious, subject to the whims and aesthetics of their MBA-wielding superiors. Yes.

But these are not a consequence of anti-expert sentiment. The door isn’t open for everyone. Those managerial nobles and HR legions were invited in thanks to the iron law of scaling: comparative advantage. Time spent managing is time not spent on interesting technical problems. Most of the senior devs I know, socially competent or not, are much more interested in the latter. So they hire their counterparts who, technically competent or not, prefer to manage.

Cartelization doesn’t help. Every hour spent on management or marketing or compliance or HR or accounting or basket-weaving is an hour not spent on the core technical task. If you need them all you have to hire more manpower. That’s more expensive with constricted supply.

The smaller studios of the 90s just had fewer non-core tasks. You don’t need a manufacturing specialist when your whole production line is one CD burner.

Why should devs be the one in charge? It's the designers, the ones that design the systems, that make the games what they are.

Is design really that exclusive of a skill? I find it hard to believe.

I'd put artists above designers in terms of value, and programmers above all of them.

I can come up with the coolest game you've ever played, in my head, right now. Good luck making it without artists and programmers.

Yeah, good luck making a movie without actors, camerapeople, costume designers and so on, but it's still the director who is the lynchpin of the whole production.

I am one of the people who would agree with you that leadership in any team context is key, and it's a lesson that took me too long to learn.

I see the value in a designer/team who has a vision and can push to see it through. The analogy of a director may be a good comparison, in that they can produce what I would consider a good movie with very little in terms of assets or contributions from the team.

I suppose it depends on your definition of "Value" and "Success". An indie film with one director is almost always going to be crap, occasionally a niche art-house classic, and very, very rarely a breakout like Blair Witch or something.

It's not management specifically I was talking about, it's having a detailed vision that you know how to iterate upon all the way to the successful release. You can be the sole developer/artist/writer/composer working on the game, but game design is the only critical skill you can't really subcontract. Theoretically it's just a PDCA cycle, but in practice it's a complex learned skill:

  • can you tell why your vision is a game people will play?
  • can you tell which features are quicksand and have to be dropped or replaced before you've wasted too much effort on them?
  • can you tell why build A is better than build B and what the next build C should be like to be even better?
  • can you tell when your game has started to diverge from your vision and rein it in or pivot to a new vision?
  • etc.

Indie devs have to learn this because they are often wearing multiple hats. It's very useful for designers to know the limits of engines/art/music/writing they have to work with. It's very useful for a developer to have some design skills ("Dave, the game is based around massive leaps across massive maps, our current movement code feels sluggish, I think we need more air control," says Steve the designer, and Dave can either increase air control and send the new build to Steve or keep tweaking the code until the movement feels just right). But it general that's two separate skillsets and one of them is critical.

No, you cannot. You cannot even come up with the coolest game you've ever played. At best you can do an elevator pitch for the latter, and noone will give a shit because being an ideas guy is indeed not an exclusive skill.

Actual game design starts at the hundreds of pages of plans and spreadsheets and design documents required to turn those ideas into something concrete. The detail level of which keeps growing the more people with less direct personal communication you need to convey those ideas to.

Tons of great games have been made without artists. Many, many more only spend any time and effort on artists long after the designers are satisfied their prototypes are worth the expense. Tons of great games have been made without programmers. The entire fields of designer board games and tabletop rpgs are like 30-60 years old despite requiring no technology not available centuries ago, only advances in game design.

You cannot even come up with the coolest game you've ever played.

First I'd disagree with this - stealing systems that I've played and modifying them is exactly what I'd do. Could I have come up with MtG on my own 30 years ago? Probably not, but a background in software and being a huge fan of games means I could probably come up with something serviceable, if not 100% unique.

Tons of great games have been made without artists.

I can think of vanishingly few games where the art and design were not significant. My video game dev friends often have something great on their hands, design and system-wise, that is ultimately not fun to play with stock art. Simple platformers with great art and music (Braid, Limbo) are vastly more successful than their hideous, bare-bones brethren. Sure, games are developed before artists get involved, but they don't make it to production or succeed without it.

This seems exactly backwards. Solo indie devs with shitty art assets and buggy code are over night millionaires if they actually have a cool game idea, on the flip side, AAA games with polished performance and graphics flop left and right because the fundamental game play is shit.

Maybe I've been out of the gaming world too long - where are these fantastic games with no/crappy art?

Even very designer-driven games (EX Super Meat Boy) have great visual components.

Vampire survivors and co? Juice Galaxy was my first thought, but that barrel of lunacy is free already.

EX Super Meat Boy

If super meat boy has great visual components then basically anyone who can download a free asset pack from itch.io has great visual components.

I believe the contention is that the devs should also be designers, or rather, that the designers should rise up from the dev mines.

I donno man. I think a lot of things were going on at once.

The centralization of the video game journalist profession in San Francisco when Ziff Davis bought everyone and consolidated their offices there didn't help. You saw a lot of video game journalist organizing on mailing list and at conferences to bully developers into pushing their views.

There is a certain type of terminally online, always offended psychopath that always seems to work their way up the ranks from forum bully, to jannie, to "Community Manager", to holding a gun to a company's head threatening to run to their game journalist buddies if they don't get what they want. Sometimes the company calls their bluff, I think the developer behind Guild Wars did that.

Sometimes the call really is coming from inside the house, and employees feel emboldened to bully their coworkers into conforming with progressive dogma. Although given all the leaks you see Grummz getting, it's obvious some dissidents are keeping their heads down and cashing paychecks.

There are all the theories about ESG loans and other financing options only being available if games pay protection money to DEI consultants. I'm not sure how much concrete proof has ever come out about that. I've never seen a contract with it spelled out, but it wouldn't shock me.

I know the indie scene is incredibly cliquey and woke. BPD chicks who've practically never made a game somehow hold court and decide who is or isn't allowed to network and make connections, and who get's slandered by the woke games journalist. Sometimes they even drive their targets to commit suicide, and then their own family throws them under the bus and refuses to tell the dead man's side of the story because of some word salad about privilege and lived experience.

And then there is the fact that the pay and the hours suck. I make way more fucking money plying my trade literally anywhere but the video games industry, despite loving games and desperately wanting to make them my entire life. In the early 00's when I was choosing a career path, The EA Spouse scared me away from even considering it. Now I wouldn't want to subject myself to how utterly toxic the entire industry appears from the outside. And I wouldn't trust anyone who tries to sell me that it's not that bad. I don't know how you tolerate the work culture unless you are already mostly on board with progressive dogma.

You saw a lot of video game journalist organizing on mailing list and at conferences to bully developers into pushing their views.

Surely video game journalists don't matter. These clowns can safely be ignored or, even better, mined for exposure as their performative tears serve to drive engagement.

I don't follow video games, but this seem incredibly obvious.

No one cares what these people think.

I disagree. Games journalist have proven themselves quite able to collect scalps in the industry even fairly recently. And while a good game often overcomes their smears, sometimes they don't, and I can sympathize with an executive not willing to bet the company on pissing off Jason Schreier.

Jason Schreier.

With respect, no one gives a rat's ass about this creature, whoever he may be.

At some point, people need to realize that woke scolds have no power. Don't apologize, don't cuck, and things will be fine. In fact, they will be better than fine if you mine their outrage for engagement.

At some point, people need to realize that woke scolds have no power.

They do, though. They can have you fired. They can have other companies break contracts or refuse to do business with your company. Including companies like Mastercard and Visa.

Fair enough. If you’re a wage slave they can get you. If you’re a person or brand with a real audience they are powerless.

The situation can be fixed by firing DEI departments and it’s happening right now.

Sometimes the good guys win.

If you’re a person or brand with a real audience they are powerless.

If you're at least as powerful as Joe Rogan, they're weaker. Others with real audiences have indeed been canceled, e.g. Roseanne Barr, Mel Gibson, and Louis C.K.

Why is the law so woke?

I have the displeasure of working with a legal textbook, it's full of stuff about destigmatizing prostitution and drugs, getting overincarcerated minorities out of prison, criticizing socially invented 'fear of crime', the neoliberal practice of fining people... This isn't a 'random academic writes law about the plight of refugees that nobody will ever read' (though there are plenty of those), it's a textbook that thousands of students are supposed to study. It's written by a bunch of established academics, it reflects a certain level of consensus that is filtering through to the next generation.

Why are Jaguar so woke? Jaguar is/was considered a heritage British brand for classy and wealthy drivers.

https://x.com/Jaguar/status/1858800846646948155

https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1859813947396047075

There must've been a consensus decision that this was the way the brand was headed, that this was the fellow who should be in charge of marketing.

I think it's a mistake to say 'this is one local effect' when we see it in so many places. There is a broader systemic cause, people think that this is good and prestigious so they do it regardless of whether it makes sense in context. There might be many commissars in the Red Army but the root cause doesn't have to do with the Army being particularly attractive to Commissars, it's that the Red Army is part of the Soviet Union.

Why aren't there antiwoke Game devs?

Because riot games was forced to pay 100 million for gender discrimination when it hired people on the basis of whether or not they even played riots games.

Anti Discrimination law MANDATES that you continually hire hostile sexual and ethnic minorities who largely resent the cre audience, and then increasingly pander to those employees, lest they file suit for workplace discrimination.

This is why indy games don't have this problem and are still creative, sexual, violent, disturbing, male-coded, etc.

As your games company employs more people the more DEI people you're forced to hire and shove into every function you can fit them... This is why hollywood and videogame writers rooms are so woke... There's maybe 0.1% gender-queer black people who can code or 3d model at the level of the pros in the coding employment base... but you can shove anyone in a writer role, have them throw out horrible ideas, and then have some poor intern turn that into dialogue.

Because riot games was forced to pay 100 million for gender discrimination when it hired people on the basis of whether or not they even played riots games.

Ludicrously uncharitable reading of the lawsuit. While the complaints ranged much more widely than the dispute over the 'core gamer' criterion, even on that point this wasn't a disparate impact claim of the form 'women are less likely to be gamers therefore hiring on the basis of playing Riot games is discrimination', the argument was that 'core gamer' was a nebulous and fake term that was the fig leaf management used to avoid promoting women, rather than actually having anything to do with playing games. Now I'm sure you disagree with that reading, but that was the thrust of the case they made.

Because riot games was forced to pay 100 million for gender discrimination when it hired people on the basis of whether or not they even played riots games.

Where can we read the best breakdown of this?

A quick Google search reveals the following documents:

By offering only "hardcore gamers" the right of passage into its workforce for years, Riot denied equal employment opportunities to hundreds of qualified female applicants since opening its doors.

Note that this lawsuit (1) was brought by the California govt. in state court rather than by the federal govt. in federal court, (2) alleged more illegal behavior than just hiring discrimination, and (3) ended in a settlement rather than in a determination of guilt after trial.

Thankfully, this does seem to be going away.

Walmart just canceled their DEI program, following many other companies like John Deere, Harley Davidson, etc...

It's not so much that the law required these departments. It's more that folk beliefs sprung up thinking that DEI was "best practices". This thinking is now obsolete, and DEI programs are now accurately perceived as damaging to public relations and the bottom line.

I don't see how that avoids a 100 million gender discrimination lawsuit.

Credentialism + nepotism is also a major factor on the creative side. A lot of the industry jobs are going to people because "I met they/them at calarts and followed their Tumblr askblog about obese superheroines with vitiligo, that's definitely the sort of person we need for Concord's character design team." I'm not kidding, that's literally the life story of all but two people I know doing art for games and cartoons, and those two are old guys.

Same with translation/"localization." It's a tiny industry with cliques of professional bullies getting away with hiring all their discord buddies and circulating blacklists, because there's literally no oversight.

It works without pushback because there's still no counter to the superweapons they developed. HR having a "Cluster hiring" policy literally gives them a party cadre within a few hiring cycles, and then you're fucked. And what do the old guard do except shake their heads and say "well I'd never hire or reject a candidate for political reasons."
Yeah, we used to hear that a lot from Google guys in 2012 who are no longer Google guys.

TL;DR: as nybbler likes to say, you can't pick up $20 off the sidewalk when there's a troll with a club making sure nobody touches it.

HR having a "Cluster hiring" policy literally gives them a party cadre within a few hiring cycles, and then you're fucked.

Wow... you weren't kidding. I looked up the term "cluster hiring" and was greeted by this helpful description (in an academic context):

Cluster hiring, a recruitment practice known to increase diversity and promote interdisciplinary collaboration, is becoming increasingly popular among colleges and universities looking to diversify faculty and advance research related to social justice.

That's almost, but not quite, the most on-the-nose self-aware description of the long march through the institutions I've ever seen. I also enjoyed the one HR blog that described it as "an approach that aims to aggressively onboard diverse candidates", which sounds rather, um, unnecessarily violent. (Perhaps it's just a microaggression.)

The most self-aware description of the long march I've ever seen was from a book by a progressive theologian, described in an academic article I read like this:

"I do think the church is well placed to bring about some significant change in the world. And change in the world is desperately needed." The church’s "new mission" will be to “develop spiritual awareness in individuals and communities around the world”. Because the church – at least in North America – is so widely distributed throughout the community it is well placed to effect widespread consciousnessraising about such issues as AIDS, Global Warming, equitable access to technology etc. "The church has ground level access to millions of people. And millions of aware, reflective, conscious people is exactly what this world needs."

(Students of history may be reminded of suicide-cult-leader Jim Jones, who -- before drinking the Kool-aid -- attempted to convince the people of Indiana to "put real socialism into practice" through the guise of Methodism and then Pentecostalism. Sometimes a wolf comes as a wolf.)

I do appreciate all the evidence we're gathering on how progressives are wearing all our institutions as a skinsuit, but one wishes they might try to be more subtle.

The Kraft Heinz Company would kindly like to insist that it wasn't Kool-Aid®. The Kraft Heinz Company products have never been used to facilitate a mass murder-and-suicide.

Cyanide tastes horrible. I would be insulted as a Kraft Heinz executive that Jim Jones didn’t trust Kool-Aid® to mask the flavor.

Well, not a fast mass suicide.

Disclaimer: I don't actually work in the industry.

The problem AFAICS is that there are so many layers of selection against anti-SJ and no real layers of selection against SJ apart from the end-users, because arts are heavy on SJers and SJ will retaliate against people for helping an anti-SJ game.

Let's assume you're a game dev and you want to make an anti-SJ game. You need: funding, other devs, marketers, friendly-ish journalists, platforms to sell it on, and of course end users.

If you're rich, you can bankroll your own game, but if you're looking for investors you might have some trouble because of the latter stages, and because SJ has a reasonable degree of penetration into the financial system (i.e. people who can invest in you with other people's money, not just their own).

Lots of other devs are SJWs, so they're not going to work with you. The ones that aren't SJWs still are afraid to work with you, because if they do then their career is basically limited to "make more explicitly-anti-SJ games"; SJ will cancel them for the sin of working with you and they probably won't be able to be coworkers with SJWs ever again.

Lots of marketers are SJWs, so they're not going to work with you. The ones that aren't SJWs still are afraid to work with you, because if they do then their career is going to take a rather serious hit; lots of marketing agencies won't hire someone with that kind of black mark.

Lots of journalists are SJWs, so they're not going to promote your game. There is an alt-media ecosystem these days who've already paid the costs of cancellation and will not be deterred by it, but it tends to be focused on politics rather than entertainment; still, this one's noticeably less of an issue.

Lots of platform bureaucrats are SJWs, so you're going to have a hard time getting your game on those platforms. This one's especially hard because of the oligopoly.

End users, as you say, no real issue.

And a lot of these reinforce each other, too, because if the game is going to fail anyway then what the hell is the point?

Even trying to make a non-SJ game has some of these problems, because you still can't hire essentially any SJW devs (or to some degree marketers) without them at some point wanting to insert SJ and then you have the choice of either defying them and being considered anti-SJ by SJWs, or acceding in which case it's now an SJ game. And yeah, as others have said there are also rumours of ESG shenanigans on the "investor" rung.

Now, there are exceptions. Eastern media comes pre-made from a place where these incentives don't apply (although translators may still have a go at "fixing" it, that's actual extra work and thus less profit). Indie games don't have the incentives interlock quite as strongly because you need less people, although outside of single-person passion projects they're still there. But for the main industry? This $20 note is sitting on the ground... in the free-fire zone of the Berlin Wall. It's not impossible to pick it up, but it's also not surprising that it sits there a while.

The answer to virtually every "why is X industry/sector/institution woke?" is the same: It's the colleges and universities.

Every institution that wants or needs college graduates are getting people filling their ranks who have been subjected to four years of woke propaganda. I would call it entryism, which it kind of is, except it doesn't take much to subvert an insitution when the overwhelming majority of your generational cohort already believes what you do. Every insitution that is not explicitly right-wing/conservative/anti-woke and requires college graduates is subjected to this. Turns out, a lot of insitutions meet this definition, including most of the important ones.

Even if the game developers themselves are mildy resistant to woke ideology on account of their nerdiness (a fact I am not convinced of, but for the sake of the argument), the HR, Payroll, Executive Support etc teams are all full of woke graduates.

I've said it before, but I probably should say it more. If you want to stop 'wokeness', you have to target the academy first and foremost. Otherwise, we are just going to keep reaching "peak wokeness" every year.

I remember a decade and more ago people - back when the woke were called "SJWs", people would just brush them off as silly college kids, it's just a college thing that won't affect the 'real' world. Turns out, those college graduates actually had to go somewhere after college.

Notably, this thesis has to account for a control group- Roman Catholic seminaries.

Seminaries are generally agreed, by everyone with actual knowledge of the situation on the ground, to sit well to the left of their median graduate. The most basic available course of study is a non-watered down masters degree and doctorates are common, so we can assume human capital is at least semi-elite. Seminary professors and rectors enjoy much more respect among the student body than is the norm at universities and there are no TA’s. It’s also a totalizing, residential institution which heavily restricts student’s internet access and reading material and doesn’t allow phones. Yet new priests grow steadily more conservative over time.

The actual difference, I think, is that the Catholic right is good at appealing to high human capital and other right wingers are not.

If that were the case, wouldn't it apply to Roman Catholic undergraduates as well as to seminarians?

I'm not Catholic nor close to Catholic seminaries, so this is just spitballing: I wonder if the situation can be explained by the facts that Roman Catholic seminarians are a relatively captive audience regardless of how liberal the institution is (in a way that Baptist seminarians, say, are not) and that young Catholic seminarians are heavily preselected for cultural and theological conservatism in a way that their professors weren't.

If that were the case, wouldn't it apply to Roman Catholic undergraduates as well as to seminarians?

There is some evidence that this is at least partially true, but I don’t think an uncomplicated case can be made about it.

I think this might be true based on my experience with other contexts – I don't know practically anything about Catholic seminaries. But I suspect what's going on is perhaps a bit more nuanced; I think the non-Catholic right has plenty of good human capital, at least in some areas [for instance I suspect the best Protestant colleges in the US are probably as good or better than the best Catholic colleges].

Gotta think about why that is. Some ideas:

  • Catholics have always been outsiders in the US, which gives them more clarity to think strategically (US Protestants, as the former dominant force, can be tone-deaf or reactionary since they are used to things being a certain way and/or bound up in wanting things to be that way again; Catholics have less time for this.)
  • Catholics have attachment to and access to a preexisting magisterial institution that constrains their ability to fully sell-out on a political party, which makes them less "gettable," more stable in their intentions, and generally more even-keeled and ready to work towards long-term projects with high degrees of success.

If either of these are true it would suggest that the LDS is also better at appealing to high human capital for the same reasons. I am not sure if that's the case or not – I don't have enough experience with the broader LDS community.

  • Catholics have access to higher human capital for Founders Effect/regional reasons (not sure I buy this).
  • Catholicism is more respectable/higher status/honored more in the public discourse than Protestantism (especially evangelicalism). There's sort of a compounding effect here, but the gist of it would be that people who wouldn't work for a tacky right-wing Evangelical organization would work for a high-status elite Catholics-aligned organization, hence the Catholics stay winning. I definitely think there is something to this.
  • Catholics have fewer bones about working outside of their faith community. Protestants (especially Evangelicals) can be insular, whereas Catholics are quite happy to work with high talent of other faith groups to achieve their ends. (You see this in their schools.) I definitely think there is something to this as well.

Catholics have access to higher human capital for Founders Effect/regional reasons (not sure I buy this).

Catholic institutions(eg, Notre Dame) do seem to be the main high-prestige route available for Italian and Slavic Americans, who are too white to be non-legacy admits at the conventional ivies and too recent to be legacy admits. It’s possible that this is a factor- and Italian and Slavic Americans are a bit to the right of other Ellis islanders.

But Irish-Americans should have the same factor apply, and they would push things left.


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