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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Here is my attempt to conclude the h1b debate given the takes in on have been just bad.
The H1B debate seems to have died down in the same way every other debate dies down: things remain the same. Trump does what a liberal from the 90s does, and MAGA people claim victory over lip service. Academic Agent wrote a very succinct write-up on this issue, and my take on this is mixed.
I would not have wanted migrants in the millions to a country I was a native of, period. White-collar migrants are even worse since you are making college admissions and jobs even harder for your kid but you are also ensuring votebanks, unstable coalitions. They may be stable sometimes on the right but they will eventually break away. Sriram, the trump appointee who started all of this was a Kamala donor up until a month before the election and was not a good programmer by his own admission, certainly not an AI guy like Ian Goodfellow either. The h1b meltdown took Elon down too as he ended up losing arguments, banning anyone named Groyper and then publicly admitting defeat somewhat to calm people down, though things are unlikely to change by a lot. Elons issue was covered by eternal Pariah and sometimes really insightful Chuck Johnson so do check it out, he also detailed Srirams issues in this post.
Vivek Ramaswamy too burned some of his social capital like former MLM peddler Patrick Bet David by asking the youth to follow cram school routines like I did and compete with the rest of the world in terms of labor and uni admissions despite the very obvious issues of them cheating and having excessive ethnic prejudices to begin with. I have first hand experience with cram schools which funnily enough neither of them does and that explains why they glorify it and those who went through it cant forget the ordeal fast enough.
I would never want such large-scale movement of any people into my own nation but otoh I will not call most Indian migrants scheming scamsters or ethno-nationalists either. I might try to move to the west in 2025 and likely temporarily to see what Rome of today is like but I am a self-respecting person and a nation choosing its own people and demographics over hard to prove claims about the benefits of 20 billion Americans is a very sane outcome. There are plenty of good Indians, them leaving is explicit iq shredding and people back home gloating about how tech firms have Indian CEOs is a massive sign of insecurity.
Political change and human endevaors work on ingroups and outgroups, coalitions, the tech bro aligning with that gets its memes from identitarians was not going to last that long and the results will not be that different from 2016. People choosing to move to the west, starting a family there and if they are really good at what they do is a massive plus as long as the number does not exceed thousands as demographic changes are nearly impossible to overturn. Many posters here are honest hardworking white collar employees who work on visas and I would not want them to be called names anytime they log in. There are no good answers here, including Trump's which is handwaving, inaction, minor lip service and then letting things happen as they already are.
Biocapital is very real, society here runs not just on caste but also on class and there is a keen awareness amongst people of both. Indian biocapital is bottom of the barrel and clustering helps eek out better performance than what it could have otherwise but topsoil erosion won't last forever, I reckon most of it has already been used up. Indians move because they do not like most Indians, they do not wish to associate with them but being in a liberal democratic world reduces your identity down to the lowest common denominator. If I ever move out permanently, it would be because political power back home is not a possibility and I would rather live as a nerd in the big leagues than in the little leagues. The future here is incredibly bleak btw and I know many posters here who have similar backgrounds and moved out. I think they did the right thing.
I wanted to conclude this post with some reasonable course of action but that is highly unlikely. People here have a hard time believing that upper castes bottled India so badly that the nearly extinct remnants of their elite genepool is gone like their ability to gain any power yet they just sat down and took it, and now you have an ever-worsening system that chugs along without ever collapsing.
A collapse may never come, it did not for the past 2 thousand years, the US too would still "survive" even if Yglesias's harebrained schemes of one billion Americans came true though surviving like India or worse Pakistan or Bangladesh or Afghanistan is humiliating. My interest in politics began because of affirmative action here and how people would allow explicit laws like the SC ST act, once I saw the rest of the world I realised that things are far more universal than I thought they would be. Anyways i dont think there is a lot more to the debate, there are plenty of good people living here, under normal circumstances, I would in fact prefer if they did not move out but if I dont have an ingroup back home soon enough, I do think they should do what the Zoroastrians did when they came here, in both cases, people should kick out and sue the living shit out of Indian IT sweatshops and be far harsher migration wise but then again nothing ever happens.
I feel a sense of deep unease writing this, I do not want to offend friends I have made here and fuck my career over, I do not want them to be called names either. I am semi-anonymous here because this forum is the only place I can be honest and muting myself here like I do irl is bad, lying is even worse. Lying to yourself is how you get takes like Bryan Caplans on India.
The longer version of Bryan Caplan's take still seems reasonable to me:
https://www.betonit.ai/p/reflections-on-india
There are serious problems with Indian governance. And the Soviet style experiment that you think can easily be shaken off is still influencing them to have awful agricultural policies.
The difference between the worst poverty in the world and one of the richest countries in the world is not biocapital it's government policy. It's most clearly visible in Korea, where the DMZ separates two governments, not two people. And the difference between them is as stark as things get.
While I think Bryan Caplan, Noah Smith, and co are correct that with reasonable economic policies India could climb above the deepest rungs of poverty i.e. no more shitting in the street, basic literacy, and an end to chronic child malnutrition, and that this is something the rest of the world ought to encourage and celebrate, they are far too bullish on its long-term convergence with industrialized nations.
Caplan's last point in particular strikes me as either willfully ignorant or completely insane:
First off, this man has apparently never told an Indian Uber driver that he's in a hurry to get to the airport. And as a supporter of elite Indian immigration (we can certainly quibble on what "elite" means, since that's really the crux of the issue here), I must strenously oppose the claim that we can just import randomly-selected(?!) people from any country and expect a good outcome, economic, cultural, or otherwise. We in fact have a pretty good idea of what importing random Indians looks like, in the form of Guyana and Trinidad, and it isn't pretty.
As for North Korea, I think the fact that in their current state they are still able to build and test nuclear missiles and field an impressive IMO team, among other achievements, is a testament to the inherent biocapital of the Korean people, and something we don't see in other nations with similar regimes like Eritrea or Turkmenistan. With nations as with individuals, you may sabotage someone with the potential to be intelligent and successful by starving them as a child or hitting them in the head with a hammer, but I have yet to the see the opposite.
I'm never sure what to make of Caplan. He's clearly contrarian enough to acknowledge that genetics and IQ matter (see The Case Against Education) but he also states explicitly that he believes in Magic Dirt (or as he describes it, 'Magic Institutions') in The Case for Open Borders.
He also seems to believe that a migrant increasing his wages by moving to a rich country is actually increasing his productivity, rather than just benefitting from cost disease.
I remember reading one of travel pieces about Japan, and there were a lot of comments asking him to square what he noticed about Japan (the trains run on time, people are hyper-polite, there is no crime) with his support for open borders. The one I remember was something along the lines of 'Should Japan open its borders to Somalia? If yes, is this because it will benefit the Somali migrants or because it will benefit the Japanese?). I can't find the comment now, so I guess he deleted it. But looking here, he seems to be mostly interested in the gains for migrants.
He seems to believe that open borders will turn the whole world into the USA, rather than turning the whole world into South Africa.
I think Caplan is the worst sort of individual; an isolated elietist living in a gated community that will never have to face the reality his choices make for everyone else, who's intent on maximizing his investments, regardless of the wider consequences.
If that wasn't clear enough, I think he's abhorrent and deserves alot of things, none of them good.
There was a documentary that someone did on the efforts of a Chinese engineer contracted to build a road in the Congo and all the trials and tribulations he had to deal with in regards to the locals. I wonder how he'd react to that. I'm sure it would be telling.
Caplan doesn't believe in the blank slatism, nonetheless he attempts to justify his position with a mix of libertarian autism, utilitarian autism and hypothesized GDP maximisation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link