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 -
I've discoursed elsewhere on the Progressive Epistemic Crisis. Short version: they constructed such impervious bubbles that they become entirely disconnected from reality. Is the president senile? What is a woman? Is the economy good? The list of simple questions that a progressive cannot answer could go on and on.
This is problem for all of us, because they successfully marched through all the institutions that we all relied on to know what was true and what was important. The rot is evident everywhere, and has been discussed in these spaces many times before. Social sciences have a replication crisis. Alzheimer's research has been almost entirely fraud for 2 decades. University presidents dragged before Congress cannot articulate their views on calls for genocide, and cannot fall back on "free speech" defenses without everybody laughing in their faces. Nobody even knows who was running the presidency these past 4 years. And trust in the media, the institution tasked with helping to make sense of all of this, continues to crash.
The problem for the Left is how to extract themselves from these bubbles, or maybe even reform them. But the problem for the Right, which already believes them to be irredeemable, is what to replace them with. And it looks like the Right has coalesced around an answer.
Twitter. The answer is Twitter.
Legacy Ways of Knowing were highly authoritative and highly centralized; the new approach flips that entirely on its head.
The first thing you need to understand is that Twitter knowledge is delivered in a breaking-news, but very provisional, style. In Rationalist terms, every tweet is effectively tagged with "epistemic status: low certainty." Info comes in very fast, but the accuracy is also low; you have to wait and watch as the story develops and keep sampling the gestalt before you can have confidence in a given piece of info. When Elon talks about finding all these dead people in the Social Security and implies that this is a major source of fraud, he is pointing at an interesting thing he found and maybe it will grow into some more substantial as they dig into it. This is "move fast and break things" applied to epistemology. Even within the same story, you can contrast the two systems. On the left, an article was found to declare, authoritatively, that actually it's just COBOL. The pitfalls of both approaches show forth here, in that finding dead people will probably not catch much waste/fraud/abuse relatively speaking, but also in that the COBOL response was entirely incorrect.
Second, Twitter Knowing is highly decentralized. In the Legacy Knowing, you got with the party line quick if you knew what was good for you, or you were banned or cancelled. It didn't matter if they said masks were dumb last week, now they believe masks are good, and so now you will believe that too, with exactly the same certainty as the previous contradictory belief. Lefty pundits thought the Trump coalition was already cracking up when Musk tweeted in favor of more H1-Bs over Christmas, and got dogpiled for it; in their world such open dissent would have meant large numbers of purges all around. Instead, Musk retreated and the leadership received some valuable information about their coalition's views.
Of course, Musk did not quietly retreat. Instead, he changed the subject to Rotherham, and the Right united around remembering how terrible their enemies are. And this gets to the primary use of legacy media, which was not so much the transmission of information, but the directing of discussion. Leftwing institutions told them when to care about kids in cages (during Republican administrations) and when not to (during Democratic administrations)(1). Right-wingers have long struggled to match this narrative-pushing ability. But Twitter is now serving the same purpose of pushing forward stories to be talked about, and Musk is experimenting with just how far he can push that ability. Most of his current posts are mostly oriented around trying to nudge the narrative in certain directions. But note that he has this power because he is a highly followed account, not because he owns the site. Others with large follower counts can do the same thing, and increasingly will.
All of this could change very quickly, but that's where we stand at the moment. Legacy institutions already capitulated to this state of affairs when Biden resigned from the race via Twitter, with no further elaboration in any legacy media. Maybe they could have pushed back then, but not now.
tldr;
(1) This should actually be seen as Kelsey attempting to wrest back some amount of agency.
The answer is not Twitter. The answer cannot be exchanging one source of information for another because the actual problem is not the source of information. It’s the meta-espistomology, how does one even begin to assess whether or not a statement is true. And for that, you need to learn th3 toolset of thinking — formal logic, empirical reasoning, inductive and deductive reasoning.
The problem for liberals is not that they have bad sources of information, it’s that they generally reason from authority. They take the pronouncements of the Cathederal on a given topic much like a Catholic would take the pronouncements of Pope Francis or Muslim would take a Hadith— the authority has said it, therefore it’s true, and I don’t need to check it out. And even for a very good source of information, this is a terrible way to try to make it all make sense.
Secondarily, I think Twitter is a terrible source of information simply because it doesn’t have anything to think about. It’s just millions of idiots screaming into the void about things they don’t understand. There’s nothing to practice empirical reasoning or deductive reasoning on. And the thing is if you can get someone to start using the toolset, you can get them out of their bubbles faster. Get them trying to predict what else is true if X story is real and it’s harder to keep that person in a bubble.
Depends how much you really believe in the wisdom of the crowd. If you can combine that with a general understanding that the epistemic status of any given tweet is very low, you might indeed be able to glean useful information, based on how wide a given piece of information has spread and for how long.
For example, the JFK files were just released. I ain't readin' any of that. But I am confident that if there's anything interesting in there, Twitter will surface it to me over the course of the next week. And if it's all a dud, it will surface that, too.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link