site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34413 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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.

12
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Bryan Caplan has a new book. His typical approach is to tour around the ideas in his book to various libertarian gatherings and podcasts. His latest book is in the form of a letter to his daughter. Various essays are put together. The title says it all:

"Don't be a feminist".

He has a talk out on the topic here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=d4C-Rz3Wv5c

@The-WideningGyre sums up the video:

I watched it, it's fairly short and enjoyable, but it's almost entirely preaching to the choir, I find. There wasn't really any support for helping de-program the other side. (The factoid about prison rape was new and interesting for me though).

Most interesting was the very first slide, where he says the dictionary definition of a feminist ("wanting to men and women to be treated equally") is wrong, in that almost all men agree with this, but only 1/3 of men consider themselves feminists. He instead proposes (paraphrasing) feminists think that "men are treated unfairly better than women" and notes that essentially all feminists would agree with it, but most non-feminists (including ones who agree with the dictionary definition) would disagree.

The rest is kind of the classic stuff -- men die on the job more, are affected by violent crime more, commit suicide more, the pay gap is BS, the "women are wonderful" effect etc. He notes how no one sees anything wrong with the Ukraine not letting any men between 16-60 out, which is a powerful contemporary datapoint.

It's also nice that he notes he wrote this book for his daughter, because he sees the feminist ideology leading to self-pity, antipathy, and injustice, which he sees as bad, and also that he briefly explores why he thinks it so popular, which he sympathetically phrases as "If so many people disagree with me, why do I think I'm right?"

I think The-WideningGyre is correct that most of this stuff is probably not new to a lot of people reading on this discussion forum. What is maybe a little new is someone sticking out their professional reputation to say these things.

That gives us a good opportunity to register predictions on how Caplan's book will be received. He says he had multiple friends come up to him and suggest that he not publish the book, or give it a different title.

Caplan is a tenured professor and shares a department with Robin Hanson (who has also courted some pretty big controversies). Caplan has also released books on controversial subjects in the past.

My personal prediction is that Caplan does not suffer at all for publishing this book. The book is most likely ignored. The book is never taken down from Amazon or any other publishers for the controversy. Caplan has a dry argumentative style, and tends to laugh at his own very nerdy jokes. I think those aspects play badly for drumming up a culture war controversy. And he has plenty of experience saying controversial things in a way that makes it sound like he is apologizing for the world. He also has a well insulated job and few easy avenues for people to go after him. If I am wrong in my predictions I should update in the direction of thinking that the culture war is hotter and more intense than I previously believed.

My personal prediction is that Caplan does not suffer at all for publishing this book. The book is most likely ignored. The book is never taken down from Amazon or any other publishers for the controversy.

Scott Aaronson was speculating on why, when Caplan visited his university to speak, no one seemed to care. No protests, nobody in the audience even asking snide questions. As he pointed out, by a reasonable definition of feminism ("women are people too"), Caplan is a "feminist" and considers "feminism" to be so obviously true as to not be worth talking about, but in his own experience, stating one's agreement with feminist beliefs never protected one from accusations of sexism or behavior that negatively impacted women. Maybe we've passed peak feminism, but Scott offers his own explanation: The worst actors, the kind who actively take pleasure in tearing down other people, wished to tear him down specifically because he claimed to be an ardent feminist. They enjoyed being able to say, "he said he was a feminist, and clearly he was lying." I have another hypothesis, though: That Caplan actually doesn't care about slacktivists and won't be guilted into capitulating, so he's not as easy of a target.

A bit of a tangent, but in 2015 Ben Croshaw (of Zero Punctuation fame) noted that cancellation efforts by woke mobs tend to be targeted at perceived heretics, rather than heathens:

For you see, the shouty fringe harassment squad only go after soft targets. Their pattern is to go after people nominally on their own side who got too comfortable and made a tiny slip-up. The hope is that an apology and retraction can be extracted, at which point the harassment intensifies, because that’s what happens when you show weakness to the pack. They swiftly get bored and move on when they realize they are having no effect. No effort against [intentionally shocking 2015 video game] Hatred could be sustained because Hatred just waved its middle fingers and blew raspberries until its attackers used up all their energy. E3 came around so they all moved on, to compete in the now-annual Offended Olympics that goes hand-in-hand with the show, trying to concoct the best way to be offended about Doom being violent without seeming like a clueless bellend. Mostly unsuccessfully.

Croshaw was by no means the first to note this, but it was the first example to come to mind. The mob went after Aaronson in large part because he self-identified as a feminist: they hate someone who is 99% onboard with their worldview but has some tiny reservations (i.e. a heretic) far more than they hate someone who openly scorns their worldview (a heathen).

On the one hand this seems a bit misguided: if you're going to send death threats to someone, shouldn't it be a literal neo-Nazi, rather than someone who generally supports trans rights but still thinks female-only spaces are important in a few limited contexts? But I can understand how an evolutionary urge to punish heretics more than heathens might have arisen. A heathen was never a member of the in-group, whereas a heretic was until they started mouthing off: it's not hard to see how someone you trusted who then turned traitor/defector stings more than "heathen does heathen things, story at 11".

I think there's also a perception of how best to spend one's energy.

Attacking a social conservative or anyone to their right gets you nowhere if you're a social progressive. They'll just say YESCHAD.jpg and move on. You accuse them of hating gays and they'll shrug because ultimately, they don't care and find homosexuality evil. There was never any hope in a progressive's heart that these people would change their tune.

A liberal? A liberal cares about the same things a progressive does, meaning it's much easier to scold them for failing to live up to shared ideals. Engaging in purity spirals with a liberal might them towards progressivism in a way impossible with the conservative.

On the one hand this seems a bit misguided: if you're going to send death threats to someone, shouldn't it be a literal neo-Nazi,

Those are pretty hard to find. And once you actually do it, you're mostly just punching a homeless guy who can't do anything without an FBI informant holding his hand through the process.

On the one hand this seems a bit misguided: if you're going to send death threats to someone, shouldn't it be a literal neo-Nazi, rather than someone who generally supports trans rights but still thinks female-only spaces are important in a few limited contexts?

Isn't that what "Punch a Nazi" is for? You send death threats to people which they will work on, and act violent towards people you think won't be persuaded by anything else.

Agreed. We also see this dynamic with the Kiwifarms/stormfront/etc stuff. They don't threaten the site itself because the owners just tell them to fuck off. Instead they threaten sympathetic people upstream to destroy the site.

I think this is definitely the same thing Aaronson was getting at, and to some extent it's true (although there's certainly plenty of efforts to purge heathens).

Caplan does not take the bait. Aaronson defends himself, which never works at changing minds of those who hate him.

I hate to say this, but Scott Aaronson has always struck me as more bullyable than Bryan Caplan. And some of the people who revel in "cancelling" others are almost certainly just bullies.

But I also think they approached the debate in radically different ways. Scott Aaronson made an impassioned emotional plea to lay back on the man hating. The response was a bunch of emotional attacks. Scott stepped into their arena and they beat him badly. Bryan Caplan has laid out a logical case for why Feminism doesn't make sense. Bryan setup his own arena and said 'come get me, but play by my rules'.

I hate to say this, but Scott Aaronson has always struck me as more bullyable than Bryan Caplan. And some of the people who revel in "cancelling" others are almost certainly just bullies.

I think this is very likely true--see my reply to another commenter. I don't know how much of a difference emotion vs reason made--I think Aaronson can make logical arguments, and emotional attacks against logical arguments are standard fare for zealots.

But Scott Aaronson was never massively popular either. I'm not sure I could compare their levels of popularity because they are both sort of obscure, but I would feel safe in saying they probably aren't an order of magnitude different in popularity. Just looking at number of book reviews on amazon, they are both in the hundreds.

Aaronson's brand is way bigger. His blog is way more popular; he has more clout in academia compared to Caplan, such as being involved in cutting-edge fileds like quantum computing. This tends to attract big egos compared to more mundane stuff. It does not help that Aaronson does not put up a shield to criticism, unlike most public intellectuals.

I doubt it is clearcut one way or the other. Clout in academia is one measure of popularity. Vaplan probably has more TV news appearances, he has been on national debate stages, and certainly has more social media followers (since Aaronson got rid of his).

I think if you both of them who was more popular theyd give an answer similar to mine.

Comparing Aaronson and Caplan specifically, Aaronson seems incredibly neurotic, the kind of person that's likely to create an issue where there wouldn't be one and respond with histrionics to the situation he created. See, for example, his bizarre airport incident. In stark contrast, Caplan seems like a delightfully goofy nerd that sees the humor in everything, the kind of guy that would react to that airport incident with "lol fuck me, right?".

Thinking about dramatic people I've known, I know which one of those would be more likely to get antagonized and trolled.

I don't know if neurotic is the right word, but I think he does definitely catastrophize. He also has the trait of many an earnest, not-very-socially adapted nerd who just wants to explain things when they don't look good and see the best in most people. Understandable--I was probably like that as well--but unfortunate when the Inquisition, which cares about finding a heretic more than it cares about truth, turns its eye in your direction.

(Which is not to blame Aaronson entirely for the way some people treated him, any more than I would blame the Maya for wanting to keep their culture as the real Inquisition burned all of their texts and tried to convert them by force. That some people respond badly to malicious, unreasonable, and bad-faith accusations certainly does not justify those accusations or the accusers making them!).

That's the funniest thing I've read in a while.

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