site banner
PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   32228 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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 Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Tyler Cowen on the future of China and AI:

…for all the differences across the models, they are remarkably similar. That’s because they all have souls rooted in the ideals of Western civilization. They reflect Western notions of rationality, discourse, and objectivity—even if they sometimes fall short in achieving those ends. Their understanding of “what counts as winning an argument” or “what counts as a tough question to answer” stems from the long Western traditions, starting with ancient Greece and the Judeo-Christian heritage. They will put on a Buddhist persona if you request that, but that, too, is a Western approach to thinking about religion and ideology as an item on a menu.

These universal properties of the models are no accident, as they are primarily trained on Western outputs, whether from the internet or from the books they have digested. Furthermore, the leading models are created by Bay Area labor and rooted in American corporate practices, even if the workers come from around the world. They are expected to do things the American way.

The bottom line is that the smartest entities in the world—the top AI programs—will not just be Western but likely even American in their intellectual and ideological orientations for some while to come. (That probably means the rest of the world will end up a bit more “woke” as well, for better or worse.)

One of the biggest soft power victories in all of world history occurred over the last few years, and hardly anyone has noticed.

You might think the Chinese AI models are fundamentally different, but they are not. They too “think like Westerners.” That’s no surprise because it is highly likely that the top Chinese model, DeepSeek, was distilled from OpenAI models and also is based on data largely taken from Western sources. DeepSeek’s incredible innovation was to make the model much cheaper in terms of required compute, but the Chinese did not build their own model from scratch. And DeepSeek has the same basic broad ideological orientation as the American models, again putting aside issues related to Chinese politics. Unless an issue is framed in explicitly anti–Chinese Communist Party (CCP) terms, as a Taiwan query might be, it still thinks like an American.

First: Cowen's argument here is a bit silly. China has over a billion people. If Chinese researchers wanted to train their own line of models from the ground up solely on the written output of Chinese citizens, thus purging their models of "Western" influence, this could almost certainly be arranged. Just because their current models are distilled from the outputs of Western models doesn't mean that this will always be the case in perpetuity.

Second: What exactly would it mean for an AI to have a "Western" soul, as opposed to a "Chinese" soul? The question is not meaningless, although Cowen's account of the Western soul leaves something to be desired. Westerners do not have a monopoly on "rationality"; even animals, non-human animals, are rational. When the animal is hungry it eats, when it's tired it sleeps, when it's attacked it defends itself. What could be more reasonable than that?

The most distinctive feature of the European mind is not its rationality or objectivity, but its ornery disagreeableness; its inability to be one with itself. Did you think it was a coincidence that both Socrates and Jesus* were sent to the gallows? Confucius and the Buddha were never crucified; Muhammad was revered in his lifetime as a great conqueror of many lands. But the Western sages, the archetypes of the Western soul, were given only death for their troubles; the Western sage is misfit and master rolled into one, hero and scoundrel, insider and outsider (and, going even further, God as an infinite divine being and God as a man who dies a criminal's death); a contradiction that is seemingly in no way "rational". This is why romanticism, Marxism, postmodernism, and in general all "revolts against reason" are not external enemies that threaten the Western tradition from without, but are instead immanent necessities of the Western tradition itself.

Doomers, safetyists, and luddites of all stripes should certainly hope that the machine god of the future is thoroughly "Western" in its fundamentals; for a Western god is a flawed god, a vulnerable god, an all-too-human god; and it is precisely this vulnerability that is the wellspring of the hope for change and renewal.

(*Strictly speaking, Christianity is non-Western in its origins, but it could not have achieved the status it did in European society if it did not possess a certain fundamental comportment with European sensibility. In some ways it is even more "Western" than the varieties of homegrown Western paganism, because it was only through Christianity that the West became itself.)

I think it’s pretty wild to posit “disagreeableness” as the key trait distinguishing “the West” from China, given China’s famously extensive list of civil wars, rebellions, splintering religious movements, etc.

Europe, too, is not without a history of armed conflict (religious and otherwise). So that doesn’t tell us much.

Of course it does; it tells us that disagreeableness is not especially concentrated in either East or West. You are the one who made the strong claim that what specifically differentiates “the West from China* is that Europeans cannot be at peace with themselves and that they persecute religious/intellectual/political reformers. Yet China also has a huge history of conflict, and also has a fraught history with its reformers and rebels. To me that makes a pretty compelling case against your original claim.

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