site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14984 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 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.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College (NYMag)

link-archive link

Article describing what was predictably coming to college campuses since GPT3 got released. The narration follows some particularly annoying Korean-American student trying to make quick bucks from LLM-cheating start-ups and a rather dumb girl who can't follow basic reasoning, which makes the read a bit aggravating and amusing but overall the arch is not surprising. Recommended for a quick read. Basically all the grunt work of writing essays and the intro level classes with lots of rote assignments seem to be totally destroyed by cheap and easy high quality LLM output.

Some interesting highlights for me:

  • There is a consensus in the article even shared by the cheating students that writing essays in "Indigenous studies, law, English, and a “hippie farming class” called Green Industries" is an important transformative experience and if young adults miss out/cheat on this for 4 years then we must be seriously worried about the next generation.
  • It is not explored much what the students are doing with their time instead of writing these very important essays. There is one throw-away quote from a brain-rot girl about how she scrolls TikTok all day and has no time for essays. Perhaps all the students are getting one-shotted by dopamine addiction algorithms but perhaps they are not and many are socializing or learning actually interesting things instead of writing indigenous studies slop essays. This should be a major question but just left unexplored.
  • None of the journos or the academics quoted in the article can bring themselves to question if these young adults should even be in the university if they are all so eager to cheat (and earlier pandemic-era mass cheating spree is mentioned as well). There is a whole paragraph dedicated to justifying seemingly pointless essays, never-again-remembered-calculus-exercises, and the importance of doing "hard things" (which is apparently writing pointless essays and never-again-remembered-calculus-exercises). But there is not a single example of a "hard thing" students are missing out on because of LLMs in the whole article. Literally every single example is students automating busy work which should cost any 120+ IQ individual little brain power but lots of time. And a bizarre out of place paragraph about the need to "consider students more holistically" with a non-sense blurb from some academic.
  • Academics sound extremely lazy and whiny about trying out the most obvious solution: ditch all course-work based grading in favor of oral examinations and comprehensive graduation exams. This would immediately solve the whole problem (it would even align the incentives to get students to use LLMs for studying instead of cheating) and it is not even a "revolutionary" solution, just how universities used to work not that long ago. But obviously this would fail 90%+ of the current university students and likely destroy the entire industry as vast majority of the students providing their income stream are not nearly smart or conscientious enough to pass then.

A tumblr post I quite enjoyed:

Certainly! Here is a tumblr post to get rich white champaign socialists riled up:

The reason AI is the Current Thing for libs to get mad at is because it puts the ability to have someone ghostwrite your college essays into the hands of poor people.

I generally agree about your fourth point: More than a decade ago, one of the better professors I had at university was an English teacher; she was young enough and new enough to not have been worn down by the grind yet. A large part of the grade for her class was in the exam portion, where we were given ~4 hours of proctored exam time to (mostly) write several short essays in person by hand, without electronics. We were allowed copies of the literature involved and no other aids, and basically given "choose 3 topics from this list of 10 to write essays about", where the topics were things like "compare [work A]'s [element x] to [Work B's]." etc. I imagine she could simply load more of the final grade on that final exam, and the similar but shorter midterm, rather than homework essays, and still be able to assess/grade students' abilities in the era of ChatGPT.

Instead, it largely seems like universities have mostly tried nothing, and are all out of ideas. The remarkable fatalism I've been seeing about it is amusing.

proctored exam time to (mostly) write several short essays in person by hand, without electronics

I'm really showing my age here, but this is my typical high school and college experience. Tests are maybe an hour long in high school, longer in college. No electronics other than sometimes a scientific calculator. No graphing calculators since they can be programmed with the relevant formulae; including fake screens that say all memory has been just now wiped.

AP English literature, English language and history was lots of hand written essays. Just write a few paragraphs answering some question statement about some short reading.

This is all so obvious and relatively fool proof. Sit and do the work in a room in front of your professor and TAs. If you could wave a magic wand and give young me an amazing hand held device with a super-LLM, it would not have helped me at all for in class final tests. Nothing but pens and paper allowed. Unless your professor is a sadist and makes open book exams. But always no looking at your cell phone.

Even my numerical methods class final was in a computer lab with the professor and TA watching us. Do whatever you want with that base installation of MATLAB, no opening the web browser. No LLMs need apply since only the final exam doc and MATLAB are allowed to be open on that computer. Using the meagerest mental faculties, I memorized the few solution methods they taught me and performed them under my professor's watchful eye. I don't see why now that doesn't equally work. I could have tried to cheat and opened the web browser to Google answers. But I didn't and couldn't given the monitoring. LLMs are not beyond Google in this respect.

Reading this thread I see more a problem in instructor will and discipline than LLMs. In class, no cellphones, no laptops, write down your answers tests. Problem fucking solved, like they were for me 20ish years ago.

No electronics other than sometimes a scientific calculator. No graphing calculators since they can be programmed with the relevant formulae; including fake screens that say all memory has been just now wiped.

Hot take: calculators are for experimental physics exams. In mathematics, they should not be required. If the exam is about multiplying five digit integers, then a calculator would defeat the purpose of the task. If the exam is about integration, then you can easily make sure that there will not be a lot of five digit integers to multiply.

Granted, some math classes are mostly to enable students to use calculators for their science classes. So sure, if the point is to learn to calculate logarithms with a calculator, you require a calculator -- no point in having students learn to use a slide rule. Likewise, for basic probability theory, a calculator will make a lot more practical applications accessible.

For my last two years of high school, Texas Instruments had somehow convinced my school board that their graphic calculators were great and educational. Our final tests featured tasks such as "determine the approximate root of this function with the graphical calculator". We did not cover a lot of math in these two years. I like to hope that graphical calculators are not a thing any more (a smartphone can do anything such a calculator can do, but much better), but if they still are, I would implore any school board deluded enough to think they would help teach math to at least make it a priority that the devices they mandate come with a decent programming language (LISP, Python, Haskell, Perl, whatever) so that kids do not have to waste two years programming in TI BASIC instead of paying attention to class.

I like to hope that graphical calculators are not a thing any more

Go to any office supply store near you. Are TI-83s still for sale?

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