site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11915 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 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.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Scott briefly observes, "The only thing about COVID nobody talks about anymore is the 1.2 million deaths.

That’s 1.2 million American deaths. Globally it’s officially 7 million, unofficially 20 - 30 million. But 1.2 million American deaths is still a lot. It’s more than Vietnam plus 9/11 plus every mass shooting combined - in fact, more than ten times all those things combined. It was the single highest-fatality event in American history, beating the previous record-holder - the US Civil War - by over 50%. All these lives seem to have fallen into oblivion too quietly to be heard over the noise of Lab Leak Debate #35960381.

Maybe it’s because they were mostly old people? Old people have already lived a long life, nobody can get too surprised about them dying. But although only a small fraction of COVID deaths were young people, a small fraction of a large number can still be large: the pandemic killed 250,000 <65-year-old Americans, wiping out enough non-seniors to populate Salt Lake City. More military-age young men died in COVID than in Iraq/Afghanistan. Even the old people were somebody’s spouse or parent or grandparent; many should have had a good 5 - 10 years left.

Usually I’m the one arguing that we have to do cost-benefit analysis, that it’s impractical and incoherent to value every life at infinity billion dollars. And indeed, most lockdown-type measures look marginal on a purely economic analysis, and utterly fail one that includes hedonic costs. Rejecting some safety measures even though they saved lives was probably the right call. Still, I didn’t want to win this hard. People are saying things like “COVID taught us that scientists will always exaggerate how bad things will be.” I think if we’d known at the beginning of COVID that it would kill 1.2 million Americans, people would have thought that whatever warnings they were getting, or panicky responses were being proposed, were - if anything - understated.1

A better comparison for 1.2 million Americans dying would be the Spanish Flu: An estimated 675,000 Americans died, while the total population was estimated to be round 106,000,000. (The 2020 estimated population was around 331,500,000.)

One problem I have with the online debates about covid policy is there's no clear counterfactual: 2021 deaths were higher than 2020 deaths, which is bad for arguments that containment policies were only protecting the most vulnerable at the expense of the general population, because the most vulnerable had disproportionately died in 2020 and management had improved. It's possible that a different set of policies would have resulted in disproportionately more QALYs lost by lower-risk demographics, due to the non-linear dynamics of disease transmission (don't forget rates of mutation). I don't really care to defend any policy, since there were a lot of avoidable mistakes, but I think the criticism should be more specific and measured.

(Edit: Scott's Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, published July 1, 2021 - anyone know if there's been much change in the understanding of NPI effectiveness?)

I dislike how he brushes over 'lab leaks'. That should've been the real story, it's more important than all other factors and especially more important than feeling sad about the death toll.

Nothing was learnt from COVID. Literally nothing, gain of function research is still continuing. Everyone knows that gain of function research caused this disaster. But nobody can be bothered to do anything about it, Trump has frozen federal funding into gain of function. A funding freeze is not remotely proportionate for the megadeath machine.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-14711269/ebola-lab-placed-shutdown-halting-disease-research.html

Speaking anonymously, an HHS source revealed that one of the researchers poked a hole in the other's protective equipment during a vicious 'lovers' spat'.

Dr Connie Schmaljohn, the lab's director, was also placed on administrative leave after she allegedly failed to report the incident to other officials.

In a previous incident in May 2018, anthrax may have been accidentally released from the boiler room at one of the labs in Fort Detrick, Maryland, and into a nearby river where people were planting lilypads. No illnesses were reported as a result of the potential release.

This is a BSL-4 lab by the way, America's top people. Wuhan was BSL-3. These doctors have been behaving like clowns with the most dangerous technology on the planet. There's no sign of any professionalism, considering the danger of their work. The acceptable number of lab leaks is zero, it's the same as the acceptable number of accidental nuclear strikes. The AI community seems to care more about bioweapon risk, that's a big part of the whole AI safety rhetoric. But why should anyone care about whether AIs can synthesize bioweapons when the experts are already doing it so carelessly?

This stuff should be done out on South Georgia island near the south pole, or somewhere incredibly remote with a huge mandatory quarantine period, if and only if it's absolutely necessary. Otherwise, anyone who tries to do gain of function, especially with humanized mice like they were doing for COVID (like Daszak boasted about in his tweets) should be treated like Osama Bin Laden, with special forces coming in to shoot them on sight.

The right of scientists to publish cool papers and do interesting research in convenient locations does not come above the right to life, freedom and property for tens, hundreds of millions.

Really, really disappointed with that post of his.

-Civil war era US had a tenth of present day US population. Scott surely knows this.

-mostly old people died now so low QALY losses compared to say, Spanish flu.

He knows all this, he's smart, we know this, yet he doesn't say it. Why?

I dislike how he brushes over 'lab leaks'.

Ironically, most of US lab leaker proponents are (probably) brushing over a the fact that covid was not made by the 'bat woman' Shi Zhengli in Wuhan, but was made in a US lab in Montana as part of a project to 'Defuse' bat coronaviruses in wild bat populations by circulating particular strains of viruses in them.

This seems outrageous and is perhaps a coverup of something darker, nevertheless there's fairly compelling evidence for it such as the animals in which covid easily spreads are not typical Chinese lab animals.

This is a complex set of claims which it'd take some serious effort to verify, but it does seem plausible and explains anomalies such as the disclosure of the genome by Shi in early '20 etc.

Anyway on the link there's an entire podcast episode that goes over it in detail.

mostly old people died now so low QALY losses compared to say, Spanish flu

He literally talks about this in the post.

Civil war era US had a tenth of present day US population. Scott surely knows this.

He changed that paragraph from "deadliest" to "highest fatality" when several people in the comments pointed out that the civil war was still more lethal per capita.

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