site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 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.

105
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Solution 1: Abort all but the top 20% (per mildly futuristic machine-learned polygenic score) of men. Gender balance in numbers evolved in a setting greatly different from modern industrial societies; maybe having a gender balance of 1:5 is actually more stable now.

Solution 2: If it's really about absolute quality rather than relative (i.e. women don't actually grade men on a curve), just have full male-side eugenics and make 5 clones of each of the top 20% instead of sampling male embryos from the general population. No gender imbalance, but of course this would lead to further increases in gender pay gap and performance which could destabilise society in other ways.

Solution 0: If quality-based eugenics is so unpalatable, just use abortion or chemicals in the water to shift the gender ratio of children to 1:5. We can change reptilian gender ratios by shifting environmental temperature; perhaps we will find something that works for mammals too.

There's a significant positional element to women's rankings of men, so breeding the top 20% of men 5x each will just result in many of those men falling to the bottom once again.

As for the rest of your post, skewing gender %s is a proposition I actually find intriguing. There's obviously some significant Chesterton's Fence issues with immediately going to a 5:1 ratio, but I think it would be an interesting experiment to start with like a 1.25:1 female:male ratio and see what happens.