site banner
PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   28598 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 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.

What is a whale? Or a crab, a tree, a planet, a psychdelic drug, cannibalism, a champagne wine, jazz music, a poem...?

What is "knowing what a woman is?" If Person A shares your conception, but cannot articulate it, while Person B has a different conception and can pass an ideological turing test for many different conceptions of womanhood, who would you recognize as "knowing what a woman is" and why?

Keep seeing same link. Keep making same response

If "is a fish" really were just semantic, then by the same mechanism "has tiny hairs" would be just semantic. So there would be no facts based on which you can classify things... The only thing that makes this theory remotely workable is that you already know which things you want to apply it too. Its pure Humpty-Dumpty-ism in practice.

Good words refer to clusters in thingspace.

In Scott's article, this is a shared understanding between "you" and King Solomon, because both are assumed to have read the sequences. Both can happily agree on a definition of "hair" at least as long as no disputed example (such as the hair on a coconut) becomes relevant.

The thing with thingspace is that it has a really high dimensionality, and often people do not care about all of the axis. Solomon is basically saying "for the projection of thingspace I am interested in, it makes sense to classify a whale as dag.

In mathematics, you can really build your definitions bottom-up, so that new definitions only contain stuff already defined (as well as pre-agreed syntax, such as quantors). In all other human endeavors, not so much. Every definition is its own can of worms, and it is highly practical to be able to open up a minimal number of them, for example to debate what should be included as a mammal without pre-emptively also debating what "hair", "water", "leg", "swim", and "definition" mean, exactly.

Yes, this is another example of asserting that there are two kinds of words, and that the "pragmatic" ones should be optimised according to reasons provided using the "primary" ones (the axis of thingspace), without explaining how to distinguish the two. Yuds version is better in that it at least gives you a concept of a plan he might propose - like "primary properties are continuous" - but it doesnt give us a system that could be evaluated for corresponding to our epistemic situation, or even being coherent. I also dont think his version of "optimise" has considerations like "Norton really wants to be an emperor so lets include him in the category":

Suppose we mapped all the birds in the world into thingspace, using a distance metric that corresponds as well as possible to perceived similarity in humans

This helps, because you have to describe your "optimisation target" in terms of primary words to avoid circularity - I doubt the Yud primary words could actually be used for the Scott objective. For the Scott version, you need to make it so "aggregate human preferences" is a real word, but "woman" is not. For an illustrative example of this problem, see here:

Similarly, if I’m thinking about whether shrimp are conscious, I’m thinking about how shrimp are similar to and different from creatures we normally think of as ‘conscious’, and what these differences indicate about whether there’s something it’s like to be a shrimp.

where you might notice that "whether there’s something it’s like to be an X" is well established in philosophical discourse as being pretty much exactly as difficult as "consciousness", and has in many ways even started the trend of considering consciousness difficult in analytic philosophy. Thats what happens when your redefinition attempts accidentally hit on one of the terms in the optimisation objective, which happened because youre not systematic about it, because youve convinced yourself its unnecessary by intellectual descent from the exact thing in Scotts post Im objecting to.

(This isnt really relevant to the gender conversation, but one consequence of these cluster words is that all logical arguments, which require language compositionality, come with an asterisk to them. This is highly relevant when you try to use such arguments to convince people of a rather unusual conclusion, where you will not have an opportunity to see if these particular words "empirically describe the cluster well enough for these purposes" until its too late.)

it is highly practical to be able to open up a minimal number of them, for example to debate what should be included as a mammal without pre-emptively also debating what "hair", "water", "leg", "swim", and "definition" mean, exactly

You, on the other hand, seem content with there not being a real distinction, and as far as I can tell youre saying here that my complaint that "this principle requires selective application" is true of Scotts theory and also in reality, without any way to be systematic about it.

When the FTX thing happened recently and people argued about consequentialist justifications for lying, I realised Scotts theory of categories literally cant tell the difference between the truth and the highest-utility-thing-to-say.

How is that supported by anything Scott has written? My interpretation is "categories are an example of 'all models are wrong, but some models are useful' and [I can't remember if this is in that specific essay, but it doesn't really matter] reaching a shared vocabulary for categories is a coordination problem." Scott knows what noble lies are and has written about them:

What if all this stuff about sexism driving away women is all a big hoax? And so after we make women feel safer, stamp out prejudice, enforce common decency, and encourage everyone to treat each other with compassion – darn it, we created a better world for nothing! If the goal is “eliminate malignant sexism” – and surely it should be – why be so upset about one argument for eliminating malignant sexism which might not be entirely accurate?

First, because I’m a heartless thing-oriented systematizer, and I despise bad arguments on principle, and I don’t care if you people-oriented empathizers think they serve a prosocial community-building function.

But second, because this gives fuzzy-empathizing-humanities types a giant hammer with which to beat all sciency-systematizing-utilitarian types forever.

(Don't be shocked that this does not become a call for consequentialists to use noble lies.)

'all models are wrong, but some models are useful'

Yes, what do you think "useful" means? Of course, your evaluation of whats high-utility will have to include all sorts of knock-on effects - but it cant include things like "this is useful to say because its true". This is of course incoherent, you cant actually decide whats high-utility without knowing whats true, and Scott the human knows what truth is when its about normal topics - but thats what the argument of the post implies when taken seriously (you will notice that the section thats actually talking about how language works is very short relative to the post). Theres no conceptual role left for truth, as distinct from "the outcome of usefully structuring language".

Yes, what do you think "useful" means?

Understanding the world, e.g., which hypothetical ancient Hebrewite government ministry would be better suited whale issues.

Those are two different things. Whats useful for dealing with whale hunting is not whats useful for understanding. As for the latter, Scott disagrees with that:

If I’m willing to accept an unexpected chunk of Turkey deep inside Syrian territory to honor some random dead guy – and I better, or else a platoon of Turkish special forces will want to have a word with me – then I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it’ll save someone’s life.

If the only thing you do with whales is hunt, then understanding hunting them is understanding them in general.

Do you think gay conversion therapy is bad? If so, can we make it not-gay-conversion-therapy by insisting that the opposite sex partner we're trying to hook the gay person up with is actually of the same sex?

I'm not sure precisely what scenario you're imagining, but how you describe the people involved doesn't seem like a factor in whether or not that scenario is bad.

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