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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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I disagree: When one of these things happens, and we want to talk about it, and we experience the nervousness that we might be making fools of ourselves if what we say is proven wrong by revelations tomorrow morning, in that moment we have an opportunity to be far closer to honesty, with others and with ourselves, than at any other time throughout the year.

As someone who argued for "wait two weeks", I actually agree with this, but the core ingredient is that it has to be a deliberate choice, and that the speaker willingly puts his credibility on the line. I still owe @fmac, who couldn't quite believe I was being serious, a reply, but this is part of why I said what I said in that post. Exposing yourself to the possibility of having your credibility shot is the mechanism by which just going with your gut ends up yielding superior results to meticulously calculating all the Bayesian probabilities.

People should be more open to talking about breaking news, not because it allows for hotter takes, but because it gives one skin in the game and favors rational analysis over sophistry. It is good for us all to call the coin before it has landed.

Sure, only making predictions on things you are confident making predictions on is a bit of a cheat, this is why I always rolled my eyes at Scott's annual "calibrating" predictions. That said, there does need to be some space for "I honestly haven't a clue". There are cases where I can see a clear signal in the vibes (see "tides turning on trans" or "Elon Musk is cooked"), but there are others where I try to listen to the vibes, and all I can hear is noise, and I think it would be unwise to stake a claim under those circumstances.