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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
An Attempt at Following Up on the User Viewpoint Focus Series
Thanks to @hydroacetylene for 1) the nomination and 2) reminding me to get on it. I followed his excellent template here.
Self-description in Motte Terms
I'm a classical liberal with a keen awareness that the American dream was made for me. In my personal life, I'm a well-paid Texan engineer with an appreciation for firearms. I love America and the American ideal even though I feel it's currently struggling with (what I see as) a particular failure mode of populism.
We enjoy unparalleled material prosperity thanks to strong societal values combined with good initial conditions. That carried us through two centuries of struggle to the top of the world, and now it gives us opportunities to shape the future of mankind. It also reminds us of an obligation not merely to perpetuate the system which got us here, but to spread the benefits to others who are less fortunate.
Yes, this almost certainly makes me one of the most progressive posters still on the site.
I absolutely despise the fascism of pure aesthetics which is so adaptive on social media. Contrarian countersignaling that you'll make the world a worse place because bad things are good, actually. "Tear it all down," "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out"... That's the lowest form of demagoguery.
My girlfriend, whom I love and trust more than anyone, once asked "why do you hang out with these people?" Why am I spending my time on this Earth arguing with people who hate my guts and sneer at the things I value? It's because I believe in the project. I believe that when classical liberalism gets to compete with the fascists and the communards, it comes out looking great. I believe that our model of debate club is a valiant attempt at implementing the liberal ethos of free exchange of ideas. I believe I can win friends and influence people via the political equivalent of betting them that nothing ever happens.
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
Recommended Reading
I'm not going to give a list of published books. Y'all probably know what goes in the classic Western philosophical canon. Plus, and I might not be supposed to mention this, but the vast majority of my model overlaps with what they teach to reasonably smart high schoolers. Perks of subscribing to what's basically our civic religion.
Allow me instead to share a few standout motte posts.
I still think about this post by, I believe, @AshLael. The idea that certain flavors of argument are advantaged against others helps to explain large swathes of the political landscape. It's also part of the reason I'm so invested in maintaining a Debate-heavy space like this one.
Here's a classic bit of Hlynka for those who missed it. While I deeply, deeply disagree with him on lots of things, he was grasping at something that most other users don't quite get.
But I've always had a special place for the strange and wonderful digressions of the Motte. /u/mcjunker's stories, @Dean's policy analysis, all sorts of stuff. One of the best examples has to be this monstrous essay on the aesthetics of jazz. Amazing stuff.
If you have any affinity whatsoever for text-heavy, mechanics-light video games, you should play Disco Elysium. Its Moralintern is a bizarre but excellent commentary on our rules-based international order. Also, it's generally hilarious and poignant.
While I am tempted to namedrop countless other works of fiction, it'd probably be more of a distraction. Ask me on a Friday thread.
Brief Manifesto
Assume your model is not going to work.
Doesn't matter if you're theorizing about politics or international relations or the state of the youth. The very fact that you've taken the time to present it in a forum post is a comorbidity for any number of critical flaws. Maybe it's wildly overcomplicated; maybe it overlooks some basic fact of human psychology. As soon as you introduce your theory, the fine commentariat of the Motte will show up and explain how it's actually stupid.
This is a good thing, because picking holes in ideas is how you get better ideas. (Okay, yes, it's also quality entertainment.) But it might not be fun, and there will be some psychological pressure to insist that nothing is wrong. No. The critics are right, and your grand psychoanalysis is probably bunk. So why not try to get ahead of the curve and figure out what went wrong? What's the first objection someone is going to make when you hit "post"?
This is the difference between arguing to understand vs. arguing to win.
If you want to have a constructive discussion, the single most useful thing you can do is to think about how you might be wrong. It's not easy, I sure don't live up to it as much as I ought to, but I promise. It's worth it.
Ping Me On...
Voting systems. Electoral reform along the lines of single transferable vote is literally my single issue, because I think it's actually a credible path to a more functional government. Seriously, if you know about a way I can act against FPTP, let me know.
Science fiction. Fantasy. Weird hybrids that defy or define genres. I'd like to say I'm pretty well-read in this sense. I certainly enjoy the subject.
Historical trivia of all sorts. Perhaps it's stereotypical for a board like this, but yes, that includes military history and hardware. And while my own collection is still amateurish, I'm always happy to talk about firearms as a hobby, too.
Posts I'm Proud Of
I don't generate a lot of AAQCs, and when I do, I tend to look back with a little embarassment. Something of a tendency towards melodrama. Still, I'm convinced that I was on to something here.
I also feel strongly about my comments on the state of fiction. Media is the first thing to get the 'ol "back in my day" treatment, and especially with modern storage methods, it's so easy to put on rose-tinted glasses. But all sorts of bizarre fiction is out there. Perks of a bigger, faster, more interconnected world. I encourage everyone who thinks modern media sucks and/or is captured by their ideological enemies to go out and find stuff that's just too weird to capture.
This was easier to write and harder to do than I expected.
I'll nominate @Rov_Scam for the next entry.
Voting systems. I'm very against STV and would love to hear some counterarguments if you've got them so I can feel sane again. STV makes ballots unresolvable on a local level; local counting is no longer easily aggregated. Every ballot needs to be held onto to possibly be recounted, possibly multiple times depending on exactly how the global election is progressing. Local recounts can force global recounts, multiple times as who is eliminated changes. On top of that automated vote counting has to rely on OCR or heavier use of voting machines instead of scantron like devices.
STV doesn't even give you compromise candidates, it only prevents spoiler candidates. By example, if 50% want A > B > C and 50% want C > B > A, B is immediately eliminated and you have FPTP.
The fact that all the talk is about STV instead of approval voting (a better, simpler system) is either proof of a psy-op or proof that we don't deserve better government.
I think you may be confusing IRV and STV. STV is the multi-winner version of IRV, intended to produce proportional representation.
As for defending IRV:
Clone independence is a huge deal. It is a much-bigger deal than what sort of candidates get elected, because it gives an escape valve against leaders going corrupt (since a clone can steal their seat). Approval voting is also clone-independent, but there are a ton of voting systems that aren't.
Approval voting has a massive tactical voting problem. Specifically, an approval cutoff (that is, when you rank the candidates in order of preference, the point at which you stop approving) that does not divide the viable candidates wastes your vote. This is in play most of the time for most voters. Rampant tactical voting cases are bad because they disenfranchise the honest and principled in favour of the unscrupulous, and the world has more than enough of that. Its tactical voting problem is not as bad as plurality, but it is close. Now, of course, there is no system that never has tactical voting except for random-ballot (i.e., pick a ballot paper at random, and whoever's on that ballot wins), but IRV does much better than most in this regard; in most cases voting your true preferences is correct.
IRV does not directly advantage compromise candidates. However, it's one of a few systems that if paired with compulsory voting invoke the Median Voter Theorem, and that does tend to produce compromise candidates. I'm not sure that approval does; I think maybe it might if everyone were to vote his/her true preferences, but that's not going to happen because of #2.
STV run with one seat and a 50% quota (under most methods of doing STV) is equivalent to IRV. I prefer the mental abstraction of STV, but your right that it isn't common parlance to use it in that way.
IRV is clone independent but still falls to the center squeeze (where several nearby candidates can choke out the center of the group). Also, every single Condorcet method is clone independent if there exists a Condorcet winner (which polling suggests is over 90% of elections). Many of these algorithms will choose something from the Smith set where it isn't even clear mathematically what you could do that is better, it just chooses a different one from the Smith set if there are clones. These are all ranked choice systems that can be computed in a single pass over the ballots. Why are we looking at IRV among the ranked choice methods?
Approval at least has the guarantee that you should never rate something you like less higher than something you like more. Approval and IRV have relevant tactical voting in the same situations: when your preference is close to losing to something more moderate. Both ask you to downrate the moderate if you think you can win, or uprate the moderate if you think you can't. IRV requires you to tell an outride falsehood to do this. In terms of the benefit you get from tactical voting, it is pretty similar across the two methods (both about 10-20% of what you get in FPTP).
IRV does not choose a Condorcet winner, and thus does not invoke the Black median voter theorem. There are many ranked choice algorithms that do, but not IRV.
Yes. There's a solid argument for some of the better Condorcet-completion methods as better than IRV, despite them failing later-no-harm. Approval is not a Condorcet method.
I... suspect you're not counting things as tactical that are, in fact, tactical. Honest voting in approval is approving everyone better than some fixed standard of goodness. This usually doesn't split the viable candidates (i.e. you approve all of them or disapprove all of them), which means your vote is fully wasted (just as with voting third-party in plurality). To make your vote count, it usually has to be tactical - to take note of which candidates are viable and choose a cutoff that splits them.
IRV has tactical voting a little bit of the time for some voters. Approval has tactical voting literally all of the time for most voters.
I only bring up Condorcet as if we are going to be doing ranked choice ballots we have all these other better options. Options where counts can be aggregated from different polling centers and that provide better mathematical guarantees. I don't think later-no-harm is a good outcome. If a candidate B becomes more popular with a subgroup, but doesn't reach the threshold of being their first choice, candidate B should be more likely to win the election. I'd much rather have monotonicity, so that rating a candidate higher makes them more likely to win.
I'll grant that your threshold choice is inherently tactical, but I think it is a much better brand of tactical than other things that fall under the label. In IRV, tactical votes are misrepresenting your preferences to the voting system. You have to lie about who you actually like and dislike. In approval voting, you are compressing down the vote to provide as much information as possible to the voting system. It is a "true preference" that you like everyone you voted for more than everyone you didn't. It doesn't reward liars, it rewards those in touch enough to know roughly the bounds of possibility for this election.
But yeah, I guess there are some real selling points of IRV:
-a lot of the other ranked choice methods aren't clone independent which is definitely a problem that needs a solution
-you can just walk in and list your candidates in order and be voting "optimally for your desired outcomes" a good chunk of the time.
I still think ranked methods aren't worth the cost (really try it, with a group of even 5 people trying to decide what to do, ranked methods are demolished by approval voting in terms of implement-ability, then extend to the entire country). IRV among them is particularly bad for counting but is among the better set of election properties and especially explain-ability.
(Also, you've been a great conversation partner, kudos and gratitude)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link