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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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You seem to be correct here. I was one of those upvotes; I think I was probably just not thinking too critically about it. After all, this thread chain consisted of a reasonable summation of a probably bad-action, in a community that largely understand the decades of history here, and then you, being relentlessly tedious and nit-picky about it while making isolated demands for charity. I mean, can you empirically prove that no one in the CDC was motivated by the effects on the difficulty of passing gun control, and that no one in the CDC has ever said that? And if not, can you empirically prove that the "they" refers to the CDC, and not the activists who swayed the CDC? Have you tried coming up with more charitable explanations?

I personally believe one of the most fundamental issues with political discourse today is that standards for evidence are far too low. So low that you will always find evidence that meets your bar, making it so your beliefs are determined more by your biases, social bubbles, and promotion algorithms - rather than the actual state of the evidence.

X is evidence for theory A or theory B if and only if

P(X | A) > P(X | B)

  1. The CDC is tweaked the wording after a neutral review of the evidence - a review prompted by activists.

  2. The CDC is biased and therefore gave in to activism, neglecting their duty to be neutral guardians of the truth.

Most of the "evidence" provided in this thread by other people, in my opinion, does not provide any actual evidence for (2) over (1). Conversely, the facts I've brought up are:

  1. The CDC ignored the activists until they were signal-boosted by the White House.

  2. The CDC dragged its feet for months.

  3. The CDC pushed back, arguing the activists' preferred studies were bad.

  4. The CDC's new wording doesn't even seem to be more liberal than the old wording.

This is all evidence in favor of (1) over (2) and is all being ignored in this thread.

So, what you characterize as "relentlessly tedious and nit-picky", I view as requiring people to actually justify their beliefs with evidence. I don't view myself as requiring isolated demands for charity/rigour - I see myself as requiring a universally reasonably high bar for evidence - a bar required if you actually want accurate beliefs. I don't see this as a vice.

You claim there is "decades of history here" that this community understands. What I've seen is decades of cherry-picked anecdotes that people have allowed themselves is believe counts as convincing evidence. This is not what a trustworthy understanding of the world should be based on. The fact this community upvotes groundless claims they like to +18 and downvote requests for a single citation to -6 reinforces my lack of trust in this community's "understanding" of issues.

Could I prove something? Maybe. I could write a scraper and scrape the current CDC website and compare that to the Internet Archive and code up some kind of sentiment NLP model to check for political bias in the diffs. But, seriously, I really don't care enough to do all that work. Everyone here apparently has a lot of emotions invested in the CDC being biased, but they aren't willing to do that either. This is where I suppose we talk about how all this is signaling and no one here actually cares about proving anything - it's all just intellectual masturbation - but I guess I'm autistic enough to want the masturbation to be done properly.

And, honestly, I think most of the people are doing Motte-and-Bailey shenanigans here. What they claim they are doing is providing evidence the CDC is biased. What they are actually doing is enjoying the bonding behavior of booing the out-group. Otherwise these self-proclaimed "high-decouplers" could distinguish "the CDC is biased" from "this is evidence the CDC is biased". But then my real sin was interrupting the equivalent of a pep rally.

[ I apologize for my exasperation. ]

The fact this community upvotes groundless claims they like to +18 and downvote requests for a single citation to -6 reinforces my lack of trust in this community's "understanding" of issues.

Sorry, but that "they" is an unspecified referent, so your whole chain here is just being uncharitable. Someone definitely did exactly what was alleged.

This is where I suppose we talk about how all this is signaling and no one here actually cares about proving anything - it's all just intellectual masturbation - but I guess I'm autistic enough to want the masturbation to be done properly.

Are you familiar with the CDC's history regarding gun violence research, going back to the 90's? That was the "decades of history", and you don't seem to be aware of it at all.

And, honestly, I think most of the people are doing Motte-and-Bailey shenanigans here. What they claim they are doing is providing evidence the CDC is biased.

The evidence provided is suggestive, and it appears efforts were taken to specifically dodge the FOIA requests that might prove it. Can you provide a cite of anyone here explicitly acknowledging that they're just enjoying a pep rally and booing the outgroup? Have you tried coming up with a more charitable interpretation?

Are you familiar with the CDC's history regarding gun violence research, going back to the 90's? That was the "decades of history", and you don't seem to be aware of it at all.

Are you suggesting that the CDC has a history of political bias on this topic? It is my understanding that, between 1996 and 2018, the CDC was effectively banned from doing any gun violence research at all.

If you had read you own entertainingly biased link, you would note that it answers this objection. The CDC was banned from promoting gun control, not conducting research. If we want to be excessively charitable to the poor, easily bullied researchers, we can note that there was uncertainty about what might cross the line. OTOH, if we want to be reasonably cynical, we can note that this outcome is indistinguishable from one driven by a CDC that cannot even imagine value judgement-free research on this topic, and that was only ever interest in waging culture war against human rights.