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 -
Possibly for the false assertions in the arguments' premises; probably for the insulting phrasing and meme at the end.
This is a good example; thanks. Many of the counterarguments to it ended up looking better than the arguments, but the only thing asking for a downvote is the "just laughable" swipe at the top, and that's unrepresentative of the care taken in most of the rest of it.
For zero negative reinforcement, there's always
cat -v /dev/random. You'll get all the arguments, sooner or later.I'm fine with negative reinforcement for bad arguments. Good counterarguments, at least if there's a dogpile of them, are themselves something of a negative reinforcement, don't you think? I just don't like it being expressed via what's supposed to be a count of negative reinforcement for bad comments. The "karma" vs "agreement" vote counts on LessWrong and similar sites now are an interesting experiment in separating those. I don't know what the correlation coefficient between them is (or what I'd expect it should be, for that matter), but their distinction is respected enough that even infrequent readers like me often come across the "this is really interesting even though it's wrong" score combo. The "I agree with this but it's a bad comment" combo seems rarer, but that may just be an artifact of the crowd or the subject matter there; for culture war discussions I fear I'd want to assign it a hotkey.
More options
Context Copy link