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 -
Here's some of my own insights, hopefully some of them are new or useful to you. I will compare artistic people to those who try to understand the world. The "critique society and power" group can be dismissed as politics/tribalism/activism/preaching, it's part power-struggle and part mental illness, so I will exclude it.
Academic communities tend to have a consensus, and to punish those who challenge it. This is much less prevalent in artisic communities, as most people there recognize that many different styles can be appealing for different reasons. You could argue that this is a kind of tribalism, but I think it's also a way of viewing the world: That there's one correct answer (that truth is unique), that truth is universal (rather than possibly local), and that everything can be made legible (that logic and math is sufficiently powerful to explain everything which can be explained), and that you can unify everything without ruining it in the process (that a theory of everything is possible).
Artistic people do indeed share a part of themselves when they share their art, or at least reveal something about themselves. This doesn't happen much in academia, you don't have to take responsibility for the discoveries you make, for they're true or false independently of you. Academia is about discoveries where art is about creations.
I also think that bad art is harmless to other art, and mostly harmless to other people. Making a mistake in academic work could potentially harm a lot of people, or slow down progress of "the whole". This punishes experimentation.
Finding flaws in work is a costly mental heuristic. It's basically conditioning yourself to only see the bad aspects of things. But while this seems to make academics treat eachother harshly, I find that this is less rare in artistic spaces. What usually happens instead is that artists are extremely hard on themselves and their own work, but encouraging of other people. I think artists who are unhappy with their own are similar to people who undergo plastic surgery again and again. Staring at something for too long seems like a bad idea, be it your own work or your own face.
The mean of the distributions of personality traits also seem different between the two groups. Artistic people are more subjective, less analytical, more social, and they tend to expand their worldview until they get lost in it, whereas many mathematically minded people tend to reduce reality to abstract models and thus tend towards nihilism and simplicity. I'd also argue that scholary types tend to have bad taste by default, - you have to be a bit of a pervert to want to look beneath the surface of everything (unlike artists, who appreciate the surface, or use it to conceal the depth of life that they cannot deal with)
I think that artistic people and academic derive enjoyment from different things. I love correcting people who are wrong, I think it feels really good when I get a new insight, and climbing the mountain of knowledge is also a joy in itself. Art is beauty, the joy of creation, it's experience, and it's anti-nihilistic. Art is quite human, whereas the objective is simply anti-human (another user on here probably disagrees very strongly with this, but I did the math)
I've once heard that intelligence is inversely correlated with instinct. It could be because instinct is innate intelligence, and that this competes with generalized intelligence, since the latter has to be able to overwrite it in order for you to update your beliefs and adapt to a new environment than what your innate intelligence is fit for. It could also simply be a trade-off between developing yourself, and aligning yourself with something else until you yourself disappear. Do you want to chop off a part of yourself in order to fit in, or will you believe in that part of yourself and work to make it more appealing?
I guess that people of a field tend to grow tired of teaching beginners because they have to explain the same things maybe 50 or 100 times. First time I saw somebody use Popper's paradox of tolerance as an argument, I though "Hmm, something about this doesn't seem right". Now I simply tell them "You're acting in bad faith, and you know it. You also don't know what comes before or after this quote, since you've never read the paper that it's from. You didn't think it through, you merely copy-pasted it because it seems like an authority which agrees with you". Of course, if somebody is so put off by stupid questions, I think they should just delete their stackoverflow account.
Finally, have you noticed the general tendency towards homogeneity? Everything is becoming more alike over time. Academic people are contributing to this problem, wheras artist people don't seem to be. Academia is, from my perspective, excessive order. Many artistic people are a little bit chaotic because they're a little bit crazy, but I personally like that
More options
Context Copy link