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 -
My rule of thumb for HackerNews with regard to wrongthink is: if the username looks like a real name, then opinion discarded – at best, it's some sellout mid-career manager with a reputation at stake, in fact he's likely posting not out of genuine interest but only to neurotically reinforce his reputation, a highly compensated yet politically powerless peasant quaking in his boots at the thought of angering the HR Inner Party cat lady sovereign – if she were to check and see him being the first to stop the applause. At worst, something lobotomized and ChatGPT-like, impervious to logic.
If it's some random alphanumeric string or witty nonsense, that's perhaps a hacker or at least a thinking person, and worth a read.
...
Case in point.
Compared to TheMotte it's markedly worse, for the aforementioned reason of HN being a good boy pageant rather than a pseudonymous discussion forum of people selected for having issues with orthodoxy. Fundamentally it's the same because there is no penalty for trotting out the same two-bit, long-discredited gotchas (muh «race boundaries are nebulous», «the Irish were dumber, checkmate» etc), therefore no progress is being made and, indeed, there is a regression in cumulative knowledge with attrition of the best. Then again, no community of notable size satisfies this criterion – as far as these topics are concerned.
Scott's wrongthink in this case is so anodyne I think it's more interesting that Topher Brennan (incidentally the gender theorist Ozy Brennan's, nee Franz', husband and father of her child – guess some people just never get over their inferiority complex) believed it to be a decent attack vector, and judging by those discussions it is giving some people enough to work with. I doubt they even read it – they just skim to confirm that on the level of sentiment he's pro-HBD – and therefore definitely pro-racism, and likely pro-white supremacy and Nazism to boot.
Confirmation bias works the same way for any belief system – with pizzagates and voter frauds just as well as with suspicions of progressives. You need tremendous social capital to merely earn a hearing from a person, and not an adversarial sentiment classifier.
HN is liberal but it's a peculiar kind of liberalism . It's like, "we want this big social safety net, we believe that there are these major social problems like loneliness, depression, teen anxiety, etc. , and we want this big government to enforce labor laws, antitrust, environmental laws, help Ukraine, etc., but we don't want to have to pay higher taxes to fund it or solve these problems."
I read HN daily and have found some of its threads to be incredibly important for understanding how organizations work. That being said, it gets hilarious consistently on two fronts:
Which makes the second thing odd:
The other thing I've noticed reading HN daily now for close to a decade is that the typical individual contributor software job, even at FAANGs, is a shitty bill of goods being sold. For a really precise timeframe, about 2005-2020, the "rest and vest, work 20 hours a week" strategy worked and did make multimillionaries of state-school slackers. Those days are over - for everyone! New CS kids are (a) oversaturating the market and (b) not actually competent. The greybeards are encountering the fact that ageism is real and they never learned how to actually work with people, so trying to step up to a manager role is really fucking hard for them. And, the low hanging fruit has all been picked. AdTech and basic social network building is either done or dominated. The new problems are harder and require way more end-to-end thought and not lazy hot fixes. There was a thread maybe a month ago asking what being a professional dev was like in the 80s and 90s .... all the dinosaurs who came out said shit like "compiling took forever and we couldn't really snapshot-and-rollback the way you can today .... we had to test the shit out of our code and think through corner cases. We would have day long whiteboarding sessions where we ended up worse off than we started."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link