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 -
You could, but this would be a bad argument and fundamentally very different from the one I laid out. This is just an attempt at equivocating between very obviously different things. Believing in miracles indicates shoddy epistemology, but it doesn't explicitly commit oneself to rejecting the very idea of objective reality or logic. People can be shoddy in their reasoning, shoddy in their observations, etc. Academics can be and often are, because they're humans like anyone else. We should hold them to high standards, but not inhumanly high standards. Never making an epistemological error, especially when it comes to things in religious life that can be compartmentalized away from academics and profession, is an inhumanly high bar. Never signing off on a document that supports an ideology that explicitly rejects the very basis of one's professional academic endeavors isn't an inhumanly high bar.
I do guess that religious people likely, on average, make for less effective STEM academics, but I think empirical evidence indicates that whatever handicap they have isn't that severe, considering the achievements made by religious scientists and engineers. If we had enough qualified atheists on-hand to fully substitute current religious STEM academics with them, it could be worth the transaction cost, though I think the effects of introducing a religious test would generally be severely negative.
However, if an evolutionary biologist or astronomer or geophysicist loudly and proudly signed on to Young Earth Creationism, then that would be more analogous to this situation (though not quite, since YECs haven't practically taken over academia like this ideology has, and YEC is merely one "theory" (lol) about reality, rather than an entire epistemology of how we understand reality itself). The core beliefs of YEC is just fundamentally incompatible with our academic understanding of these fields in a way that does raise reasonable questions about qualification to do the job, in a way that merely "being religious" doesn't. Even then, one can reasonably argue that someone's ideological commitments to YEC should be excluded from consideration of their work as an evolutionary biologist, because of their ability to perform [task] that isn't hindered by YEC. But that's a different argument than saying that this is just as much "cancel culture" as firing someone for "being religious" or whatever.
More options
Context Copy link