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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27001 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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Not quite, this is still scientism. Economics can help answer the actual object-level question, "Are tariffs an effective way of obtaining a desired outcome?" It can tell you what the trade-offs are.

But the questions of what outcomes are desirable, and what trade-offs are acceptable, are values questions.

Yes, but I think there is truth to the claim that many political disagreements are genuinely downstream of disagreements about the object-level questions, not value differences in the weighing of whatever associated trade-offs exist.

The distinction starts to get blurry very quickly.

We can reasonably assume that there is a fact of the matter regarding which HBD claims are true. But the reason people take such strong stances on HBD, even in the face of inconclusive or insufficient empirical evidence, is because of their values. It’s hard to cleanly separate questions of value and questions of fact because our values influence what we think about the facts.

It’s hard to cleanly separate questions of value and questions of fact because our values influence what we think about the facts.

1000x this. Which to my mind is the true and valuable insight hidden at the heart of post-modernism.

I take the opposite view that most disagreements are value disagreements that ultimately map to aesthetic disagreements about the nature of a good life.

What led you to think this? Can you take some central disagreements and drill them down to the object level?

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