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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   24635 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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its own period of dealing with failed prophecies

I have seen a common thread on this: there are a few topics where what I consider to be "woke" types express epistemic certainty based on a tiny number of very small studies with results that sound really nice and politically convenient for partisans explaining the world, and occasional shouting down of alternate takes. For lots of these we've collectively thrown lots of effort and money at applying more broadly, but strangely have never gotten a good larger scale followup on those implementations. I personally have found it frustrating how slow we are to walk back claims that I suspect a good chunk of conservative-leaning people [1] thought were "too good to be true" all along.

Other examples [2] that come to mind (hopefully not too uncharitably phrased):

  • Housing-first approaches to homelessness
  • "Harm reduction" against drug addiction
  • Failing inner-city schools are that way exclusively because they are under-funded
  • "Poverty causes crime, and crime doesn't cause poverty"
  • Fat-acceptance and body positivity
  • Gender medicine, especially in children: taxpayers funded a study on the efficacy of puberty blockers that strangely hasn't been published, presumably because its conclusions aren't positive. "Trust the science", though.
  • The lab leak hypothesis for COVID
  • Almost all conflict globally can be mostly blamed on colonialism
  1. It feels to me like there is an element of ivory-tower elitism in many of these conclusions in that they feel very out-of-touch with people who have to go outside and interact with the public on a regular basis. I think this is at least an element in the ongoing political realignment.
  2. Just because these claims likely seem overplayed doesn't mean that the inverse claims are completely right. I think there is a bit of a short-term alliance between reactionaries that'd claim the inverse and nuance-enjoyers that I think will gradually fall apart while they're trying to govern as a coalition.

See here:

First, the argument from exhaustion: because we've been trying to fix these problems for the better part of a century. Many hundreds of thousands of smart, capable, hardworking people have dedicated their entire lives to solving these problems for multiple generations, across fifty different states, and have uniformly failed every single time, on every single approach to every single issue...

Second, the argument from blindness: we have no way of effectively measuring the problem we're trying to fix, other than by raw outcomes. The dominant narrative holds that bad outcomes are caused by racism, but there is no detectable racism gradient. That is, there do not appear to be places in America that are noticeably more or less racist in any coherent or useful sense, as measured by outcomes, despite a wide range of policies, populations, and cultural norms...

Third, the argument from dementia: we don't approach the problem in a systematic way, we don't learn from our failures, and we don't even keep track of what's been tried or what the outcomes were. The realities of politics, policy, media narratives and public attention span and engagement mean that there is no consistent train of thought, no effective accumulation of experience. People can and do spend their whole lives pushing solutions that were proved to be a dead-end a generation ago. For obvious reasons, this makes the previous problems much worse. It's not just that we're stuck in a maze, and it's not just that the maze is extremely vast, it's that we aren't capable of remembering what turns we took. For an example, look at the ubiquitous claims that bad educational outcomes are caused by differences in school funding between majority-white and majority-black schools. Note, halfway down that article, the following sentence:

The analysis does not include federal dollars, much of which is targeted to the poorest communities.

You will find a similar sentence in most articles on this subject, because those federal dollars completely close the gap. Less educational funding for black students looked like an obvious example of low-hanging fruit, so we fixed it by using federal money to compensate for differences in local funding from disparate tax bases. Only, the disparate outcomes didn't go away, and so people willfully ignore that the solution they're advocating has already failed...

Fourth, the argument from sociopathy: powerful institutions are incentivized to aggravate all of the above problems, because doing so provides significant short-term benefits at no appreciable short-term cost. Blacks get the soothing reassurance that all their problems are the fault of the out-group, not the inevitable result of their own bad individual choices. Progressives get a profoundly loyal block of supporters, and a massive rhetorical cudgel to beat the out-group with. And of course, the alternative is admitting "things suck, and we have no idea how to fix them", which is never going to be a winning answer, despite it being the truth. At this point, any solution is pretty clearly going to require a minimum of decades of constant effort, and the reality is that on the timescale of our existing political system, decades-long solutions are effectively impossible. Lying provides immediate and significant benefit at no cost, and not lying imposes significant costs with no compensating benefits. The result is that lying is adaptive, so our political and knowledge-production systems are absolutely overrun with liars...

Fifth, the argument from senescence: we do not get unlimited attempts at a solution to the racial justice problem. Attempted solutions burn social cohesion, and we are running out of social cohesion. Despite popular narratives, this is not primarily a problem between Conservatives and Blacks; Conservatives and Blacks mostly don't live near or exercise power over each other, so there's not all that much cause for direct, serious object-level conflict. No, the problem is between conservatives and Progressives, who are locked in a direct and extremely damaging culture war due to incompatible values...

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