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 -
This is a great write-up, thanks. I really enjoyed it.
I see two somewhat separate theses competing for dominance here. One is something like "Klaus Schwab is nobody important, it's kind of stupid to worry about him." The other is something like "the papers people give at WEF are not important, it's kind of stupid to worry about them." I'm well persuaded of the former (in fact until I read your post, I had never consciously heard of Klaus Schwab and could certainly not have named him as the organizer of WEF); am I still an embarrassment if I am skeptical of the latter?
The reason I ask is that I am sometimes inspired to revisit old documents from seemingly trivial or irrelevant conferences, and I repeatedly find the words of John Maynard Keynes remarkably insightful:
I have lived long enough to notice that American culture is now at the bottom of a great many slippery slopes which I was personally assured, by very apparently sensible people, were not slippery slopes at all. Is there a grand conspiracy out there plotting to feed me bugs? Surely not. Is there a prospiracy to make it expensive-to-impossible to keep meat on my menu? Yes, definitely. Is there a grand conspiracy out there plotting to put me in a pod? I can't imagine. Is there a prospiracy to shrink people's houses generally? Well, yes, there definitely is.
These various prospiracies do not rely on the cunning of Klaus Schwab or, really, anyone else. At this point, they are mostly--though not entirely!--academic scribblings. Which I can certainly dismiss as academic scribblings--if I'm not at all worried that some government bureaucrat or other might suddenly take them up. For example, this article from January 2022 did not start a culture war spat over gas stoves, but a recent critical comment from a Biden appointee on the Consumer Product Safety Commission did. I'm sure it's nothing! And as long as I continue to be sure it is nothing, then I am no obstacle to gas stove critics making it into something, possibly in such a way that by the time I say anything at all, I have already definitively lost on the issue.
Of course, this isn't always what happens--sometimes crazed academic scribblings never become more than that. But it is difficult to know for certain which ideas will take hold in advance. If I should not be concerned about what people talk about at the WEF, pray tell--what should I be concerned about? How can I know which objectionable academic plots at merely fanciful, and which I must strangle in the crib if I am to ensure they never harm me or mine? You have suggested that conservatives who worry about liberal globalists have a "complete inability to figure out where political and economic power actually lie," so maybe you can tell me--where does political and economic power actually lie, if not with the academic conferences that have been deliberately and successfully shaping broad swathes of American and global culture pretty much as they please--since the 1960s or 1970s at latest?
I think if you're concerned about shrinking homes, meat increasing in price, gas stoves, etc. it's a better move to write your own intelligent think pieces about the benefits of large homes, meat, gas stoves, etc. instead of ranting and making memes about how the elite global order want to make your life worse. I don't really have any hard evidence for it, but intuitively I feel like Zvi's blog post about the benefits of gas stoves was many more times effective in preserving gas stoves than any number of /r/politicalcompassmemes posts or comments hating gas stove bans and regulations. Because if you're genuinely in the right, there's a decent chance a well written essay will beat out the essays of your opposition.
Though I don't begrudge anyone their essays, I don't really like this presumption. The left is much better at writing essays and getting them published, because most journalists and writers are lefties. The battle, by it's nature, is asymmetrical, and picked by the collective consciousness of the left to be the path of least resistance to them - since all they need to do is sow doubt about whether gas stoves might be harmful, and because the regulations they favor are designed to boil the frog and wipe out gas stoves thirty years down the road rather than tomorrow.
Mmm. I cannot for the life of me find it, but I remember reading something a long while ago, and I think it was some kind of meta-analysis, definitely something with actual data anyway, that studies are more likely to be published and cited if they come to a left-favouring conclusion. A study finding that women have it harder in some way, for example, will be published and boosted to the high heavens while one highlighting male hardships will be largely buried.
The Paranoid Rant used Cumulative Meta-analysis as a Publication Bias Model, though it's a fairly small number of items for a meta-analysis and only one is obviously political.
What I remember was contained within a blog post, I'm pretty sure. Not SSC, a different layout. But the same topic. But that's getting at what I mean.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link