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 -
Average lefty here, happy to respond with specifics?
I just sort of mourn the old United States where acting with blatant corruption was out of the pale.
Also as someone in science I mourn the days when the nation took pride in being a powerhouse in things like scientific research, and in being a place where people all over the world wanted to come and get educated here.
We had this really great thing going being not just the most economically powerful but also the most intellectually productive country in the world, and we acted as a vacuum sucking up all the intelligent and ambitious people from around the world and having them come here to build things with us.
Now we started with this mean style of politics which makes those same people not want to come here anymore. Some might still do it based on a risk-reward calculation, but even then, we’ve destroyed science funding in the country and so even the reward side of the equation also got hit.
Meanwhile, we’re destroying the open market of energy that we used to have and actively persecuting renewable energy technologies. Places like Texas were world leaders in renewables because the tech is just simply good and competitive. No more. Batteries and renewable energies are the technologies of the future of the rest of the world and we’re letting China and the rest of the world just absolutely eat our lunch there. While the world undergoes this technological revolution we just chose to sit it out.
So overall, largely because of Trump and his politics, we’ve become this angry inward focused power that is giving up the very sources of dynamism that make us powerful.
I guess the one thing we have is AI and it’s just about the only area where the United States has an advantage that the Trump administration isn’t trying to destroy while pursuing some misguided ideological end.
By that you mean "moral" corruption, and that appears to be the root of the disagreement. Conservatives (and the average leftist is motivated by the same things per Haidt- after all, they [perceive themselves to have at least perpetuated if not] built the system, they are interested in that work meaning something) correctly observe that people who are unwilling to respect their prerogatives of decorum are probably unwilling to respect conservative framings entirely.
For instance, if a conservative redefines X to mean Y "because it's what decent people do" (read: because I make money hand-over-fist; business always marches alongside honor), a reformer might then redefine word X as Z and reject definition Y with prejudice, which will disadvantage and destabilize conservatives that built their fortunes around definition Y.
"Where my country gone?" is a conservative statement, it's just coming from the left now.
Well, as long as they were the correct color. They had quotas for that, just like they did in the '50s, for the same reasons they had them in the '50s.
Science that doesn't replicate isn't science, and the initiatives to do R&D were also suffering from the "so long as they're the right color" problem. I guess it's the age-old dilemma where you can either do science or you can sacrifice it to be anti-racist, just from the right's definition of anti-racism instead of the left's. Naturally, this is moral corruption to the left, just like ending racism the first time was to the right.
No, only China. Nobody else invested into the tooling to manufacture the panels for the same reason the US couldn't- too expensive. The West has already lost the battle for renewable energy sovereignty (and already won the battle for forcing Europe into a dependence on American natural gas by successfully provoking a war in Ukraine); the only question is whether we want to pay now to redevelop indigenous green energy generation capacity, or pay later by having to do that anyway when China starts making diplomatic demands in exchange.
Now, are tariffs the right way to do that given how long it takes to spin up manufacturing in a country that has largely forgotten how to do it? Well, maybe not (annexing the country with a good chunk of high-tech manufacturing immediately to the north is likely to be the better long-term plan here). But it does strike me as interesting that the Rs have pivoted into being the party of bad ideas and the Ds into the party of no ideas.
Maybe that is the deeper issue but I had more in mind things like: the president and his associates running cryptocurrency scams on their supporters
That sort of thing didn’t used to happen in the US or even the developed world from what I know.
The moral corruption I perceive is that suddenly the US started acting in ways that I associate with third world governments, and there was only tepid criticism.
Affirmative action type stuff to me is a side note to what I’m describing.
I agree with conservatives about basing acceptance for jobs and studies on merit instead of skin color.
That doesn’t change the fact that we’ve essentially renounced the role as the country that hoovers up all the intellectual talent and high agency individuals from the world and puts them to work building things here on our soil.
Look, science has flaws, but it works, damn it!
The survivability of cancer has increased dramatically over the past decades. That’s just one (set of) disease(s). Dementia, Parkinson’s, AIDS, diabetes, MS, arthritis, many of these conditions have seen outcomes quietly yet drastically improve over these past decades. Science is working and still acts as a fundamental engine advancing human wellbeing.
Materials science, computational techniques, and even odd niche branches of science such as looking at what chemicals are in the saliva of lizards, have delivered huge advances in recent decades. And surprisingly, most of this has happened in the US!!
You might be destined to get Alzheimer’s in the future and science poses the ability to save your very brain and being from a terrible fate. Or maybe you will experience a horrific accident and regenerative medicine techniques might save your life from becoming a living hell.
Scientific advancement is occurring, and is good for all of us, and despite our comfort and confidence in continuous advancement, it’s not guaranteed.
The current administration has been a storm that passed though science funding at every level, ripping up grants, discouraging a generation of youth from getting into the discipline, and discouraging people who typically would have come here to work in our labs to stay away and go elsewhere.
The sheer strength of our position as the center of the scientific world might allow it to hunker down and withstand all of this, but that’s not at all the outcome you would hope for.
I agree and this one is complicated, but we had a role to play in a technological revolution that the entire world is going through and we decided it’s better to sit back and actually attack it rather than get in and help shape it.
It’s like if in the past upon seeing that the English were advancing with this new concept of coal fired trains and industry, we had decided to actively combat its establishment here to preserve the timber industry.
China has the lead but we could have played a role with innovating in this domain and then at least competing to help lead the global buildout that is (genuinely) occurring. Instead, China is the one and only benefactor, and for this is leaps and bounds ahead with the know how to produce and install this stuff and is doing so in every country across the planet. Not to mention that in any conflict has a decent shot at kicking our ass with massive swarms of cheaply made drones and batteries.
Were obviously just missing out on the next supercycle of technological development on the planet when we could have at least tried to be in the game.
Like I say we did stay in the game on AI, since it was genuinely our innovation which came from the US academia and tech industry. Currently it’s the only thing keeping the American economy afloat (although probably also is in big bubble territory).
But instead of navigating this time of challenges skillfully, focusing on our fortifying our competitive strengths, we just adopted the posture of an angry inwardly-turned nation that started attacking its own foundations of power and influence based on passing culture war freak out stuff.
In other words, stuff like affirmative action and all that is just some silly ornamentation we put on top of the most successful engine of power and influence of the modern world. We could have taken away the mild productivity-decreasing AA stuff and kept the foundation intact! Instead, we started chopping the entire thing down.
The baby can only be thrown out with its bathwater for so long. The lightening might be very hard to get back into the bottle, as each former center of world power and influence can attest.
As another scientist, the problem is that it has been working less and less well, with ballooning costs to boot (especially including the entirety of university funding).
On the teaching side, I've been now long enough part of academia, and have seen it from both the student and the teaching side, over more than a decade now, and it's obvious that the standards just keep going down and down. Professors openly admitting that they let everyone pass in the oral exam anyway, so why even bother making the written exam hard? Students just whining until they get their way, and the administration takes their side. Entire new courses with even lower standards are created, lest the "Nursing Sciences" may feel disadvantaged by the mean old boys club of math and statistics.
On the research side, it becomes harder and harder to even try to conduct neutral investigations. Everything that can possibly be judged politically has to either directly include assurances that you're a good person with good politics, or you have to live in fear that activist-scholars will go after you. Jesse Singal has examples that are close to the platonic ideal of course, but you're extremely mistaken if you think this just limited to specific topics.
I'm working in genetics, and it often feels like almost everything about it is politisized. IVF and embryo selection have always been opposed by the conservatives of course, but nowadays the left will be much more dangerous to your work. A colleague of mine works on a certain kind of serious, inheritable and debilitating diseases. She is being pressured by left-wing activist-scholars from the humanities to drop the topic since exploring the genetic background assumes these diseases are bad - which is ablism - , the money ought to instead go straight to left-wing support structures. Nevermind that most of the patients themselves hate the disease and are thankful for any attempt of fixing, even if only available for their kids. Do you think they get in trouble for this egregious breach of scientific conduct? Of course not, they get support from the administrative and cheers from the media. One of my PhD students is an Egyptian curious about his heritage, and we are investigating what the genetic differences we found functionally do. But even here we have to walk on eggshells since implying that different groups from different places with different conditions might be genetically different in meaningful, functional ways is a big no-no. Well, only for humans, for any other animal it's perfectly obvious and only a creationist would disagree.
And apart from the science itself, the AA hiring is also madness. I personally know not just one, but two cases of a female professor getting their position with just a single publication. I haven't had to work with them myself, but everyone who did has told me that they have been wildly out of their depth and very difficult to work with. Committees that make lists by publications and other measures of competence, and end up taking number ... eight because that's the first one that fulfils whatever quota currently in need of filling.
This is not mild productivity decreasing, these are the big dangers that have been bogging down science for decades. For a different field, just look at the nuclear renaissance going on in certain countries right now; we could have had that in the 90s for the entire world, but fearmongering and green extremism has thrown us back so, so far. Instead, we ideologically wasted so much on trying to turn solar and wind into essential generators through complicated battery schemes, while they are much better suited to simply being supporting energy generators for specific times & places. Michael Magoon has a whole slew of good articles for lay audiences on the topic, but the basic economic case is currently being proven by demonstration in my own home country, germany, which has managed to utterly ruin its own energy production through ideological mismanagement. Even just keeping the old nuclear reactors would have been better than the insanity we've went through. We didn't just move more slowly; We actively moved backwards, and are now depended on the countries around us who invested correctly.
The only part I agree on is that I do not like Trump and don't think he is likely to really fix things. But I also do not trust academia to fix itself. If anything, I expect it to get worse.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link