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 -
1a isn't accurate. Sure, some versions of HBD posits stuff ab out civilizational level stuff. That's not what I mean by HBD, and I don't intend to defend that at all, as I don't find it scientific and, as such, entirely inappropriate in academia. The version I meant was studying associations between genetics, race, and intelligence (and other traits, obviously, but also obviously intelligence is the big one that causes most of the controversy). In any case, the point of studying HBD in academia would be to discover if that's true WITHOUT pre-emptively biasing oneself to either side (to the best of one's ability to remove one's biases, anyway). The point would be to actually do what academia is supposed to be doing.
I have issues with 1b as well, but that's moot given 1a.
Furthermore, the chain of logic in 2 is a fully general argument about anyone using logic and empirical evidence to support anything, which seems to be based on a misunderstanding of my statement. The full sentence from my earlier comment is this:
If you believe that the supposition being made here about "logic," "empirical evidence" and "White Supremacy" was that the former 2 are sometimes used as tools to justify the latter, then I apologize for not being clear in my sentence, though I admit I thought the meaning was fairly clear in context. I shall restate it as below, and I completely disavow entirely the notion that people never use logic and empirical evidence as tools in service of White Supremacy or Critical Race Theory or socialism or Nazism or egalitarianism or Creationism. I that's akin to what I stated, then I misstated and should have tried to clarify with you before defending my earlier statement:
And, unlike the latter, the Hams of the world don't actively try to subvert the ability of other fields to do good scholarship by denigrating basic concepts like "logic" and "empirical evidence" as inventions of White Supremacy that must be discarded for us to get at the truth.
This kind of thinking seems to reflect a particular set of values that I don't think is anywhere near universal enough in modern Western society to make these logical jumps actually take place. Maybe I'm wrong on that, but I don't think that's been proven to any reasonable extent.
More options
Context Copy link