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 -
Productivity is another very sad word that is used in economics while having also colloquial meaning. Productivity is a simple economic concept meaning how much money you earned by selling products and services you produced, nothing more, nothing less. It has weird implications like for instance a janitor working for Goldman Sachs in one of their office buildings being more productive than a janitor in 3rd world country or even in government building as the former has higher wage and company he works for rakes in more revenue and profit. If you invented something amazing but made it free, your productivity did not increase. If million other people took your invention and used it to improve their bottom line, it is calculated independently. If you look at it, it is not as strange as it seems. In broad sense productivity per person is increased by using capital. In a sense living in a large city with sophisticated infrastructure enabling various network effects makes everybody more productive even if they moved there yesterday and did not contribute anything building that infrastructure.
But of course productivity also has colloquial meaning, which than translates to various value judgements talking about things like bullshit jobs, how government jobs are nonproductive or how it is unfair that two workers working with the same machine producing the same number of parts should be considered as similarly productive.
By the way there are many such "economics" words and concepts that have the same issue of being a technical term while also having normal colloquial meaning - even basic ones such as capital, savings, the act of saving, investment and many more. It also does not help that even economists or journalists are using these meanings interchangeably thus needlessly confusing the whole discussion.
More options
Context Copy link