site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025

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.

3
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Before the experiment, the researchers ask you what the probability of the coin coming up heads is. What's the answer? 50%, obviously. So what if they ask you after waking you up what the probability of the coin coming up heads was? It's still 50%, isn't it?

No, it isn't. Being woken up is evidence for tails. So if they ask you after waking you up, you have additional evidence that you did not have when they asked you before the experiment.

(And if your reply is "well, didn't you know in advance that you would be awoken?" the answer is that "being awake" and "knowing that you will be awake" don't provide the same evidence, because they are distributed among the outcomes differently.)

Note the phrasing:

what the probability of the coin coming up heads was?

Not:

what should I assume the coin came up as, if I were a betting man?

The former is a question about a reality that continues to exist outside of our personal observations. The latter is a description of assumptions you can make while biased under this or that frame that limit your observational abilities. These are different questions and have different answers. Again, as described, the gambling case makes the practical side of this very clear, but this shouldn't blind us to the absolute perspective.

As for why this matters: imagine that the researchers tell you what they flipped before you go to sleep the first time. This is the analogue to real-world scenarios, where there always is a driving factor of variance, but we rarely get a privileged peek behind the curtain as to what it is. Describing this or the other real world event as probabilistic is helpful primarily for placing ourselves within our own information-blind reality, but if you are able to get a real look at the coin, everything changes. That's why it's important to understand the odds, of course, but also to understand there's something behind them. If you at all aspire to a scientific understanding of your situation, you must not be thinking about the odds, you must be thinking about getting a look at that coin.

Well, ok, but you chose that ambiguous phrasing. The Wikipedia article has two different statements of the problem, neither of which is unclear. You have to be very careful with your wording (as you were) to make it a misleading question that sounds like it's asking about a result but is actually, uh, about a "reality that continues to exist".

Note the phrasing:

In that case I would agree that the problem is phrased ambiguously. The per experiment probability is 50% and the per-awakening probability is 1/3.