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 -
Microsoft is trying to transform Windows into an agentic OS. Apparently, this means Injecting copilot into the operating system to the point where you can just ask it how to do something and it tells you exactly how to do it. Just follow its instructions, no need to know anything yourself.
I guess the argument is that it will make Windows easier to use for non-technical people. Of course, there is a multitude of problems with this:
The culture war angle:
The left absolutely hates AI. It is built by multi-billionaires looking to replace our jobs so they don't have to pay us and can take all the planet's resources for themselves. Every time AI is added to consumer products, the consumer is increasingly placed in the control of its owner. AI is known to be biased, and we have already seen the tech giants attempt to inject their own bias into them. So not only are we seeing a development in the wrong direction, we are becoming increasingly vulnerable to lies and manipulation by the most powerful in society. This is without even going into the monumental costs of training the models, and the opportunity cost from not spending the resources on other areas that would be more directly helpful to humans.
The AI doomers are afraid of AI takeover. This seems like a step towards that. A chief argument against the AI doomer scenarios has been something like "who would be dumb enough to place AI in control of key systems?" Well, Windows, apparently. While it is true that in their add, it is still the user making the final decision as to which settings to choose, it seems to me that a super-intelligent AI would be capable of manipulating most users into choosing exactly the settings best suited for the AI to manipulate them further. Besides, if this becomes a commercial success, then more is sure to follow. At least, you would expect Google and Apple to follow up, making all the mainstream OS's infected with the kind of intelligence that could ultimately destroy us.
The AI skeptics believe that AI is not going to improve much in the near future. As such, this is a misstep of moronic proportions. You even see it in the add: The user asks the AI to increase his font size. It suggests he changes the scale setting, which is currently at 150%. When asked what percentage he should change it to, the AI responds with 150%, as this is the recommended setting. The result? Nothing changes, because the setting is kept at default. Wait no, the user went against the AI's wishes and picked 200%, seemingly hoping that you would not spot this stupid mishap. If the actual marketing material is damaged by AI hallucination, how bad is the final product going to be? Are you going to have to argue with your AI until it finally does what you want? This is probably going to push more power users over to Linux, as the agent does not give them the fine control over their systems that they want. Meanwhile, it might actually make the experience worse for Grandma, who is gaslit into picking suboptimal settings for herself by an unhelpful machine.
Finally, if you are concerned about AI and mental health, you have probably heard of AI-induced psychosis. The usage of chatbots by a small minority of vulnerable people has apparently fed into their delusions, resulting in psychosis-related behavior. An agentic OS that at best requires the user to opt out of AI functionality, places the chatbot right in the user's face. While a therapist today could instruct her patients to avoid seeking out the chatbots, that is hardly possible when the main way to use your operating system is through an LLM. If copilot is on by default, or if other ways to use the system is slowly deprecated making it harder to use without the bot, I would expect this change to result in more cases of diagnosable mental health conditions.
This is fascinating to me in light of the fact that the left often accuses AI of innate bias. Okay, but are they aware of the direction the bias goes? Ask AI why women are bad drivers and it will wag its finger at you for daring to ask that. Ask AI why men are bad drivers and it will laugh along with you before gently pointing out the cause of the misconception. Similar dynamics exist along racial lines. This is true of basically every AI except for Grok (obviously). AIs are gigawoke and yet the woke often express their extreme hatred of the people responsible.
It's enough to make you wonder if the billionaire techbros really are stupid, because their efforts to appease the most enthusiastic billionaire haters seem to have not affected them in the slightest. Why do they continue to do it? It's just the latest round of "Why do rich people assume kinship with the people who want to cut off their heads," but it's a rather naked example. The billionaire techbros have absolutely no favor with the types of people who want their AIs to be implicit-biased trained. Their efforts to make implicit-bias-trained AIs do not move the needle on those people's opinions of them, nor AI, as they see AI as a fundamental evil that is taking artists' jobs. So why the fuck are they forfeiting their own integrity to appease them?
Because they are true believers? Wokeness is simply what you get when you take antiracism and antisexism seriously. You can get away with 90s colorblindness and gender neutrality right up until you notice the huge disparities in outcome that result from equality of opportunity, and then what? Shrug and say "well, shucks, I guess the racists and sexists were right, but I stuck to my principles and treated everyone like an individual, so even though I got an outcome that is 90% similar to what the bigots would have gotten with discriminatory policies that is still a moral victory?"? Only a few autistic libertarians are OK with that. Everyone else starts looking for a way out, whether looking for ever earlier, ever smaller environmental causes ("no, it's not that blacks are less intelligent than whites, it's that complimenting their mothers for being articulate while they are still in the womb causes irreparable trauma that shows up as disparate test scores by first grade), or sticking their head in the sand and shutting the fuck up while neurotically telling people to go away every time the subject comes up until genetic engineering makes everyone equal (Scott Alexander).
If women are equal to men, if blacks are equal to whites, then every gap must be the result of evil white males oppressing minorities in ever subtler ways, and ever more extreme measures are justified to combat this. Wokeness is simply the elimination of unprincipled exceptions. If you believe the moral message that every school and TV show has been putting out since the 1960s, you believe that the woke are more holy than you, morally superior to you, and are at worst a little misguided and overzealous. Certainly nothing like the racists and sexists, who are pure evil.
There's a coherent anti-racism that doesn't lead to evil-white-menism.
Through some non-genetic differences (endowment of resources, geography, simple good luck), some civilizations significantly surpassed others. This led to things like colonialism and slavery initially, because historically pretty much everyone is happy to use violence to improve their own position.
Eventually, white Americans abolished slavery. But whites and blacks still had different endowments, and that affects their descendents. And, more importantly, slavery left deep scars on black culture, breaking up families and opposing education. Later on, government programs (intentionally or not) exacerbated the toxic parts of that culture, and that's how we get to the sorry state of the present.
This isn't even a particularly out there take, and it was fairly widespread in the 90s (and lives on to this day, albeit not in the halls of government, media, and academia). The issue is that this argument/analysis doesn't suggest any plausible political program--"we are going to end welfare dependency, invest in policing minority areas to protect them from crime, and encourage stable family formation" has approximately zero takers, for whatever reason.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link