site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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.

13
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

critical thinking. And I do not necessarily believe this to be fully teachable because I think abilities of comparative and analogical reasoning may be neurologically/genetically/IQ limited by the space of one's working memory along with the natural interconnectivity of one's brain.

I believe in some extent to critical periods for learning to think, and debiasing, but can we please stop the ineptia/hypocrisy and admit we live in a degenerate world that is at the level 0 of teaching critical thinking/epistemology, it's not that it's hard to do it is that we are not doing it at all, ever.

can we please stop the ineptia/hypocrisy and admit

This is a kind of consensus-building rhetoric (along the lines of "everyone knows")--it is not allowed here.

""Critical thinking""e is, itself, modern concept. There weren't any critical thinking teachers in medieval towns or primitive cultures. Meanwhile, modern schools explicitly attempt to "teach critical thinking".

There doesn't need to be a concept for something for that thing to exist. There's also no reason to assume modern schools explicitly attempting to teach critical thinking actually improves it, rather than impairs it.

I take issue with the idea of critical thinking (it has no low-level differences from other kinds of thinking), but you're right that needs to be argued for, which GP didn't do.

As for schools 'improving' thinking - thinking isn't a monolith, "improving thinking" doesn't mean much, but schools clearly teach a lot of useful things to some people. e.g. high school science or math for researchers and engineers. Or people like academic historians usually claim that high school was useful in teaching them the basics of reading, writing, and thinking about sources that they build on in their careers, which seems related to what is called "critical thinking".