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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7906 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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It should be dead obvious that being supported by the institutions of your field is better than being opposed by them. Yes, there are some people who succeed outside, but it's a much harder road they have to be that much better. And of course others fail with such opposition where they would have succeeded with support or just neutral treatment.

For men, the team found one correlation with GRE scores: men who scored in the top 25% of the GRE’s quantitative section

An interesting find, but the upshot of the article is "We should get rid of the GRE because men have an advantage in quantitative scores but no advantage in actually getting degrees". (Which I suspect is because of discrimination against them in the grad programs.) It's a call for even more enshittification of academia, and in an engineering publication no less.

ETA: He actually addresses this argument in an interview about an earlier article about white writers:

Oliver goes on to helpfully suggest that younger white men, if indeed they face institutionalized discrimination, should self-publish. Who cares about the New Yorker? A Naomi Kanakia in every kitchen, a John Pistelli in every garage!

This is just wild. Can you imagine giving that advice to any other group of people?

There's this magical idea among the Substack literati, who all appear to be deranged graphomaniacs themselves, that a True Artist will always produce work regardless of material circumstances. But do you really think Philip Roth or John Updike or Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith would have published dozens of novels between them if they couldn't make a living at it? And while we're here: if Tony Tulathimutte, whose writing both Henry Oliver and I both adore, hadn't been able to publish Private Citizens with William Morrow in 2016 — what would have happened? If he'd found himself ever-so-slightly further offsides the Maginot line of identity and a mainstream publisher hadn't picked up his début, do you really think we'd all have read Rejection in 2024?

There's this magical idea among the Substack literati, who all appear to be deranged graphomaniacs themselves, that a True Artist will always produce work regardless of material circumstances. But do you really think Philip Roth or John Updike or Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith would have published dozens of novels between them if they couldn't make a living at it?

I don´t mean to be overly hyperbolic, of course. But even back in Ye Olden Days, yeah, great writers were often persecuted. John Locke fled England on fear of his life. John Bunyan wrote much of Pilgrim's Progress from prison.

Today, with the advent of the internet, it's much easier. Fuentes had his bank accounts and credit cards locked, was put on a no-fly list, and booted from every major social media platform. Has that stopped him?

Or take all the AAA video game producers that have been ideologically captured. So what? Just make your own studio! Clair Obscur just won game of the year! And the runners up were like... Hollow Knight: Silksong (produced by a grand total of 3 people, if my knowledge serves me right) and Hades 2. You really can just Do Things, and out-play people with orders of magnitude more institutional privilege.

Anyway, the other thing I wanted to highlight with my post is that complaining about institutional capture is a really bad battle tactic. I won't contend that fighting to retake institutions is a bad idea (though it's not the sort of thing that inspires anything in me personally). It's probably a good idea. But complaining that you don't like the status-granting institutions lends them more status, because it looks like they correctly kept all the losers out. For anyone seeking to go on their own Long March to retake the institutions, you need a more compelling battle cry than "No, no, you can't refuse to accept me, my test scores were good!" I propose something akin to Harry Potter's line when he retook Hogwarts: "How dare you stand where he stood!"

Like the double edged sword of the Internet more broadly --- the crushing dichotomy of endless slop and almost the complete collective knowledge of mankind at your fingertips --- the tools are there for you and a couple friends to go produce, say, movies with effects that surpass Kubrick's with a much larger budget. Blender is free (and Academy Award winning!). Camera equipment is smaller and lighter and cheaper. LED lighting can run on batteries.

And yet, nobody that I've found is producing well-written, compelling movies on shoestring budgets that actually get eyes, while Netflix keeps churning out heaps of slop with the odd gem tossed in (KPop Demon Hunters was enjoyable). I'm really not sure what to make of it: maybe there is a stochastic element of movie magic that requires the stars to align for a good product and lots projects to produce a hit, or maybe it takes the collective will to power and collective experience of something like the Hollywood juggernauts to push to finish projects well. Or maybe it's happening, but not in genres I follow: are we in a low-budget horror Renaissance? Or it's a change in dynamic to creators of short-form videos?

And the same is true of other mainstream media. I suppose there are a few breakout hits on Substack or various podcasts, so maybe it's happening and we're just not noticing.

Movies in particular, no, but there's an enormous amount of quality video content produced on shoestring budgets on YouTube. NileRed, 3Blue1Brown, Adam Ragusea, Practical Engineering etc.. It's not just a handful of people: there are many channels on a myriad of topics, produced by people who as far as I can tell have no major studio backing. It's just regular people with cameras, doing stuff they find interesting and showing other people.

I'd wager this "industry" already dwarfs legacy producers of similar content.

I don't think there's anything stopping people from producing movies, the will just isn't there for whatever reason. But It's been done before: The Blair Witch Project was a successful low-budget film, and it managed to achieve fame even without the help of internet video distribution!

As for writing, there's SlateStarCodex, which was just a guy who decided to make a website to publish his writings. It was pretty big once upon a time, so I hear. He wrote a book, too!

The Blair Witch Project was a successful low-budget film, and it managed to achieve fame even without the help of internet video distribution!

The Blair Witch Project is a special case because being low budget is inherently part of the story, which alleviates most of the problems caused by having to be low budget. This doesn't generalize.

Because the larger organizations are on watch for such and will likely move to crush them.

Astartes sits in my mind as an example of this. It was a single person passion project that blew people away for how good it was and got more people interested in Warhammer 40K than anything Games Workshop ever did. So what did GW do? Bought the guy out and basically hid him away from doing anything.

Taking out competition is trivial when you have the resources and advantages to do it.

This is a level of indifference that would never be applied to any other group in a modern context. "Oh, you think blacks are discriminated against in publishing? Well MLK Jr and Nelson Mandela wrote from jail, why can't you succeed? You think women are discriminated against? Jane Austen made it in a man's world. Gay people are getting the short end? Oscar Wilde did fine and Alan Turing made a name for himself even while being chemically castrated".

I was going to reply to Soteriologian with somewhat similar. The right phrases it to sometimes sound like a white man will never be hired again. The left will claim this is all made up and point to some really specific stats like programming being overwhelmingly men (women don't even try to go into programming at nearly the same levels) or X% of a field is still white men (even though many got the job before DEI initiatives ramped up). But there definitely is a finger on the scales towards non white man. Success is a spectrum, not a binary. The geniuses of any generation can succeed against a headwind. But for those who are around average talent to somewhat above average, having the resources to get off the ground can be huge. Hollow Knight was made by a handful of people, but in order to do that they need a stable job with time to spare to work on personal projects.

We really need to do a "you halves he picks" analysis on these types of proposals. You guys define just how hard the millstone of racial and sexual discrimination grinds on the have-nots, but I get to pick who they are. If it's truly no big deal, you won't mind it pressing down on women and minorities, right?

Every so often, someone rediscovers the original position.

Which I suspect is because of discrimination against them in the grad programs.

Uh, does it control for degree program? Lower-scoring individuals are usually less likely to go into difficult programs, and thus finish.

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