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 -
It is much more expensive than you give it credit for. Superdeterminism sweeps away all laws of nature and replaces them with one: "whatever happens, happens." It is the equivalent of "dinosaur bones were planted by Satan to lead people astray" in terms of explaining away some undesired physical finding (ancient extinct creatures or physical randomness:) absolutely any phenomenon is compatible with the theory, because absolutely any phenomenon could have been predetermined to happen/planted by Satan, with all existing evidence leading us to suspect otherwise also having been predetermined/planted. The theory has no predictive power, and thus can't be most parsimonious.
That is not my understanding of superdeterminism - it is extending determinism to quantum (and all probabilistic) phenomena and thus necessarily forming one causal chain from end to end through the entire universe, which does indeed follow lightly from a free-will-free determinism that only leaves probabilistic corners. If that is not correct, mea culpa, give this extension of determinism a different name.
If you want to salvage determinism, just go with many-worlds. That gives you a deterministic multiverse, which is good enough for most people, though it doesn't produce a deterministic universe from the observer's perspective, and that's good, because the evidence really does suggest that one universe isn't deterministic.
I'm not a many-worlds partisan, myself, but it's useful to illustrate the point that there is not, from any observer's point of view at any moment in time, One True Future that could be determined, Laplace's Demon style, through total knowledge of the current state of the universe, because, in the many-worlds view, there are infinitely many futures ahead, and any prediction you make would either have to be accurate for all of them if it needs to be guaranteed to be correct (such predictions are "motteish:" true but trivial) or else it would only be, at best, probabilistically correct (i.e., the most likely choice, but decreasingly likely to be correct the more ambitious it is: "baileyish.")
So to recover determinism from a situation where it appears one cannot determine the future, many-worlds says that all possible futures actually exist, none more real than any other (well, unless you weight them by probability...) If the idea of every physically possible continuation of the universe's initial conditions being real is more palatable to you than any sort of non-determinism, then many-worlds is for you.
Superdeterminism, by contrast, recovers determinism for a single universe by saying that physics aren't random at all, but are only pretending to be. Beautiful perfect statistical matches to theoretical predictions of quantum randomness are observed because - well, because it pleased the Uncaused Cause that it should be so. Reality is pulling the wool over our eyes (and if about this - then about what else? We can never know...) This isn't something I can say is false - it is no more falsifiable than, well, any other theism, frankly. But cleaving to it doesn't sound like hard-nosed empiricism to me - maybe more like Calvinism.
But of course you can be a Calvinist if so you please.
Bold of you to assume I had a choice in the matter.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link