site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29304 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 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.

11
Top Bottom New Old Controversial
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Let me clarify my point. I'm generally skeptical of arguments of the form "they did [thing] in [Japan/Europe], why can't we do it here?" that do not take into account culture. Because my answer to that question is culture. If you live in Japan and affordable housing gets built next door, the worst thing your new neighbors might do is talk on the phone too loudly. If you live in America and affordable housing gets built next door, the worst thing that could happen is, well, let me just quote OP again:

One of my best friends used to live in a condo that was seated next door to one of these, which gave them a rather first-hand and literal application of what it means to say, “yes in my backyard” to this sort of project, and it was about as unpleasant as you’d expect. The frequency of parking lot fights, ambulances in the middle of the night, and police presence were, again, about you might expect.

So then people oppose these projects when they otherwise wouldn't if they had lived in Japan.

You state that "Prices are lower because supply is higher." This I do not have a disagreement with. But you seem to miss the point of why, exactly, supply is higher.

I think your mistake is characterizing it as "wasteful" for people to pay to price out undesirable people from their neighborhoods. People pay that premium for a reason: they think it's worth spending a lot of extra money to not have to live around those people.

In other words, the nimbies you're responding to are essentially saying "we'd rather give up a lot of money than live around those people" and your response is essentially "but that's a lot of money that could be used otherwise". Which... well, yes, of course, but people derive value from that money.

Your musical chairs point - that someone has to live near these people - is trivially true. But a basic principle of living in a free market liberal society is that people get to selfishly make themselves better off if they're able to afford it. Perhaps we'd be better off if people donated more of their wealth to alleviate the burdens of the less fortunate, but human nature is what it is. Why single out housing as the one domain where people shouldn't be able to use their wealth to obtain things they want at the expense of others?

Ok but how much money exactly does it take to price out undesirables and who/what else are you pricing out at the point the price actually gets to? If you have multiple children have you decided which one will get the house and which one(s) will be priced out of the neighborhood they grew up in?

This sounds like a good idea. Let's apply it to the rest of society first, and then apply it here last. Reasonable?

Free markets are pretty neat! They solve a whole host of problems quite elegantly. I'm pretty sure they don't solve all problems, though, and it seems to me that for some problems, they only offer a solution if the whole system is free-market end-to-end. It is not obvious to me that each incremental freeing of a market has a linearly-positive effect. I think it is obvious that a market can get "more free" in specific ways that benefit some and not others, such that the system ends up worse-off on average when that "freedom" does not actually generalize across the whole system.

More generally, there's a thing I've observed where people argue that people should apply policy X in one specific area, where it will be to their short-term advantage, while absolutely stonewalling such policies everywhere else, where the people on the other side would derive advantage from them. Call it "policy arbitrage". I prefer specific policies because I think they will have good effects, not because they have a specific label on them. If there's a label I like, but it seems both that the policy it's applied to will have bad effects on net, and also that it won't do much to actually advance other policies that seem better, even ones with the same label, I'm not going to support it.

The market, as a whole is not actually free. It's somewhat plausible to me that an actual free market would be better than what we have, but this change would not actually make the market as a whole free, does not seem likely to even measurably help in making the whole market free, and does seem likely to cause immediate, highly significant harms. If you tell me that I should support such policies because "free markets", I'm going to tell you to come back when you've actually got the market free elsewhere. What I'm not going to do is embrace immediate, obvious harms in the hope that nebulous, uncertain benefits materialize, someday, at some unspecified date in the future.

TL;DR - Free markets != Free(er) markets, so arguments for the one don't generalize to the other.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats