site banner

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
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

When reading Is Seattle a 15-minute city? this morning, I couldn't help thinking about what's missing from it. For context, the 15-minute city is an urbanist idea about making every residential area a 15-minute walk to important amenities like grocery stores. It's a good idea if it could be achieved without incurring too many other costs, and it's the other costs that I couldn't help thinking about. Specifically, crime.

The metric "walking time to the nearest supermarket" I'm sure correlates closely to rate of property crimes. Where I live, homeless encampments tend to spring up close to grocery stores. These things are related.

I'm very sympathetic to concerns about car dependence, and how much better life could be if housing was built closer to stores, schools, and workplaces. But the problem is always crime. Requiring a car to get to a place disproportionately screens out would-be criminals, even if it also screens out some upstanding citizens who cannot or will not drive. Suburbia is the epitome of this phenomenon, where everything is too far from anything else to live without a car. In cities that are naturally denser, there are constant fights over zoning that dance around this issue but don't address it directly (at least when the participants are nominally progressive and need to be seen as non-discriminatory).

There's a more general point here, which is this: discrimination is required for a well-functioning society. I'm using 'discrimination' in the more technical sense here, as "To make a clear distinction; distinguish." The concept of statistical discrimination covers a lot of what I mean here, but discrimination based on signaling is important too.

Statistical discrimination is basically using Bayesian inference, using information that's already available or easy to get, to make inferences about hidden or illegible traits that predict some important outcome. In the context of walkability, people who don't own cars are more likely to commit crimes or to be bad customers and neighbors than people who do own cars. So you end up with a better-behaving local population if you require a car.

By discrimination based on signaling I mean things like choice of clothing, personal affect and mannerism, accent, vocabulary, presence of tattoos, etc. These things are useful for statistical discrimination, but they're under conscious control of the person in question, and they're hard to fake. They basically prove "skin in the game" for group membership. It takes time and effort to develop a convincing persona that will get you accepted into a different social class, and higher social classes have much stricter standards of behavior. Basically the guy speaking in Received Pronunciation, with no tattoos, who uses PMC vocabulary and dresses in upper-middle-class business attire is very unlikely to rob you, because it would be very costly to him. He'd lose his valuable class status for doing something so base.

Why is discrimination required for a well-functioning society? Because every choice is almost by definition discriminatory, and preferentially making positive-sum choices leads to a positive-sum society. Imagine if you made zero assumptions about a new person you met, aside from "this is a human." You wouldn't be able to talk to them (you'd be assuming their language), you wouldn't know what kind of etiquette to use, you'd have no idea whether they're going to kill you for doing something they consider obscene; you wouldn't be able to get any value out of the interaction. If instead you inferred based on their appearance that they're a middle-class elderly American woman who speaks English, you could immediately make good choices about what to talk about with them.

I'm sure this is all pretty obvious to anyone rationalist-adjacent, but I had a confusing conversation with a more left-leaning relative recently who seemed to have internalized a lot of the leftist ideas that are basically of the form "statistical discrimination is useless." Setting aside topics outside the Overton window like HBD, even for questions like "does the fact that a person committed a crime in the past change the likelihood they'll commit a crime in the future, all else equal?" the assumption seemed to be "no." Michael Malice's assertion seems to be true, that answering "are some people better than others" is the most precise way to distinguish right-wing from left-wing.

Bringing this to the culture war, there is a scientific or factual answer to every question "does observable fact X predict outcome Y", and pointing out that leftist assumptions contradict the evidence is how to convince reasonable people that the leftist assumption is false. I'm speaking as a person living in one of the most left-leaning places in the country, so the false leftist assumptions are the ones that most harm my life. Rightist assumptions of course also contradict the evidence, but I don't have salient examples.

The astute observer will note that most of the leftist intellectual movement of the last 50 years is trying to poison the evidence (via ad hominem and other fallacious arguments). How can one improve the quality of evidence when the wills of so many high-status people are set against it?

P.S. I'm sorry for the emotional tone of this post. This community is the only place I have to talk about this and I appreciate your thoughts.

Back when I made the unfortunate decision to live in Seattle, I did actually live less than a 15-minute walk from a supermarket. And I literally never walked to it, because Seattle is full of steep hills similar to San Francisco's and even if it wasn't you can only carry so much in a single trip. Asking if it is a 15 minute cit is asking "Do you want to make a 30 minute round trip to the grocery store on foot every three days?" And I'm guessing for most Americans the answer is a resounding no.

I did this for a few months in Seattle too, and it was ridiculous. Like what are these walkers even buying, single serving microwaved meals and a pack of orange juice? I needed a hiking backpack to be able to haul milk, rice, and flour bags (walking 15 minutes with one of those and seeing how much flour you have left is always fun!)

And that was 20 year old me. What's an 80 year old woman in the same situation supposed to do, hop on her skateboard with a turkey under her arm?

Everyone going "oh, just spend 30 minutes walking to and from the store every day instead of shopping once a week" needs to take an economics class, or maybe they just don't see other people's time as having any value. Which would explain the Seattle bus system, come to think of it...

Plus the week after I moved out of that strip along I5, a guy got mugged on my store route. If people want to mandate how we live according to their urbanist fantasies, they should bloody well be made to fix their own cities first.

Ehhh, I don't know, groceries are pretty heavy if you cook at home all the time. I'm not usually the kind to make a big deal about small inconveniences, but back when I was biking, I decided to switch from potatoes to pasta or rice so that I wouldn't have to carry the extra water weight. Much, much easier to have it piped in or brought in a car. This was a young man with no kids who biked 20 miles to work every day.

So fantasies about painful hourlong trips to carry back-breaking groceries back home for a (very suburban) once-a-week shopping trip are just that.

When I was living in a city, there was a small convenience store five minutes away, with prohibitively-high prices for my limited budget and very poor selection. If I wanted actual food, I needed to either walk 30 minutes uphill to the actual grocery store, or more frequently, take public transit to the other grocery store, at an hour and a half round-trip, which involved pulling a 40-60-lb shopping caddy up multiple flights of stairs and about a quarter-kilometer of 30-degree incline, often in the rain.

That really seems like a specifically American experience to me. I've lived in various cities all over Germany and Europe and never been in a situation where the next grocery store offering about 95% of what I'd buy in a month is farther away than 10 minutes on foot. From where I'm currently sitting in Berlin there are no less than 6 medium-sized supermarkets of varying price- and quality-ranges within that radius. In the north-eastern countryside where I spent parts of my youth every third village had a store run by one of the large German chains, so even for rural residents it was either 5 minutes by foot or 10 by car.

Well, Canadian in this case. Vancouver.

This is the same in the UK. Wherever I've lived, the closest shop has always been much more expensive than a larger supermarket, to the point where milk was double the price in the local corner shop compared to the nearest supermarket

I loved it when I did it. I lived about four minutes from a grocery store and it was very convenient.

In most dense cities the walk to the grocery store is more like 5 minutes than 15

Not a chance, unless you're counting convenience stores.

When I lived in a big dense city, I had two convenience stores within a 30 second walk of my apartment and five grocery stores within a five minute walk. One of them was pretty big.

To be fair, until just last year the authoritative North American Industry Classification System did include both supermarkets and convenience stores within the overarching "grocery stores" category, so there is precedent for this nomenclature. (The 2022 edition of the NAICS now calls the overarching category "grocery and convenience retailers".)

5 minutes is true for my experience of urban Europe and Asia. In both one can drive further to a big box store and do weekly shopping, but walkable grocery stores are near major walking commute routes and sell quantities of food that the single person can carry back to their home.

I usually buy fresh groceries daily 5 min from my house (but 10 seconds off my route) on my commute home and nonperishables 1.5 hours away by bus once a month.