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 -
Something like >30% of Ivy League graduates go straight to Wall Street. I assume another >30% go straight to SF to optimize addicting people to rage slop (I actually think this is a worse use of human capital than playing esoteric financial games against each other).
I'm glad you highlighted the zero-sum part. I think about this a lot.
I'm quite pro capital markets, as they're clearly the best mechanism we have as a civilization to allocate limited resources thus far. And both PE and VC, despite their reputations, play extremely important roles in the "ecosystem" as do banks and institutional funds and everyone else.
I doubt this is controversial here, but I think capital allocation mechanisms/markets are one of the greatest human inventions along with steam power, electricity, etc.
But I wonder a LOT about when (and maybe we didn't, but I doubt it) we hit the point of extremely diminishing returns/zero-sum with the financial sector.
Because it's obvious that no financial markets results in terrible price discovery and terrible allocation of resources. Having great capital markets means good price discovery means resources allocated well and the human race benefits as a whole as great ideas are rapidly rewarded and scaled. The pie grows for everyone.
But at some point, or many points over time, it does very much seem like there was a shift from "making the pie bigger hy effectively allocating capital" to "getting increasingly sophisticated at fighting eachother for slices of the pie as it grows slowly in the background". I don't think this was a nefarious plot by hedge fund managers. Ironically I think it was probably my man Marx's chickens coming home to roost. Economic growth in the developed nations has slowed a lot since the "golden age of capitalism" , the pie doesn't get bigger faster like it used to. So it's a natural shift , but it sucks.
If I had to pick a moment, my gut says somewhere around the invention of high frequency trading. That is pure zero-sum fuck fuck games.
Yeah but you also get people optimizing purely for the allocation of capital thus all the bubbles and semi-scams you see in financial fields. You can do a lot of hard, intricate work at optimizing your arm-wrestling techniques, but when end of the day it's just PVP arm-wrestling there are limits to what you can derive out of that in the end.
Also frankly as somebody who lives in the 'developing world' and meanders around it a lot, it feels in pure material terms like the best parts of mid-tier countries are perfectly on par in terms of human comfort with the richest Western countries. There hasn't really been that much innovation in terms of stuff like building houses or infrastructure in the last decade or two, and later adopters get the advantages of being able to build it with the benefit of experience plus generally having less ridiculous red tape to handle.
Not at all, the productivity of the construction sector in North America has been flat/down over the last 20 years
Such a big issue, and no one is talking about it
Yeah and later adopters have social technologies like 'removing homeless and drug addicts from the commons' that mean that frequently the nicest parts of the developing world are better than world cities.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link