site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25304 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

An elegant solution to all the male crisises, embryonic sex selection. https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/the-y-chromosome-is-dysgenic

Men commit far more crime than women, they are more prone to diseases and they live shorter lives.

There may be more variation in men's IQ scores and they are more common in STEM, so we would certainly need some men for new discoveries and the like but what is the need for 1:1 sex ratio?

Most people don't work on intellectual tasks in civilization which need constant innovation and incredible time spent on them with a singular focus. Most jobs are mundane and of maintaince variety. We can just have few men which work on hard research type jobs where vast majority of population is women. Maybe with lack of men female researchers would lead. Besides if super intelligence arrives we may not need men working at these jobs at all.

This would solve the incel problem since men are rarer, this would solve the problem of dangerous men preying on women.

Note I am not serious here, but talking about this hypothetical seems like fun. It does seem obviously wrong but I can't pinpoint any specific moral principle it might violate.

Surely there is something wrong with this argument but what is it? It seems fine from an purely utalitarian perspective.

Edit: i am again restating that I am not seriously considering this. It's starting prompt for philosophy and a fun writing excercise. No serious person would start their message with "An elegant solution".

Seems reasonable at first pass but I think you end up with a coordination problem. How do you decide who gets to have the male child and thus have their genes highly represented in the next generation?

If you normalise sex-selective IVF for white normies, families wanting two children will have one of each and most of the families wanting one child will choose a girl. I suspect the same is true of black babymamas and well-assimilated Asians.

The problem is that you preferentially need to remove the bottom 20% of males to get the benefits of @Testing's idea, whereas this policy would preferentially remove above average males.

most of the families wanting one child will choose a girl

What led you to this conclusion?

Media coverage makes three arguments for a mild daughter preference in the modern rich world:

  • When US IVF clinics offer sex selection at no or trivial extra cost, most patients choose girls. (Patients who explicitly seek out sex selection and are willing to pay a premium for it are mostly non-whites with a cultural preference for boys).
  • Adoption agencies say boys are harder to place than girls, and are able to extract more money from adoptive parents who get a healthy girl than they do from parents who get a healthy boy.
  • Last children skew female, suggesting that couples who have a girl are satisfied but couples who have a boy are more likely to try for a girl.

In the west it is an issue where people lie on surveys because "no preference" is definitely the politically correct answer (except for families with one child preferring the opposite sex for the second - "one of each" remains an acceptable, and common, preference for two-child families), but see for example this Korean poll showing a dramatic, recent shift in Korean preferences, with people now openly preferring daughters in surveys.

There is a lot of discussion about mechanism, but my suspicion is the dominant one is that most parents in cisHajnal societies have an own-sex preference, coupled with the feminist norm that having children is something women should make the decisions about.

but see for example this Korean poll showing a dramatic, recent shift in Korean preferences, with people now openly preferring daughters in surveys.

I guess that it's childfree people are saying this in a poll, instead of actually producing daughters.

Make life socially a lot tougher for male children. This will result in 45th trimester self-abortions, concentrated among the bottom quintile of men.

Making life socially tougher only removes the bottom quintile if you define it tautologically. You'll remove those who are least socially adept within every stratum, not the least adept overall.

The benefits of his idea have nothing to do with gene quality. It has only to do with positional status. The idea is just to make men rare so women are more desperate. You don't need to ensure the men are "high quality" -- what could that even mean? As long as the policy isn't making men worse each generation in a noticeable way, it should be fine.

This would be a society where girls are the desired sex and boys are the undesirable one. If we look at that in the real world, what you get is:

(a) Sex-selective abortion. In gender-flipped world, this means if you get pregnant with a boy, you abort it and keep trying for that girl. (b) Skewed sex ratios, which is the point of the experiment. Parents want girl children, boys are a mistake. We see places where that plays out. See China in the one child policy era, where the preference for boys meant that there were not enough women to go round when these boys grew up. (c) Scarcity will not mean the scarcer sex now becomes high-status and desirable. The preference for sons meant that even where daughters were scarce, women were not given high-status due to that scarcity:

The male-skew in India's sex ratio has increased since the early 20th century. In 1901 there were 3.2 million fewer women than men in India, but by the 2001 Census the disparity had increased by more than a factor of 10, to 35 million. This increase has been variously attributed to female infanticide, selective abortions (aided by increasing access to prenatal sex discernment procedures), and female child neglect. It has been suggested that the motivation for this selection against female children is due to the lower status and perceived usefulness of women in India's patriarchal society.

Your "one man for every ten women" world would not be "now even the most ugly, loser incel can have his pick of women", it would be "oh dear, you're having a boy? sorry to hear that" for every pregnancy.

We are talking past each other. What are you even talking about? Your "oh dear sorry to hear that" is just an emotive distraction. Using 'status' to refer to 'children as status trophies' is completely alien to the conversation. It might as well be off-topic. In your hypothetical world, you think men are so low status that no woman would ever want to have sex with one, and the mens' sperm would just be siphoned for IVF?

Status and quality here refer to 'husbands as status trophies' and with scarcer men of course their status would go up. This specific thread is about whether it is even necessary for the male minority to have 'desirable genes.' I argue that merely making men scarce would be enough to offset the hypergamous instinct.

'husbands as status trophies' and with scarcer men of course their status would go up

Unless we start breeding men like thoroughbred horses, and who knows what might be the rule in the hypothetical society, scarce trash is still trash. Let me ask the people complaining about the lack of ability for men to get wives: would you hold your nose and marry a meth addict obese trailer trash woman to have kids with, on the grounds that "this is all I can get", or would you hold out for something better?

You could do welfare/tax incentives for girl children only.

Personally you just convince the existing feminists/misandrists to not have male children. Taking it one step further, you could offer to-be-single-mothers incentives for aborting sons, which is morally equivalent anyways. I'm the same vein, you can institute a policy of doctors spending relatively more time caring for female infants in neonatal care, and pushing harder for male children to participate in extreme sports and dangerous behavrior. Heading into pubescence, advertising and subsidizing potentially-lethal behaviors to boys would also work.

[Obviously this is all highly immoral, but I think this is a problem soluble to engineering solutions.]

I'm laughing because guys, this is already happening in parts of the world for women. So if you want to know what the world of skewed sex ratios would be like, you can just look around!

Son preference causes parents to utilize sex-selective abortion to ensure they have their preferred number of sons. The availability of abortion allows parents to abort female fetuses until they get pregnant with a male fetus, leading to a disproportionate amount of female feticide. Although female infanticide, the intentional killing of already-born girls, also occurs in India, research indicates abortion has become exceedingly more prevalent to determine the gender of children. In India, upwards of 1 million fetuses are sex-selectively aborted each year in India out of an estimated total of 16 million abortions in 2015. Additional research shows that the selective abortion of girls increased from the 1980s to the 2000s. Although sex-selective abortion is widely practiced in India, as evidenced by the abnormal SRB of 110, it is illegal to have an abortion based solely on the gender of the fetus. Abnormal sex ratios cause various problems for a country due to a shortage of women, as there will not be enough women for men to marry. One study projected a female deficiency of 6.8 million in India by 2030.

After birth, son preference results in health inequities for women and girls because parents prioritize the well-being of their sons over their daughters. Son preference causes unusually high mortality in female infants and girls.110 Parents are more likely to seek out and provide medical care for sick sons rather than sick daughters.

...In addition to mortality, girls in India experience health disorders and conditions at much higher rates than boys because of a lack of care. For instance, 54% of girls aged 15–19 were anemic, compared to 29% of boys in the same age range. Researchers have also found that son preference also increased the rate of stunting among girls. These outcomes occur because Indian girls often receive fewer calories and less nutritious food than boys. One study on nutrition in India found that, among breast-feeding children below the age of 2, girls were 15% less likely to receive supplemental milk-based solid foods, and 21% less likely to receive valuable meat, fish, or eggs. Girls were also 7% more likely to be malnourished than boys, demonstrating the nutrition disparity among children stemming from gender discrimination.

Ah, gentlemen. 'Gosh wow, what would this unprecedented thought experiment look like in reality? We can only speculate!'

Yes, we all know about son preference in india and china-- and that's why we're discussing installing an artificial daughter-preference in the western world. Tilting the gender ratio away from women has the unintended but in-retrospect obvious effect of increased the demand for and therefore power of the remaining women in the daughter-preference countries, so now male mottizens are considering how to encourage the opposite preference in their own societies to eliminate male competitors and increase their own social power. Obviously that would be terrible and unethical because infanticide, including abortion, is bad, but speaking from a purely self-interested perspective it makes perfect sense.

the demand for and therefore power of the remaining women in the daughter-preference countries

Buddy, when people are still burning women for bride-prices, I don't think we can say "women there are scarce and so have power".

It's really amusing to read all you guys claiming you are being so terribly repressed and oppressed by the new women-first social paradigm, where your major complaint is "I can't get a date" and not "my in-laws will murder me for not handing over more money".

The woman who were burned obviously got a bad deal, but the women remaining had more power than they otherwise would have thanks to their scarcity. That doesn't mean they were powerful in an absolute sense, but it's not necessary to prove that they were to still believe culling younger generations of males to increase the relative power of the older generation of males.

It's really amusing to read all you guys claiming you are being so terribly repressed and oppressed by the new women-first social paradigm, where your major complaint is "I can't get a date" and not "my in-laws will murder me for not handing over more money".

You are clearly engaging with my argument in bad faith if you think anything you said in the paragraph is at all relevant to this discussion. I can tell you very badly want to rehash the "are men or women more oppressed" argument but even if you could prove your side of that argument to everyone's satisfaction, it wouldn't counter anything the other posters have to say about the effects of enforcing artificial scarcity.

We've also done all of those.

The first one is a gimme. Of course, they don't have female children either.

The second one is already law in Blue areas (some nations take it a bit further and only make it illegal if the child is female- it's sold as an anti-Muslim thing, but the incentives align).

The third one is likely already the case for Women are Wonderful reasons.

The fourth one is war-as-population-control (re: white feathers of WW1).

I don't understand your comment. Yes, we've implemented policies similar to the policies I propose for obtaining a lower male/female ratio. That's my point. Your comment has the tone of a counterargument but doesn't actually oppose anything I said.

Easy, its a lottery.

Then you'd breed unusually lucky people, I guess that could work.

I don't mean this as an attack on you: "Breeding lucky people" sounds like the kind of phrase LessWrong.com would call "a confusion"

The Pierson's Puppeteers tried that, hoping the luck would rub off on them. Didn't work out as they intended.

It's a reference to the scifi Ringworld series.

Larry Niven's gonna have to sue somebody.

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