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 -
That is not remotely emotional blackmail. It's perfectly normal to be upset when your spouse doesn't trust you and demands to check up on your behavior just in case you're up to something.
Not when it comes to legally binding documents. "Trust, but verify" is the way healthy relationships work. "Trust, but don't you dare verify" is the way abusive ones work.
No. A healthy relationship works on "trust". That's it. Not "trust, but verify" (which is in fact a lack of trust), not "trust, but don't you dare verify". Simply trust.
That would only make sense if you view trust as a binary. Typical usage treats it instead as a spectrum, with healthy relationships requiring less verification for the same level of risk.
Trust is a binary. While you may not extend trust to a person in all areas, for any given area, you either trust someone or you do not. There's no middle ground.
Credence is a probabilty measure, and even marginalizing it onto a single binary question gives you values on a continuum interval. Probability measures on a binary set are pairs (x,1-x), x∈[0,1], not binary values. Let's see if we can at least come to an agreement that there are more points along that interval than just the two endpoints:
If my wife said she could never kill anybody, and I continue seeing no evidence to the contrary, I would believe her.
If my wife said she could never kill anybody, and yet there was a suspicious death of someone she hated and circumstantial evidence pointing toward her, I would believe her.
If she said she could never kill anybody, but the police just arrested her for murder, I would believe her.
If she said she could never kill anybody, but the police just arrested her for murder and showed me surveillance video, I would be pretty paranoid any time I saw a stranger who looked like her, but I would believe her.
If she said she could never kill anybody, but the police just arrested her for murder and showed me video evidence and she had been weirdly missing during the time of death and her Google Maps timeline had an inexplicable gap, I would expect to believe her answers, but I would ask her a lot of questions.
If she'd said she could never kill anybody, but I had just walked in on her alone in a room standing over a dead body holding a bloody knife, I would initially believe her previous statement was most likely false, but in lieu of even more incriminating evidence I'd believe her "someone just dropped this knife and ran out the door, then I picked it up and wandered over here and found the body!" story.
If she was covered in blood too and I'd seen nobody leaving the scene as I approached, the story would have to be firmer for me to believe her, and the available evidence supporting it.
If also the room had a nannycam and its 4k recording showed her doing the stabbing, I would start looking to confirm my hopeful alternative theory that it was hacked and an AI-generated video uploaded, but until I found some evidence of that I'd believe she was probably guilty and I'd definitely be cooperating with the cops.
If I'd walked into the room just in time to witness her stabbing someone to death, I would end up asking a therapist about the possibility that I'd hallucinated the event, not just about trauma, but I'd consider the possibility that I'd gone mad too slim to say it was something I "believe".
If in the room was also a group full of people I trust who also witnessed the stabbing and who reaffirmed to me repeatedly afterwards that they all saw what I saw, I'd believe them, and it would take quite a bit later to convince me that I'd been having repeated distinct but coherent hallucinations.
So out of these 10 statements, considering my fraction of a point for statement 7 balances out the not-quite-a-full-point for 6 and almost-a-full-point for 5, my trust for her scores roughly a 6. In my defense and hers, I created a test that deserves a hell of a grading curve, and IMHO I'm pretty well calibrated at that "6". If I would believe her at even higher levels of this hypothetical I'd be too credulous; at lower levels I'd be too suspicious of her. It still seems fair to say I trust her, doesn't it?
I think some of our mutual friends and family would score a 5 here; IMHO my judgement of her character is better, but surely a 5 should be tolerable, even from family or someone very close? We shouldn't ghost or shun or disown anyone like that, right? It would still be fair to say someone trusts her, if they could watch a video that looks like her killing someone and say "we need to find the doppelganger". On this scale the cops' trust for her is only around a 1.9, and we could round that down to "don't trust her", but that's still a big step up from 0, right?
I don't think anyone should score a 10 here. They would be undeniably more trusting of her than I am, but would that make them better people than me, even to her? I wouldn't think a 7 was too gullible, but I also wouldn't think they were my moral superiors.
Trust is a prior credence. The more you have, the more contrary evidence can be survived by your posterior credence. There's no total order on probability distributions, so this is already a simplification, but even after oversimplifying: some people have a little trust, some have more, and some have a lot. Nobody who isn't utterly incapable of forgiveness (or of changing their mind) ever gets down to zero trust, and nobody who wouldn't stay in the Flavor-Aid line at a Jim Jones farewell party ever gets up to maximal trust.
I get that it's tempting to oversimplify. We don't even teach Bayes' theorem on discrete probability spaces in high school, much less how to compute or marginalize a posterior on an arbitrary probability space. So it's tempting to just reduce the options to either "I believe" or "I don't believe", and mostly that works well enough. The Pirahã mostly get by counting with "one", "two", and "many". Different strokes for different folks.
But please, don't try to turn oversimplification into relationship advice. There will be times when you or your partner are suspicious, about one thing or another. This will mean that you and they should ask and answer some questions, and ideally those answers will mean your trust for each other will increase (not from 0 to 1, but in that direction), because one of you was open enough to ask for reassurance and the other was understanding and open enough to provide it. This will not mean that your relationship is doomed.
Man, how did I forget to get "Your Soulmate will never make you feel untrusting or admit to needing help trusting you" on the list?!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link