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 -
As a biologist it seems entirely obvious to me. Biologically people are the end result of an optimisation process running many hundreds of millions of years with the sole goal of shaping you to reproduce your genes. You exist only in as far as your ancestors were able to reproduce. Your body and your mind are incredibly strongly shaped for ‘what is needed for you to reproduce’. It makes sense to call the utility function through which you were ‘designed’ your purpose, biologically speaking.
To be frank you are an educated man and know this already, and I assume your statement of bafflement is a refutation of the idea that we should care what evolution ‘intended’ for us.
To which I can only reply that my brain was shaped by these same processes and I & many others find ourselves caring regardless of whether you do.
Your interpretation is not wholly off the mark, but more specifically I wanted @Tretiak to be explicit about the assumptions he is smuggling in. Evolution did not meaningfully intend for us to do anything, unless you believe in some flavour of supernatural will driving it; but without that you are really left with some statement along the lines of your ancestors reproducing having been causal to your existence (indisputable) + evolution probably having optimised you to pursue it (but this latter statement has a lot of obligatory footnotes that seem highly relevant to this question). So does he believe that there is some moral obligation to engage in the things that some process in the past optimised you for? Does he believe that not doing so locally, or globally, leads to unhappiness? Does he believe in some sort of duty to replicate the actions of your ancestors, along the lines of Tanner Greer's "procession of the centuries" (I can never shill this essay enough)? Each of those unpacked statements can be defended, as well as argued against, in a way that produces interesting discussion. On the other hand, just slapping a fancy label like "biological purpose" on it and refusing to elaborate seems to be a rhetorical trick that is designed to make that discussion impossible, instead just bamboozling people by keeping the different interpretations in convenient superposition.
(On the meta level, I do stand by the appropriateness of some degree of playing dumb as a response to obscurantism. If someone doesn't want me to get the true essence of their point, why should I be obliged to try and guess and walk into some rhetorical trap they have prepared?)
More options
Context Copy link
I do not mind when people descriptively state that they want children etc. Coming back to evolution as a prescriptive guide for what one "should" want though is just weird.
I think it makes sense in the context of a) a confusing world and b) a general understanding that humans and animals are usually more comfortable in their native environment.
So e.g. nobody blinks twice if you say that humans (or tigers) need a green environment and lots of sunlight, because we evolved to expect these things. Likewise, mildly more controversial, the similar arguments made in favour of exercise and combat sports.
From there it doesn't seem inherently unreasonable to say, 'Look, you're designed to breed. You may think you would be happy with porn / in a monastery / DINKing but your brain and your body expect kids and the longer you ignore that impulse the more you're going to regret it later'.
THEN of course you get all the complications around group reproduction. Obviously you have Palestinians literally saying the battle for Palestine happens in the womb, but you also have the demographic tax pyramid where a failure to reproduce can collectively screw over your entire society. Of course it's up to people who much they care about that, but I don't think that caring more than zero is invalid.
Well, I for my part blink a lot! If we just blindly look at everything that was a given in the ancestral environment, we find
some things like sunlight that people still seem to struggle if bereft of
some other things like eating meat and a highly diverse diet of foraged plants, doing without which seems to be basically fine for most everyone
some things like walking barefoot that are only advocated by weird people with benefits that are probably minimal, if at all existent
some things like having high parasite load all your life where the upsides of not doing it clearly far outweigh whatever downsides (higher propensity for allergies?)
some things like chimpanzee-style violent tribal conflict that we have decided we don't want and seem to be happier off without on an intellectual level, but that sometimes reassert themselves in strange ways.
How do we know which of these classes breeding is in? To begin with, apart from some very indirect methods like genetic drift estimation on gonosomes, what can we even infer about the exact type of "breeding" that we were optimised for? There are a lot of wobbly bridges being crossed here from what we actually know to the "it is imperative that all young men be given an opportunity to breed" conclusion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link