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 -
Looks like Dilbert is being pulled from newspapers following controversial remarks by its creator, Scott Adams https://www.foxnews.com/us/laid-off-newspapers-drop-office-cartoon-dilbert-over-creators-racial-remarks
I don't think this is quite that big of deal personally. He has FU money and his brand/career at punditry keeps growing. I think his bigger risk would is being de-platformed from Youtube/Twitter. He don't need Dilbert anymore but he does need his Youtube and Twitter accounts.
I'm curious about this. To what extent are his views actually his choice? The concept of anyone's views being anyone's actual choice is kind of silly to me. Your views are the result of all of your life experiences, are they not? Maybe this is crossing into free will territory. I never sit down and think, "What am I going to choose to believe today?"... I just believe things. If data comes about that demonstrates I'm wrong, then that's a learning experience, not a choice to change my view.
This is something that gets me as well. I wager if you asked the person from MLive Media who wrote that statement to choose to become a Nazi right now, in the sense that he truly, in his heart of hearts, believed that Jews were sub-humans who ought to be exterminated, he couldn't do it, even under threat of death or torture. The best he could do is to play-act the role. I don't see why this would be any different for Scott Adams's views about black people or anyone's views about anything.
This does cross into free will territory and applies more broadly to any sort of behavior. A bank robber didn't have the choice to have a brain that tells him that grabbing a gun and threatening tellers was a good way to make money, no more than Charles Whitman had a choice to have a tumor in his brain affecting his amygdala before he went on a killing spree in UT Austin.
Yet our society does treat these behaviors as being "choices" and hold the people carrying these out as agents responsible for the consequences of these "choices." And to a large extent, our society depends on this in order to function. People noticed that holding people accountable for their "choices" is helpful for making a more comfortable society to live in, likely through incentivizing - perhaps "manipulating" is just as good a term - people to behave in certain ways. The way I see it, the idea that these types of things are choices is a sort of legal fiction that society holds up as a means to make it function at all. And basically no one who created the fiction realized it was fiction, and same goes for people who follow the fiction.
And so we get to cases like here, where someone like Scott Adams is excoriated for daring to "choose" his views. The person is just acting out the fictional thing that our society agreed on to treat as fact; he doesn't like Scott Adams's behavior and wants less of it, so he incentivizes less of it in society by punishing Scott Adams for doing that behavior, while invoking that fiction as the justification.
I've never been convinced by this line of reasoning. Like, the conclusion is supposed to be, "...and, therefore, one's beliefs aren't a choice," but I just don't see how that follows. Instead, the only conclusion I see is, "Some beliefs are held strongly enough that asking for them to change (perhaps even under threat of death or torture) will not result in said change." It doesn't seem to imply anything about whether the strong belief is chosen or not.
I suppose, can you give me an example of a thing that a person can choose? I think, at bottom, the above argument is a facile face on what is really just hard determinism at its core (from people who can't bear to "choose" to live with the consequences of real hard determinism).
I can't give an example, and that's the entire point; there is no such example, by my lights. And I don't see how determinism enters into it. Whether the universe is deterministic or there's some sort of cosmic dice that get rolled for physical interactions that make future states impossible to reliably predict based on the current state, one still doesn't have choice on the states of one's brain, which are the direct antecedents of one's apparent "choices." I didn't choose to have a brain that tells my finger muscles to type out this paragraph, for instance, and that's the case even if the atoms in my brain aren't following some sort of deterministic set of physical rules but rather being affected by some sort of truly random process.
It's more a question of dualism than determinism, which are related concepts but not identical. Dualism makes room for a soul to manipulate our neurons, allowing us to make true choices, but also requires a belief in the supernatural. Without it, we have to accept that whatever experience of "choosing" one has in their consciousness is a consequence of the behavior of the atoms in one's brain, which may be deterministic or not, but either way aren't controlled by oneself. One could argue that one's current brain state is "controlled" by past choices made by one's conscious mind, but that just moves the whole thing back a step, which can continue all the way back to the point where one became conscious for the first time as a baby.
Schrödinger equation's equation is deterministic, but the output concerning physical observables includes randomness. So, your distinction concerning randomness isn't really relevant. Nor is dualism the only mechanism by which the ability to choose could be said to exist. Typically, 'determinism' is short-hand for the opposite position of 'free will'.
But yeah, as I suspected, you pretty much commit yourself to hard determinism... at least until this discussion is finished.
Nothing personnel eh?
How about you just explain what you mean? Because currently your posts look like shorelines with at least three feet of vertical elevation above the high tide line.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
You speak very condescendingly about hard determinism, but never actually explain what you mean by that term. Even after 07mk said he doesn't see determinism entering the equation, you still just sneer at the concept like everyone should know exactly what you mean. In the past when I have seen people do this, it is as a bluff. Either a sort of shit test to see if their partner knows as much as them, or in the hopes their confidence and condescension will convince others to assume they know what they are talking about and drop it. But that goes against the spirit of this place, and the speak plainly rule.
I don't want to report you though, because I might be wrong or you might have done it by accident or a thousand other possibilities, so I'd rather just talk it out. I do think you know what you are talking about, but I would also like to know what you are talking about.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link