site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   23788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 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.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Last week anime culture war news was rather unwelcome here, so it is time for another.

The topic of last week xitter storm was anime.

Is anime weird? If so, what should parents do to make sure their kids never watch anime and become normal members of the crowd?

Fitting with the crowd as end in itself was always seen as moral duty in small c conservative tradition, nothing unusual with it.

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. His parents called him Eustace Clarence and masters called him Scrubb. I can't tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none. He didn't call his Father and Mother "Father" and "Mother", but Harold and Alberta. They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non- smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds and the windows were always open.

It is clear who the bad people are and why they are bad.

Nevertheless, massive arguments for and against torn xitter asunder and joined with even bigger arguments whether normie existence in 2020's North America is really something you should strive for or whether much better, happier, nobler and more fulfilling life can be found elsewhere.

If you examine all parts of normie life, from such basics as school, regular employnment, transportation or house building and find this is worthwhile prize, and then find out that your kid is not normie, you should indeed tell them:

"For your whole life, you will live as undercover agent in enemy territory. As Otto von Stierlitz had to pass as Nazi, you must learn how to pass as normie."

(using Eastern archetype here, in Western culture heroes are men of action facing adversity directly and challenging enemy in honorable combat, not sus characters skulking in shadows)

But parents are usually extremely bad judges what is "weird" and what isn't. They remember what was normal and what wasn't in high school in early 1980's, and are unable to comprehend that times are changing. And this is the problem barely noticed, the problem that makes this whole discourse waste of time.

Whenever I start to worry that I'm not a very successful or well-adjusted person, I just attend an anime screening at my local cinema and I'm like "actually, you know what? I'm fine."

Last night they were showing Mamoru Oshii's Angel's Egg, which neither I nor my fiancée had seen, but she wanted to go. The movie was incomprehensible nonsense (disappointing, as I thoroughly enjoyed both Ghost in the Shell films), but the real validation came from seeing the other people in attendance. The obese; the gender-confused male attending solo, with breasts that I honestly couldn't tell if they were the product of HRT, gynaecomastia, or both; the man wearing makeup and a headscarf like fucking Professor Quirrell; the couple who smelled so bad we moved a few seats further down the aisle; and of course a gender-confused female (I think?) with a cane she obviously didn't need and which she wasn't even pretending to rely on for support.* These people truly are the dregs of society: even the junkies I walked past on my way home seemed to be having more fun. At least none of these nerds literally yelled at the screen, as I had the displeasure of witnessing during a screening of Akira some years back.

I know, I know: "'Get a load of this weeaboo,' says man also attending anime screening". "Local man who posts on Mongolian basket weaving forum every day has the audacity to call others nerds". But believe me when I say that there is no way I could possibly be mistaken for one of these individuals, if for no better reason than because I haven't needed to be reminded to bathe since secondary school. (Seriously, what is it with nerds and smelling bad? Why is it such a universal thing in any country where nerds are to be found? Do they just not notice?)

In late prepubescence and early adolescence I dabbled in anime and manga, watching the aforementioned Ghost in the Shell and Akira and reading their respective source comics. Watching this parade of overweight smelly malcontents, congenitally incapable, to a man, of making eye contact for more than a second at a time – it made me feel enormously grateful that my interest in these things never progressed beyond mere curiosity. Some of the people in attendance even looked like they could have turned out perfectly normally (not to mention more successful and subjectively happier) had they not allowed their interest in nerdy things to become an entire lifestyle, had their parents not indulged their every idiosyncrasy and passing whim, had they been bullied a little more rather than less (s/o to @100ProofTollBooth). There but for the grace of God go I.

*This was the second female person carrying a meticulously decorated cane as a fashion statement I saw that day. Yet another thing I do not understand about the woke: they'll be the first to tell you that a white girl putting her hair in cornrows is cultural appropriation and utterly inexcusable, but trying to pass oneself off as physically disabled is A-OK?

A new article about the cane phenomenon just dropped:

https://archive.is/20260805235412/https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/young-women-walking-sticks-gen-z-disability-2ssv95mws

https://archive.ph/uNwyn

Kathleen Stock is so based.

Even severely debilitating physical conditions produce good days as well as bad. On some bad days, a person may need extra help. But when a disproportionate number of young women are insisting this applies, we need to find out what is going on.

Serendipitously, the book I'm currently reading notes that, while the people being hospitalised for Covid were overwhelmingly old and male (and often diabetic), the people diagnosing themselves with long Covid were overwhelmingly young, female and not diabetic. O'Sullivan is much nicer about this than I would be, insisting that psychosomatic illnesses are not any less "real" than those caused by viruses or bacteria. But occasionally the mask slips, as when she notes that a widely-circulated list of possible symptoms of long Covid included both "loneliness" and "feeling scared".

I don't know why young women in the modern era are disproportionately prone to malingering or diagnosing themselves with diseases and medical disorders they don't have. But they are.

It's funny that you mention Akira. I was once listening to a movie/film podcast episode about it and the guest participant was a woman teaching movie history and cinematography at a prominent university. The curriculum of one course of hers includes the history of Japanese animation and she said she also talks about Akira in detail as a part of this - even though she admitted she has never watched it until she was invited to the podcast. 'The most typical normie I can imagine', I told myself.

What on earth.

This was the second female person carrying a meticulously decorated cane as a fashion statement I saw that day.

Any chance they were cosplaying some specific character I haven't heard of? If I saw them, that's what I'd guess they were doing.

Whenever I start to worry that I'm not a very successful or well-adjusted person, I just attend an anime screening at my local cinema and I'm like "actually, you know what? I'm fine."

Whenever I start feeling that way, I visit the lolcow zoo over at KiwiFarms. Heh.

Seriously, what is it with nerds and smelling bad? Why is it such a universal thing in any country where nerds are to be found? Do they just not notice?

Over a long period of time, you get used to your own smell and don't notice it unless it changes. These people's hygiene have been nonexistent for so long, the only recourse is for somebody to tell them they stink. Unfortunately, doing so is considered a rude gesture, so this never happens in polite society.

Because hygiene is taught to teenaged boys- or was, up until recently- in large part through sports. Nerds don't participate in them, thus they don't learn many of the normal hygiene rules.

Unfortunately, doing so is considered a rude gesture, so this never happens in polite society.

Certainly not in the West. I understand that people in Asia have no such compunctions, and will tell you that you smell bad to your face. (And that you've gained weight.)

Likewise for many Asian-Americans, at least in the first generation.

The most recent time I was told I was noticeably putting on weight was by a family friend far more fat than me. There was no irony in that, because he wasn't trying to be insulting or mean, he was being helpful! He immigrated many decades ago, and speaks perfect English, probably because that's difficult but useful, but he must have never adopted the American idea that you shouldn't pressure someone you care about to eat healthier, probably because that's easy but harmful.

Last night they were showing Mamoru Oshii's Angel's Egg, which neither I nor my fiancée had seen, but she wanted to go. The movie was incomprehensible nonsense

It's a solid film. Not my favorite or anything, but worth seeing.

the real validation came from seeing the other people in attendance. The obese; the gender-confused male attending solo, with breasts that I honestly couldn't tell if they were the product of HRT, gynaecomastia, or both; the man wearing makeup and a headscarf like fucking Professor Quirrell; the couple who smelled so bad we moved a few seats further down the aisle; and of course a gender-confused female (I think?) with a cane she obviously didn't need and which she wasn't even pretending to rely on for support.* These people truly are the dregs of society

Let's hear a few words of wisdom from the man himself:

224: Ennoblement through degeneration. - History teaches that the branch of a nation that preserves itself best is the one in which most men have, as a consequence of sharing habitual and undiscussable principles, that is to say as a consequence of their common belief, a living sense of community. Here good, sound custom grows strong, here the subordination of the individual is learned and firmness imparted to character as a gift at birth and subsequently augmented. The danger facing these strong communities founded on similarly constituted, firm-charactered individuals is that of the gradually increasing inherited stupidity such as haunts all stability like its shadow. It is the more unfettered, uncertain and morally weaker individuals upon whom spiritual progress depends in such communities: it is the men who attempt new things and, in general, many things. Countless numbers of this kind perish on account of their weakness without producing any very visible effect; but in general, and especially when they leave posterity, they effect a loosening up and from time to time inflict an injury on the stable element of a community. It is precisely at this injured and weakened spot that the whole body is as it were innoculated with something new; its strength must, however, be as a whole sufficient to receive this new thing into its blood and to assimilate it. Degenerate natures are of the highest significance wherever progress is to be effected. [emphasis mine] Every progress of the whole has to be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures preserve the type, the weaker help it to evolve. - Something similar occurs in the case of the individual human being; rarely is a degeneration, a mutilation, even a vice and physical or moral damage in general without an advantage in some other direction. The more sickly man, for example, will if he belongs to a warlike and restless race perhaps have more inducement to stay by himself and thereby acquire more repose and wisdom, the one-eyed will have one stronger eye, the blind will see more deeply within themselves and in any event possess sharper hearing. To this extent the celebrated struggle for existence does not seem to me to be the only theory by which the progress or strengthening of a man or a race can be explained. Two things, rather, must come together: firstly the augmentation of the stabilizing force through the union of minds in belief and communal feeling; then the possibility of the attainment of higher goals through the occurrence of degenerate natures and, as a consequence of them, partial weakenings and injurings of the stabilizing force; it is precisely the weaker nature, as the tenderer and more refined, that makes any progress possible at all.

I know, I know: "'Get a load of this weeaboo,' says man also attending anime screening". "Local man who posts on Mongolian basket weaving forum every day has the audacity to call others nerds".

There's something really funny to me about us mottizens, weirdoes on the internet who argue about weird shit with our resident weirdoes, objecting that anime won't make the kids weird and in fact it is the lamestream that is weird.

Yeah, it's us guys. She doesn't want her kids to be like us.

... it is the lamestream that is weird.

It is not really normal versus weird. normal covers both solid-normal and cozy-weird. If you grow up with something you treat it as normal, as do the people around you, and some of them work for main-stream-media, so you see it on TV too, treated as normal. And some of the stuff that falls into that category really is weird, you just cannot see it.

For example, I was reading an article in The Economist about food distribution in India. Back in the early 1950's there was a famine and hoarding. Disapproving of horading they banned ware-houses and cold-storage to stop it. Not completely, but enough to cause trouble. Obviously that is a bit of a disaster. Agriculture is notorious for having good years and bad years and you need plenty storage to smooth things out and make sure people don't starve.

Here is where it gets weird. You'd think I was going through the archive, reading a story from the late 1950's about the repeal of the anti-storage laws (complete with little box explaining about how such a totally whacked out law got passed in the first place). No, the article was from June 27th 2015 and was lamenting that the law was still in place. So it is not just weird. It is cozy-weird. People are trying to combat the volatility of agricultural production with laws against warehousing and cold-storage and it has become normal, just the way you do it.

Second example: Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome were born to a virgin, Rhea Silvia, who had been forced join a virgin priesthood. Her wicked uncle Amulius had stolen the throne from her father Numitor, and didn't want any grandsons turning up to reclaim their grandfather's throne. So no sex for Rhea Silvia. The God Mars helps out and soon Romulus and Remus are born to a virgin.

I'd always imagined that when Christianity was getting popular in 300 A.D. it was a case of "virgin birth, wow, like man, that is so totally amazing, nothing like that ever happened before. That is sooo cool, count me in, I'm a believer!". Now I've learned a little more history. The Christian Virgin birth is looking like a me-too story. "Our hero-founder was also born of a virgin, so there!" In 300 AD virgin births are cozy-weird not out-there-weird.

Example three: People believe that if a scientific result is statistically significant at the p=0.05 level, then the probability that it is true is 95%. This weird belief is so cozy that some readers will not know what is wrong with it. Which brings up a deep problem: I shouldn't be able to give any examples of cozy-weird at all. I say "X is cozy-weird" and every-one dog piles on top of me insisting that X is normal and every-one agrees that X is normal.

Having renamed weird to be out-there-weird and divided normal into solid-normal and cozy-weird I can now state my thesis succinctly: the lamestream is mostly cozy-weird.

The virgin birth was seen by contemporary pagans as being less believable than the resurrection. It was definitely out there weird- and Romulus and Remus's mother was generally understood to have had normal intercourse, just with a god.

Put this post in the Louvre, for the perfect satire of missing the point and proving it at the same time.

I've just asked Google's search engine LLM about Crowe's Law of Sarcastic Dismissal and got a terrifying response

Crowe's Law of Sarcastic Dismissal is an informal internet maxim that states: "Any explanation that is subtle enough to be correct is turbid enough to make its sarcastic dismissal genuinely funny."

It essentially highlights the tension between accuracy and comedy. The more nuanced and detailed an explanation is, the easier it is for someone to mock or dismiss it with a clever, sarcastic punchline.

The Core Concepts

Subtlety vs. Simplicity: True explanations for complex phenomena (like human behavior, physics, or philosophy) often require heavy nuance and caveats. The Sarcastic Edge: Because these explanations are complex, they can come across as confusing (turbid) to a casual observer. This makes them ripe targets for a quick, witty, and dismissive joke that ignores the nuance for a cheap laugh.

LessWrong

The LessWrong Origins: This law was coined in community forums like LessWrong to describe why rigorous intellectual debates can easily be derailed by people utilizing humor to dismiss legitimate, well-thought-out positions.

Would you like to explore how this applies to modern online debates, or perhaps share a specific complex explanation you've been working on to see if we can "stress-test" it against this law?

I was an LLM sceptic, but now I see that even a basic, free LLM gets it, in a way that leaves highly intelligent mottizens trailing behind in the dust. I'm shocked because Crowe's Law of Sarcastic Dismissal is my own lame coinage. It got no traction. There is no exposition in the training data for the LLM to plagiarize. The LLM has managed to understand it, all by itself. Terrifying!

The God Mars helps out and soon Romulus and Remus are born to a virgin.

Do you have a source interpreting the story this way, or attesting to its being interpreted this way in the 300s? I don't get the impression from just a quick look that your account of how the story would have been interpreted in the 300s is correct - for instance, Livy says the following:

But the Fates had, I believe, already decreed the origin of this great city and the foundation of the mightiest empire under heaven. The Vestal was forcibly violated and gave birth to twins. She named Mars as their father, either because she really believed it, or because the fault might appear less heinous if a deity were the cause of it.

This seems quite different from a virgin birth.

Whoops! I didn't bookmark where I got that version of Romulus and Remus from, and cannot now find it. I've probably got that wrong.

But what distinguishes solid-normal from cozy-weird?

Your examples seem to imply that normal is rational in some way (benefiting society, believing facts), but there are society-benefitting behaviors not considered normal, like (successful) Effective Altruism, and opinions most consider normal or weird, like Christianity or Pastafarianism.

My impression is that normal only means something with context. For example, carrying a mobile phone may be considered normal today, because everyone does. But in a different way it's not normal: we're the only animal to carry them, we've only done so for a short amount of our species' existence, and they seem to have negative social effects so we may be better off without them.

Abstractly the difference between the solid-normal and the cozy-weird is that the cozy-weird is indeed weird.

Artistically, https://youtube.com/watch?v=4mdiZ9rwoSQ is a scifi story about hi tech perceptual filters leading people astray. Err, it is over long and clunky, but it does have an interesting, oblique take on the dangers of consensus reality.

Concretely one wants examples. But this is where it gets self-defeating. If X is genuinely cozy-weird in our shared culture, you will not accept X as an example of the cozy-weird, because it appears normal to you. Worse, I will not suggest X as an example of the cozy-weird because it appears normal to me. One only catches glimpses of the cozy-weird out of the corner of ones eye.

I've encountered this kind of tangle, where it is impossible to give good examples, before when thinking about subduction phrases

Why think that the cozy-weird exists at all? I started down this path by reading https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/ with discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16386406 It struck me that people hoped that psychedelics would tear away the veil of illusion, and let people see reality as it really was. It was a hope that I had been warned against, but still shared. However, psychedelics tear away too much, one just ends up out-there-weird. Meanwhile I read some economics and noticed that people believe strongly in folk economics. Some folk economics is both weird and not out-there-weird. Early psychedelicists could believe in folk economics and no-one would include that as evidence that they believed weird things, because the weird things appear normal.

One example is that people talk confidently about raising and lowering taxes. If raising, do they mean raising taxes rates? Or raising taxes revenues? Taxes rates are directly within the power of governments, so it is tempting to assume that the discussion is about raising raising rates. But following the discussion one notices that it is about what the money gets spent on. There is an assumption that raising rates brings in more money. That is not in itself a problem. But people are also comfortable with the idea of punitive taxes. Protect people from lung cancer by taxing cigarettes so heavily that they smoke a lot less. Shame about the tax revenue, which falls due to people quitting. So the cozy weird bit is a belief. We can infer that people believe that government ministers have psychic powers. When they intend an increase in tax rates to raise additional revenue they hypnotize the general public to keep paying. When they intend an increase in tax rates to change behavior at the cost of lost revenue, that works too. No discussion needed. Nor even permitted. People don't actually believe that government ministers have psychic powers, but people do have psychological defense mechanisms. They will push back angrily against the idea that tax rates and tax revenues are two different things. There is a tangled mess of weirdness here, but it is cozy, people like it and will defend their cozy fuzziness.

People also talk about raising and lowering the minimum wage. That is bizarre. The minimum wage is a prohibition. It is parameterized. One might prefer to call it a restriction. Whatever. It is the kind of thing that you make tighter or looser. If you like brutal and disturbing satire, the Manifesto of the Nasty Fascist Party might help you get the point.

I realize that the previous paragraph is a flawed example of the cozy-weird. Arguments are soldiers, and words are the uniforms they wear. "Raise and lower" are the dark blue words worn by the good guys, and "Tighten and loosen" are the gray words worn by the bad guys. It is natural to dress your arguments in the uniform words of ones own side.

And yet dressing your arguments-soldiers in the appropriate color uniform-words is perhaps a good example of the cozy weird. We are supposed to be helping the poor. Instead we play elaborate word games. As the Nasty Fascist Party would put it " The booze and TV addled brains of the comfortably off are actually too feeble to distinguish between these two opposites."

I've tried addressing the distinction between solid-normal and cozy-weird abstractly, artistically, and concretely. Concretely is the important one, but articulating good examples is too hard for me. Fourth option: Praxis. What can one do to improve the chances of catching sight of the cozy-weird?

I think that psychedelics hinder, by leading you towards the out-there-weird and away from the cozy weird. The invisibility of the cozy-weird is policed by emotional reactions and defense mechanisms. Perhaps Buddhist meditation practices can help. One learns to notice the flickering play of emotions. Notice and let go rather than getting sucked in by the illusion. Maybe cached thoughts are important. Re-reading Eliezer Yudkowsky's "cached thoughts" essay, to check the relevance of linking to it, I notice that his examples have a vibe of "cozy-weird thoughts sitting in the cache". There are strong emotions telling you not to clear the cache, because you must Never Question Conventional Wisdom. Noticing the unreasonable strength of the strong emotions telling you not to clear the cache leads you towards noticing the cozy-weird. Getting stale answers straight from the cache leads you away.

Am I misunderstanding that "cozy weird" is believing something false or ambiguous? When medieval people were talking about humes and treating bacterial infections with bloodletting, and 1900s people were talking about mental association centers and treating mental issues with lobotomies, it was weird even though it was mainstream, because people incorrectly believed how the illnesses worked. Now we treat bacteria with antibiotics and mental health with medication, it's less weird.

Although in that case, today's treatments are still weird, compared to a more advanced society, who discovers ways to treat bacteria that don't breed resistance, and ways to treat mental conditions without medications' side effects, and understands that our biological concepts were too broad (for example, DNA is not the only way genes are inherited). "Reality as it is" is impossible to perceive, we can only get closer by experimentation, so everyone is weird to some extent.

Am I misunderstanding that "cozy weird" is believing something false or ambiguous?

You are misunderstanding.

Since life is about seventy years long, and science grinds slowly, taking hundreds of years, we all end up in forced choice situations, forced to guess. We guess wrong and believe something false. "Believe"? Maybe we knew at the time that we were guessing, but we still acted upon the false "belief"; that is the main part of believing. Shrug. Believing something false is built-in to the human condition. It is part of the solid-normal. It is not part of the cozy-weird.

I've an essay to write, provisional title: "Life is more complicated than language, nothing that needs saying can be said briefly." Since life is more complicated than language, ambiguity is inevitable. We can push back a little, by writing at greater length, using the extra words to disambiguate. But watch out for two dangers. First, wittering on at great length usually muddies the waters; more words, more ambiguity. Second, the seventy year thing; we don't have the time. So again, ambiguity is built-in to the human condition and part of the solid-normal, not the cozy-weird.

I'm hoping that we share a common understanding of the out-there-weird. One kind of out-there-weird is when you fry your brains with LSD. But humans are flaky. There are a lot of beliefs that are crazy, and the people who hold them just latched on to them with no chemical assistance. "flat earth in 2026 AD" is out-there-weird. "flat earth in 700 BC" is solid-normal. Why is "flat earth in 700 BC" solid normal? Wikipedia has Eratosthenes of Cyrene measuring the size of the Earth in around 200 BC, and tells the tale

The distance between Alexandria and Syene was reported to be about 5,000 stadia, as measured by professional bematists.

The Earth is big enough to be locally flat, and few people in 700 BC were travelling far enough to notice that something was off. (Wait! I'm forgetting the long distances involved in the Bronze Age tin trade. Shit!)

Back to the cozy-weird. How does inter-generational transmission of culture work? As a child I wanted to grow up and become an adult and that meant copying the adults around me. My father would tell me "You will understand when you grow up." and I would accept what I was told, trusting that I would indeed understand when I grew up. It is worse than that. My father was a Yorkshire man and proud of his deadpan irony. I was a socially incompetent child and did not get the joke. Looking back I think that some of my world view was formed by the following route. My father would attempt to tell me that X was false, by stating X ironically. I would miss the irony and learn that X was true. I think that inter-generation transmission of culture works badly in two different ways.

First, culture is transmitted faithfully, but the "You will understand when you grow up" bit doesn't happen. Father passes belief to Son. Son never does understand, but Son passes belief to Grandson with the words "You will understand when you grow up". There is no error correction.

Second, beliefs are flipped due to too much irony. Young people are not in on the joke. Old people do not notice that young people are not in on the joke and are getting the opposite of the intended message. The message gets corrupted.

The idea of the cozy-weird is that there are many beliefs that an outsider (to our culture) would consider out-there-weird (not false, not ambiguous, but crazy and weird) that we are brought up to believe and which pass for normal inside our culture. I'm claiming a disastrous failure of culture transmission with crazy rubbish being passed down the generations so well that the craziness is invisible to those inside that culture. Hence my subdivision of normal into solid-normal and cozy-weird.

Do we all live in a single global culture? Not yet, but things are heading that way, and it is hard to find an outsider. Or maybe talking to an outsider doesn't help. The details of the cozy-weird are culture bound, but the phenomenon of the cozy-weird is universal. You could go to Tehran and talk to a Mullah. He would point out the craziness of Western Culture. But he cannot show you the cozy-weird that both cultures share. Worse, he is embedded in his own culture. He may be quite convincing that the important thing is to submit to Islam, because he sincerely believes it, but that is his own culture's cozy-weird. His sincerity and conviction are warning signs of the invisibility of the cozy-weird details specific to a particular culture, to those within that culture.

A long time ago, I was telling my brother about one of our resident incel posters (I think it was the Hock guy), and he sardonically noted that incel posters must be a real rarity around here. He seemed genuinely surprised when I said that, to my mind, the modal poster here is closer to "married homeowner with multiple children".

I mean, look at you: married with a baby on the way, good job, own a house, physically active. What kind of mother wouldn't want her son to turn out like you? I bet if my mother met you, she'd be thinking "oh, why couldn't FtttG be more like FiveHour?"

Sure, I can put on the dog-and-pony show for mothers everywhere. But I'd have a hard time explaining the private hobby where I argue on the internet with pedofascists and incels and holocaust-deniers.

”I’m in this moderated online debate group. You’d find it really boring.”

I actually refer to discussion here with Mrs. FiveHour as today's issue of "The Daily Autist."

Hey, Xitter's been around for like, twenty years now.

There was an aphorism, I think from George Burns, that went something like: "There is almost no person who, if the details of their sex life were made public, wouldn't inspire public shock and revulsion."

I think the same applies to posting.

On the other hand, the early 2010s, when I just entered grad school, seemed to be the exact watershed moment in the US where some part of anime culture went irrevocably mainstream. I remember being taken aback at the undergraduates (including a large well-adjusted Greek Life chad/stacy contingent) constantly spamming JoJo memes in office hours and homework, trying to square it with the previous generation of JoJo memes that were the province of fat 2ch otaku who are paranoid about Korean conspiracies to steal their pure Yamato seed and their fat Western VHS sub otaku admirers.

Whenever I start to worry that I'm not a very successful or well-adjusted person, I just attend an anime screening at my local cinema and I'm like "actually, you know what? I'm fine."

Me attending any major fandom convention.

I was/am a nerd, but then I run into the nerd nerds and I feel the need to shove them into a locker and then go wash my hands afterwards.

Part of me is like "well don't deny a person their escapism" but there's also another thinking "you need to be cut off from the internet for about six months during which you're put through boot camp training designed to get you into decent shape and have a healthy routine in life and THEN you can have some anime, as a treat."

Ultimately it makes me do some self-assessment: "Do I want to walk down a path that could end up being THAT type of person?" And often has me actively deciding to limit my intake of the media in question. Kinda like seeing an alcoholic passed out on a bench, his pants soaked with urine, and deciding "I'll just skip the bar tonight."

It goes towards my other theory that many subcultures (even outside explicit 'nerd' hobbies) end up driving away 'attractive' and 'normal' people because they are usually governed by the most obsessive types, who have the most time on their hands, and often have NOTHING ELSE TO DO but gatekeep and bully and since this is the one tiny bit of power they have, they will drive away any possible competitors.

I was/am a nerd, but then I run into the nerd nerds and I feel the need to shove them into a locker and then go wash my hands afterwards.

I never did understand why people engaged in the American stereotypical nerd culture when I was growing up in Finland in the 80s and 90s. Sure, I also had nerdy interests like programming, reading fantasy books and the occasional RPG session but I never felt like they defined who I was. They were just things I was interested in or liked to do, the same way some other kids liked to play sports without making that their whole identity.

I see "anime culture" as like that cliche nerd culture: A bunch of people who fail to distinguish between their interest and their identity (quite possibly because they don't much have one) and that leads to all sorts of issues.

I never did understand why people engaged in the American stereotypical nerd culture

They were acceptable minority targets that were easy to abuse and everyone excused said abuse.

That's what it really boils down to.

I feel people have abit of a deformed perspective nowadays when it comes to the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres, what with Marvel movies being such multi-billion dollar cash-cows that they are nowdays, nevermind other things, but at one point all this stiff really was a niche market being enjoyed by niche people. People playing D&D weren't making a good paycheck doing podcast/webstreaming, they were guys in thier basement or thier parent's basement playing make-beleive with rules and havine fun and not really bothering anyone.

I was very much a quiet, 'go away and leave me alone' kind of kid who stuck my nose in a book 90% of the time, and I still got harassed by people and my novels thrown out a window.

The times haven't really changed any, just the targets. I'm sure I could scrounge around for another set of acceptable minority targets people love to shit on as a demonstration.

As far as I can tell, teenage subcultures are about psychological need to fit in. Be a member of a tribe. Nerdy subcultures are so because the nerdy kids and teenagers have some kind of trouble adjusting to the society of fellow non-nerdy teenagers and start building self-image out of imaginary simulacra found in internet.

Titular characters in Rebel Without A Cause would be weeaboos these days.

Nerdy subcultures are so because a small section of the nerdy kids and teenagers have some kind of trouble adjusting to the society of fellow non-nerdy teenagers and start building self-image out of imaginary simulacra found in internet.

(bolded addition mine)

Even with that addition I'm not convinced of that explanation, not least because as far as I can tell, back in my teenager days (ie. the 90s) the only "subcultures" I witnessed were the occasional guys wearing metal band shirts (which amusingly included one Jehovah’s Witness who really loved Helloween and power metal) and a bit later some friends of a friend being into hiphop music and clothes. Even for those people it seemed to be limited purely to music and fashion and as far as I could tell, they didn't fraternize among the group any more than random friends did.

It's possible that (unlike here in Finland) in the US such subcultural cliques really were / are common but this would point towards this not being any inherent aspect of being a western teenager and more something learned via local / national cultural examples (possibly imported ones, in the case of anime nerds). Certainly there were a few "castouts" (in the sense that they were weird in various ways and seemed to keep themselves aloof of the rest of the students) but they didn't hang together either and seemed to be content with being weird loners (the very notion of a clique based on being castout / loner would have been absurd).

a small section of

Sure. Naturally the discussion is about those affected.

I don't have hard data about any country, I am trying to grasp for psychological explanations why some people with nerdy interests don't turn out well-adjusted people with nerdy interests but as faceh puts it, "nerd nerds". You wrote you don't understand; I am trying to. I certainly never has been quite as well-adjusted as I would have liked. Like, humans are social animals. A need to be part of some crowd is something I can recognize. If you are not having success with real people, imaginary people are better than no people at all. And subculture is better than anything than anything you could make up, because they are real imagined people. Imagined in the sense of word as used by Benedict Anderson, but unlike any fantasy people you could cook up entirely on your own, they indubitably exist.

A maladjusted teenager supposedly typified by James Dean's character in Rebel Without a Cause can at best project his malaise by wearing a leather jacket and lashing out and picking fights. Scriptwriter still needs find him other people to pick fights with: he's oppositional, not self-driven. (After the film came out, the would-be malcontent could perhaps try to be James Dean). But by time we get to the 1990's, a would-be ill-adjusted teenager has something better: real subcultures. A 1990s goth has a script how to be a goth and hopefully a local scene of other goths. After the 00's, you can add widespread availability of internet, which removes the need for "local scene". You can find other people over the internet who can provide some human interaction that scratches the need for socialization, but it's profoundly weird as it's all mediated by the internet. The local scene, if it exists, will be people who spend a large part of their time on the internet, so real interactions become internet-weird, too. Thus, alas, anime weeaboos.

As Freddie deBoer would say, you aren't the shit you like. It actually explains a lot about modern culture. Sending death threats to a film critic who gives an insufficiently fawning review to the latest Star Wars film is only really explicable if an attack on Star Wars feels like an attack on you, personally. Not that nerds are alone in this regard, as critics of Taylor Swift or BTS can well attest.

While Freddie's post is aspirational, I think it implodes on contact with reality because humans judge each other on what they like all the time.

Liking trucks, wrestling and NASCAR is a cultural and class signal. We may not like that it is, but as long as we continue to use it as a cultural and class signal it will serve that function.

"you need to be cut off from the internet for about six months during which you're put through boot camp training designed to get you into decent shape and have a healthy routine in life and THEN you can have some anime, as a treat."

Unironically, I think many ills could be cured with a year on a Wyoming ranch with lots of physical activity, healthy same-sex role models, and no internet.

I keep hearing about how people are totally sure grass-touching can cure many ills, but never the accounts of it actually curing them.

Your mileage may vary on whether I qualify as "cured", but two months ago I discussed how I've been prescribed a laundry list of varying antidepressants and antipsychotics in varying combinations, but didn't find any of them half as effective as simply doing a lot of intense outdoor cardio.

"lift heavy stone run long trail make sad head voice quiet"?

Literally, that meme is 100% accurate.

How would you hear such accounts? They certainly wouldn't be posting them on the internet. They'd be too busy living happy, fulfilling lives.

I've heard anecdotes of people who were isolated and socially awkward, they moved (usually by choice) to positions that required them to interact with others, and suddenly they had a large friend group and could socialize. (Also heard the opposite, people moved to a new area and felt like they lost social skills.) I'm sure it would normalize some people.

But others are autistic.

I have a hard time seeing how spending a year at a Wyoming ranch would improve the social skills of anyone much.

Probably Definitely beats a year sitting in your bedroom on your phone or PC.

It depends on their initial level of social skills. Anywhere with others would to some extent for a shut-in.

I'm guessing OP was referring to the rather low population density of Wyoming and the isolated nature of local ranches.

Learning to STFU is an important social skill!

Weight lifting and distance hiking cured me. Now it's the rest of society that's the problem.

Well yeah, presumably good and properly cured people log off.

Throw in some physical combat training and you have my endorsement.

I'm kinda heartened when I see that a lot of nerds are getting into MMA. For many, training jiu jitsu seems to scratch that particular itch for a mental challenge.

Part of me is like "well don't deny a person their escapism" but there's also another thinking "you need to be cut off from the internet for about six months during which you're put through boot camp training designed to get you into decent shape and have a healthy routine in life and THEN you can have some anime, as a treat."

I've previously mentioned a colleague of mine who's extremely nerdy and who refuses to eat proper food. Unsurprisingly, he's thin to the point of emaciation and his teeth are revolting to look at. I often fantasise about locking him in a cell and telling him "you can have brown rice, broccoli and pork chops, or you can starve". We'll see how "insurmountable" his eating disorder dietary preferences really are.

Less facetiously, I genuinely think mandatory military service upon reaching the age of majority would have done wonders for many of these people. It certainly would have done wonders for me.

Should I send my kids to this weirdly intense Russian Orthodox camp? https://www.orprcamp.org (I probably won't, as we're not of Russian descent, but it looks intriguing)

It's interesting how the kids in the pictures simultaneously look both Russian and not. Reminded me a bit of the "the only difference between Australians and working-class English are better food and climate" meme.

I often fantasise about locking him in a cell and telling him "you can have brown rice, broccoli and pork chops, or you can starve". We'll see how "insurmountable" his eating disorder dietary preferences really are.

Unfortunately I'm sure ED people would literally starve in that scenario.

I think society should encourage healthy activities, and extend school to include them (longer hours with more (mandatory) social and physical activities). But there are some people who don't fit in normal society, act weird like obsess over anime, and some of them have niche talents that lead to great advancements.

I don't think he literally has an eating disorder. I just think his parents indulged him as a child and refused to make him eat proper food, and he never learned on his own.

ARFID, where severely autistic children will only eat food of a particular colour and so on, is a real thing. This dude is just a manchild who wants his chicky nug-nugs. It's contemptible, and borders on outright neglect when he wants his children to follow the same diet he does.

And this is the problem. Beating the snowflake out of people will usually work, but trying to beat a genuine physical or neurodevelopmental disability out of people will usually leave a wreck, and even worse is that beating the eccentric genius out of people will also work. There is a reason why the global capital of snowflakes and the global capital of zero-to-one founders are the same place.

The uncontroversial example of this is asthma in the military. The military (both US and UK) won't touch even suspected asthma with a bargepole, and the reason is obvious - drill sergeants/drill instructors/recruit instructors are not doctors, and trying to use standard tough love techniques to keep an asthmatic running through an attack is the easiest way to kill a recruit.

The scissor example is Full Metal Jacket. Gunny Hartman tries to fix Private Pyle using the standard tough love techniques, and gets fragged for it. Hegseth and his supporters see this is as obviously an obviously correct attempt to beat the fuckup out of Pyle that had an unfortunate result, and see Hartman as a role model. Snowflake-protectors see this as a justified rebellion against tyrannical authority, and see Hartman as the villain. Anyone with a brain thinks that Pyle should have been discharged on mental health grounds, and sees Hartman as culpably stupid for not considering that possibility. (Simple stupidity is not normally a capital offence, but natural law is not required to be just, and Hartman was 100% the author of his own demise).

The controversial example is the massive increase in autism (and other mental health) diagnoses. How many of the marginally-diagnosed autistic people who currently struggle to present in normie-acceptable ways just need the schoolboy equivalent of a blanket party to straighten them out? How many can't "straighten out" with ordinary effort and will just end up being bullied until they shoot up the school? And how many can be useful members of society if we don't beat them up over some normie-friendly trivia? Many people are confidently wrong about this question. It is existential for my family so I have spent a lot of time looking, and as far as I can see nobody knows anything with the kind of confidence I would want before I beat my kids over it.

There is a reason why the global capital of snowflakes and the global capital of zero-to-one founders are the same place.

Which place is that?

Beating the snowflake out of people will usually work, but trying to beat a genuine physical or neurodevelopmental disability out of people will usually leave a wreck, and even worse is that beating the eccentric genius out of people will also work.

I mean, citation requested? Do you have any evidence that every eccentric genius in history (or even a significant majority thereof) was relentlessly coddled and indulged as a child, his every whim granted without a second's thought? That's certainly not the impression I get of the current generation of billionaires and tech geniuses.

It goes towards my other theory that many subcultures (even outside explicit 'nerd' hobbies) end up driving away 'attractive' and 'normal' people because they are usually governed by the most obsessive types, who have the most time on their hands, and often have NOTHING ELSE TO DO but gatekeep and bully and since this is the one tiny bit of power they have, they will drive away any possible competitors.

I increasingly think "evaporative cooling of group beliefs" is one of the most perceptive things Eliezer ever put his name to. Of course there must be people with nerdy interests who still maintain normal standards of grooming and bodily hygiene, but once the people who don't reach a critical mass within a club/DnD group/whatever, then sooner or later the people who do will start to drift away, either from finding the smelly dudes personally repulsive or simply not wanting to be seen with them. The process is recursive and accelerative, as with every non-smelly dude who leaves, the smelliness of the average member increases, making the group increasingly unattractive to prospective members: you might join a club with ten clean-cut guys and one smelly one, but the only people who'll join a club in which the smelly outnumber the non-smelly are – you guessed it! – smelly people. Before long, the only people left in this group are smelly unemployable losers who've never felt a woman's touch, while the high-functioning nerds have long since departed for greener pastures. See also Scott's Living by the Sword and Neutral vs. Conservative, which describe a similar dynamic. Any community which conspicuously advertises that its members aren't expected to adhere to the standards of behaviour expected of society in general will inevitably find itself overrun and colonised by some of the most dysfunctional people society has to offer.

Weirdly enough, this seems like a great argument in favour of broken windows policing. You might think that it isn't fair to throw someone in jail over a relatively minor crime, and if you're doing that across the board, maybe it's better to simply not bothering enforcing these "minor" laws. But every time you fail to enforce a "minor" law, you're making the environment in question less attractive to the law-abiding citizens, who will eventually get fed up and leave. And once word gets round that $Jurisdiction isn't seriously enforcing minor laws, inevitably it'll start to attract people who habitually violate said laws: and people who habitually violate minor laws tend also to violate major ones, on a long enough timescale.

Take it one step further, and it's a great argument against permitting immigration (or granting asylum) from dysfunctional countries.

How would the social theory of evaporative cooling explain the phenomenon under discussion right here when there's broad consensus that anime consumption has been becoming more mainstream and acceptable in recent times?

I think it probably relates to the dynamic described by Freddie deBoer in "Our Product is Permission". Nowadays, it's much less socially acceptable to openly mock or bully people for being interested in anime (alongside other similarly nerdy pursuits), and consequently people feel much more comfortable about advertising their interest in anime openly, in public. But just because it's less acceptable to bully people over this sort of thing, that doesn't mean the people who are interested in anime are any higher in social status than they used to be.

But again, the broad consensus about anime is that it has become normalized, that is, it's being accepted to the mainstream and normies are consuming it to an increasing degree. The social phenomenon of evaporative cooling represents the complete opposite of this, namely when normie/moderate members leave a specific social circle.

I increasingly think "evaporative cooling of group beliefs" is one of the most perceptive things Eliezer ever put his name to.

The trouble is, the one study it was based on was fraudulent. https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/cognitive-bias/#kelly-2025-section

In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival material, this article demonstrates that: the book’s central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false. The documents reveal that the group actively proselytized well before the prophecy failed and quickly abandoned their beliefs afterward. They also expose serious ethical violations by the researchers, including fabricated psychic messages, covert manipulation, and interference in a child welfare investigation. One coauthor, Henry Riecken, posed as a spiritual authority and later admitted he had “precipitated” the climactic events of the study.

Yeah, I've been meaning to take on the (LLM-assisted) project of reviewing every citation in The Sequences to see which ones are bunk. The Sequences were written before the replication crisis (was named/noted) and so much of EW's work is based on cognitive and other social science. I'm starting to suspect that a majority of the science behind his arguments is just BS.

I'm tempted to say "But the core of what he wrote is still so true and valuable!" It sounds like special pleading. If it works just as well with all the science, then why was all the science there in the first place?

It's a modus ponens/modus tollens thing. In the conclusion to the book Opening Skinner's Box, which I mentioned downthread, the author observes that, a hundred years in, psychologists still struggle to define what psychology is exactly, and if it's even meaningfully distinct from philosophy in any way. Sometimes when you ask psychologists to name discoveries their field has given us, they'll list off a handful that will sound quite impressive and which haven't fallen afoul of the replication crisis. But you quickly realise that when they say "we discovered X", they really mean "we gave a fancy scientific-sounding name to an observation about human nature which long predates our field". People had been talking about the concept of confirmation bias millennia before some academic slapped that label on it (Ctrl-F "Thucydides"): psychologists didn't "discover" shit. To paraphrase Franklin someone who may have been Samuel Johnson, the findings of psychology are both true and original to it – but the parts that are true are not original to it, and the parts that are original to it are not true.

Eliezer wanted STEMlords to get onboard with his project, so he had to present the Sequences like they were a work of science, with lots of citations and superscript numbers and so on. But really, they're philosophy, and philosophers by their very nature do not demean themselves by justifying their opinions with sources and citations, the way that commoners have to. It would be cool to see a new edition of the Sequences, but purged of any pretension of being anything other than philosophy.

I was a psych major (well, double-major, I also did pre-law) and I ultimately think I want a refund on the psych part.

Psych really does have an identity crisis insofar as it tries to present as this grand theory of how the structure of the human brain maps to all the observed behaviors from the individual level all the way up to the, arguably, nation-state level, and thus someone who has mastered the science of psychology should be pretty good at predicting human behavior (not perfect!) in the same way someone who has mastered meteorology should be pretty good at predicting the weather.

But there's gaping holes in said theory at the very core, and it gets rattier and more tattered as the scale increases. "Social Psychology" regarding groups of people is like 90% woo.

Some areas like developmental psych (which has done a pretty good job at categorizing human development stages from infancy on) and cognitive psych (which actually does succeed at mapping the human brain to human behaviors) are actually useful at understanding the world, so I argue work as 'sciences.'

And then you can plug in some neuroscience and it FEELS like you're gaining a deep understanding of how human decisionmaking and actions work. But what can you DO with that purported understanding?

The big condemnation of the field, leaving aside the replication crisis, is the failure to show results from applied clinical psychology. Most forms of therapy and 'mental illness' treatment just don't really work, at least not at effecting permanent 'fixes.' Scott used to talk about this quite a bit. Psychiatrists/therapists might be able to help a patient address one area of their dysfunction for a short period of time. True 'healing' is almost nonexistent.

If the application of your science to real life doesn't produce tangible results, its a sign that its been built on foundations of questionable value.

One exception: Exposure therapy. Despite being counterintutive, it works! If someone is afraid of a thing, and the thing isn't really all that scary/dangerous, then 'forcing' them to be in the presence of that thing, repeatedly and at increasingly high intensity, they will acclimate to become less afraid of it, which is exhibited as a tangible change in behavior.

Operant conditioning also works, although perhaps less effectively in humans than you'd expect. Its good to have some study of the unsurprising fact that "humans respond to incentives!"

But you have to be very exacting and apply some serious skepticism to pull out the useful parts of psych from the whole edifice, which is why the field as a whole is rotten. It hasn't reckoned with its own shortcomings and expelled the failed ideas.

And, of course, it likes to cover up one of its most patently useful and robust findings of the field: IQ testing.

You wanna know what happens to psychology discoveries that actually work at changing behavior? They become marketing.

One exception: Exposure therapy. Despite being counterintutive, it works! If someone is afraid of a thing, and the thing isn't really all that scary/dangerous, then 'forcing' them to be in the presence of that thing, repeatedly and at increasingly high intensity, they will acclimate to become less afraid of it, which is exhibited as a tangible change in behavior.

Except when it doesn’t, of course. I have a phobia of wasps (and by adjacency bees because they look so similar but consider bumblebess to be harmless because their colors and flight are immediately distinguishable). While researching wasp traps it wasn’t hard at all to find many accounts of people who had gone through exposure therapy without any improvement. So YMMV.

More comments

Most forms of therapy and 'mental illness' treatment just don't really work, at least not at effecting permanent 'fixes.' Scott used to talk about this quite a bit.

You have to be very cautious about this, it's mostly an exaggerated self-deprecating meme - large subfields of psychiatry and psychology work great.

Criticisms are often stemming from narrow areas such as SLS (shit life syndrome) driven depression and through exaggerated posting by a heavily loud population of patients with serious mental illness and Anosognosia.

For instance medications work great for the traditional serious mental illness - Schizophrenia and related disorders and Bipolar. It helps that these are more directly biochemically mediated. Now patients relapse but it's usually through poor choices (stopping medication, drugs).

A more restrictive society does not have that problem. To some extent the other conditions have the same problem. If the treatment for your depression is to get off your ass and to stop smoking weed as much as it is taking an SSRI, then a society that doesn't keep you away from weed isn't going to be able to do shit.

Much of mental illness is as much a political and ethical problem as it is a treatment problem.

Even with the area where what you are saying is more true (the classic "SSRIs don't really do shit for depression and anxiety" critique) has a lot of nuance.

For example SSRIs are one of the worst treatment for depression. They are first line because they don't have side effects like "eat a certain type of cheese and die" or the image problem of ECT.

Scott likely writes about this less because he finds that the medications and treatment do actually help, and as a heterodox nerdy person he likely had a lot of exposure to people with personality disorders being treated with medication and with mild symptoms. Both types of people medicine doesn't have much to offer.

As your clinical practice expands you see stuff work and less marginal pathology.

The vast majority of doctors in the vast majority of specialities have consulted psych and watched them fairy dust some magic bullshit with a few pills. The average person is going to care about life satisfaction issues and mild to moderate depression and anxiety but that's a small fraction of the morbidity and nearly zero of the mortality.

More comments

Ironically, while we were unable to replicate the result of people persisting their beliefs when they encounter crushing counterevidence among the classically religious, we may succeed in doing so among Rationalists.

Shit. I guess I got Gladwell'd.

When I was a child I read a book called Opening Skinner's Box about the most important experiments in the history of psychology. Now I'm wondering if any of them haven't been exposed as fraudulent or survived the replication crisis.

Thankfully one of my favorite experiments of all time has withstood the test of time.

The Asch Conformity Experiment.

And that one actually fits here too. If the social norms of the group don't nudge people to 'conform' with healthy hygiene and cleanliness, then you start letting those norms be defined by the worst offenders.

Milgram held up reasonably well too, but a lot of people mistakenly believe that it didn’t because it pattern matches well to a lot of studies that didn't, and also they're misremembering whining about how it was unethically emotionally disturbing for the subjects.

I'm pretty sure Milgram didn't hold up at all. Loads of people said afterwards that it was really fake, and there's also just the glaring confound that nobody actually expects a university psych department to be torturing people to death so they don't take the scenario seriously.

(Now you might say that guilty participants would say this, and that's not provably wrong. It's one reason why deception in experiments just isn't a good idea. I've volunteered myself for one of those economic fairness experiments and I remember getting halfway through before saying to the poor student, "It's just a computer on the other side, isn't it?")

...I'm questioning my own memory, but my recollection is that Scott wrote extensively on the cultural implications of the Robber's cave experiment and what it tells us about tribalism in his classic posting era, and then a couple years later someone pointed out that Robber's Cave was likewise faked.

At some point, there actually has to be a feedback mechanism between pernicious behavior and resource and status distribution.

At some point, there actually has to be a feedback mechanism between pernicious behavior and resource and status distribution.

AGREED.

Ultimately it makes me do some self-assessment: "Do I want to walk down a path that could end up being THAT type of person?" And often has me actively deciding to limit my intake of the media in question. Kinda like seeing an alcoholic passed out on a bench, his pants soaked with urine, and deciding "I'll just skip the bar tonight."

Back when I was going to anime conventions in my 20's, a friend of mine was super into Anime more than all the rest of us. Worked his ass off bussing tables all summer to save up as much money as he could to buy shit at that years Otakon we were all planning on going to. He gets there, sees some morbidly obese 40 year old anime fan, nobody to talk to, suspenders covered in pins of cute anime girls, and he decides "You know what... maybe I should take up drinking instead".

Man, I think that was the same year most of decided we needed to tone down our anime enthusiasm. I recall sitting in one panel for a publisher that happened after ADV's panel. ADV had announced licenses for nearly everything, then the room changed hands. People circulated. Some people stayed. So next panel starts, might have been Media Vision or whatever. So people are asking, as they do "Have you licensed X anime yet?" And some guy in the front seat who'd spend the last two hours rocking back and forth aggressively in his chair just kept interrupting the panel shouting "ADV ALREADY HAS IT! ADV ALREADY HAS IT!"

I just... like going through some of the twitter threads links in the OP, I hear it. Don't deprive your child of their special obsession. Let them spend their years where their time is cheap going deep on something that strikes their fancy. I'd be a much worse person if my parents cracked down on my love of computers as a kid. Certainly wouldn't be bringing home mid 6 figures like I am now.

But, all the same, maybe try to make sure your kid's special obsession isn't toaster fucking. Even in the unlikely event fucking toasters somehow brings in 7 figures for the top toaster fucker.

Ultimately I think it comes down to being a little selective in your consumption. I don't eschew anime in general, but I've learned what I like and what I do not. Unfortunately the larger anime culture has shifted more towards the stuff I'm ambivalent to negative about. Of course I have my preferences for classics like Cowboy Bebop and GiTS, and the most recent series I really got a kick out of was Vinland Saga. I would love another season or two of Black Lagoon but that seems vanishing unlikely now.

Turns out I enjoy animes that DON'T lean into the most notorious anime tropes. I don't need some overpowered protagonist, tons of fanservice, ridiculously cute side characters, or a harem romance subplot to get into it. The series' I mentioned above also really scratch an itch for stuff you cannot find in Western Animation.

So by sticking with the stuff I actually like, I don't get bogged down in the most obsessive, anti-social, degenerate elements of the culture.

If you find yourself suffering though a series you despise just so you can be up to date on the current trends, or you're debating the finer points of various waifus with an obese NEET then something has probably gone wrong. I enjoyed the hell out of One Punch Man Season 1, found Season 2 lacklustre but good, and then I heard how horrendous Season 3 was so... I just didn't watch it. I don't need to waste time on it to stay informed on debates and memes and drama, because this is not what I care most about in life.

Its the element of self-control, discipline, and, call it 'maturity' that seems to be lacking for many of these folks. In many (most?) cases its probably down to autism or something. But parents aren't WRONG to notice when so many of the 'weird' kids are into anime and this tends to put anime nerds in social circles that will potentially stunt them or otherwise keep them from acquiring the useful discipline and self-control they'll need to succeed in life.

As a counter example: I saw the chainsaw man movie when it came out with a weeb friend. People were maybe a little more overweight than average. Other than cosplayers it was pretty normal. Most people were clearly there with their friends. My friend made a comment that the audience was "gentrifying".

I attended an anime movie premiere once. It's a mistake I won't make again.

My wife and I make it a point to try and go to movies near the end of their theater run, especially for anime movies. We had the theater all to ourselves for the latest Demon Slayer movie since we saw it in the last week of its run (though we had to drive to a theater almost an hour away to see it since the theater closest to us had stopped showing it a week early).

The one anime film I've seen in theaters (it was Chainsaw Man Reze Arc), there were people shouting at the screen on multiple occasions. I relate to your experience. However bad Hollywood is, these things aren't accepted in showings of western movies.

You missed the chicken jokey phenomenon.

I thought that making noise in movie theatres is an American thing. I noticed it with a healthy amount of dismay the one time I watched a movie in a US cinema (the first Star Wars sequel, at the SO's urging; some very central location in Boston next to a park, I could probably pinpoint the exact cinema if necessary), and was told that this is normal.

Kinda depends on the movie in my experience. Most movies I've been to, people were quiet. When I saw the first Star Wars sequel people kept applauding at all the nostalgia callbacks and it got super annoying. Then at the extreme end you have stuff like Rocky Horror Picture Show, which is notorious for being an audience participation event. But I would say the vast majority of the time, when I go to see a movie people are quiet except for laughter at any jokes.

When I saw the first Star Wars sequel people kept applauding at all the nostalgia callbacks and it got super annoying.

"DUDE, PRIDE ROCK!"

You've never been to a theater with a predominantly black clientele, then. In 1990, I made the mistake of watching Necessary Roughness at the Union Station theater in DC. During the climactic scene, the whole audience SCREAMED so loud, my ears genuinely hurt and I was afraid my hearing might be damaged forever.

I've heard of this stereotype before. Part of me really wants to go to a cinema in Baltimore or Detroit just to see it firsthand.

However bad Hollywood is, these things aren't accepted in showings of western movies.

This is just not true. My wife and I stopped going to theaters years ago due to people's behavior. Simple shouting at the screen is nothing compared to the shenanigans of some screenings we went to--eg, people were throwing toy snakes around the theater when Snakes on a Plane came out.

Screenings of The Room tend to have an audience participation element, with people yelling "because you're a woman!" and throwing plastic spoons at the screen. I found it good clean fun, although I've heard that there are some purists who think that these antics detract from the so-bad-it's-good experience of the film. I wouldn't recommend one of these screenings for someone watching the film for the first time.

You're lucky you missed the "bring a live chicken to the theater for when Jack Black says 'chicken jockey' in the Minecraft movie" trend

I feel bad for those theater employees. They do NOT get paid enough to deal with literal manchildren.

There but for the grace of God go I.

A statement I find myself saying far too often. I'm thankful I've never felt the slightest interest to watch anime or read manga or go anywhere near that subculture.

I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Some anime is well worth checking out. Perfect Blue is one of the most disturbing psychological horror films I've ever seen, and the direct inspiration for Black Swan with Natalie Portman (to the point where it might as well be called a live-action remake). Tokyo Godfathers by the same director is, by contrast, sweet, funny and touching, and my current favourite Christmas film. Akira is a masterpiece of action cinema and dystopian sci-fi, and casts a long shadow in both genres. Without Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix wouldn't exist: in their pitch to producer Joel Silver, the directors literally showed him the film and said they wanted to do something similar but in live-action. Several Miyazaki films are charming light entertainment, suitable for children but that their parents would enjoy just as much: the phrase "fun for the whole family" gets bandied about a lot, but that's a perfectly accurate description of My Neighbour Totoro, even more so than just about any Pixar film. Your Name is a funny and moving slice of emo teen drama, as is The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes.

Aside from the source material for Akira and GitS, I never really read much manga: I recall the former being pretty good, but thought the latter's film adaptations were superior to the source material. The only two anime video games I've ever played were Valkyria Chronicles (fun, gorgeous to look at and told an engaging story, but inferior to the XCOM reboot as far as turn-based tactics games go) and Catherine (addictive, stylish and bonkers).

But yeah. There's always the worry that you're going to get too deep into it. It's probably safe to fuck one or two toasters a year, but any more than that I can't recommend.

A cane for the blind, or just a cane? The latter have been fashion accessories for centuries, albeit now out-of-date.

A cane as a support for someone suffering from mobility problems. The first woman I saw carrying one yesterday was carrying one that was unambiguously a piece of medical equipment (similar to a crutch), probably made from aluminium, albeit decorated with Hello Kitty stickers.

I'm aware that canes have been fashion accessories for a long time, but most young women I see carrying them claim to need them for medical reasons and yet clearly do not. And it surely cannot be a coincidence that all such women meeting this description are nerdy girls who know what their preferred pronouns are and often have their hair dyed an unnatural shade. Apparently this is a common occurrence in the Anglosphere (Ctrl-F "canes").

Interesting, never heard of it before. I did nearly buy the other kind of cane but decided even I could only go so pretentious without consequences.

When I see an otherwise casually dressed person carrying a cane, it triggers my cringe alert in the same way as seeing someone wearing a fedora with jeans and a hoodie. Go the whole hog (three-piece suit, greatcoat, top hat) or don't go at all.

Man, if I knew a place to find a decent greatcoat for a reasonable price, I absolutely would. (Hats are no concern -- I used to drink near a very good hat factory).

This one looks decent. Not as cheap as milsurp, but I guess the US has gotten rid of its army overcoats a long time ago.

You still see that at army surplus places quite a bit...

Go the whole hog

There’s a reason I thought the addition of a cane might bump me up from pretentious and funny to pretentious and a twat. I had a much more fun wardrobe in those days but enough social nous to recognise that half a hog is a welcome addition to barbecues everywhere, but a great big squealing hog is a hunting accident waiting to happen.

At least none of these nerds literally yelled at the screen, as I had the displeasure of witnessing during a screening of Akira some years back.

TETSUUUOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! KANEDAAAAAAAA!!!!!

Hopefully I retriggered some of your PTSD there.

Edit: On a more serious note, I can't help but agree with your point. I spend way too much time on /pol/ and have no problem dropping the normie killing word that starts with an N, but I was playing Meccha Chameleon with my wife and some friends the other day on a public server and there was some rando who just kept saying it over and over nonstop in voice chat and not even in a remotely funny way. It's like a certain subset of people find something edgy/cool but don't understand the core of what makes it cool and imitate it in a way that just doesn't make sense.

Yes, anime villain #345647 with long hair, a trench coat, and a big sword is cool. No, you imitating it with your obese body and your dandruff and grease and your katana from the mall ninja shop isn't, and I really don't understand how you can't see that.

I was playing Meccha Chameleon with my wife and some friends the other day on a public server and there was some rando who just kept saying it over and over nonstop in voice chat and not even in a remotely funny way.

It's good to see that the youth are carrying on the old traditions from Counter-Strike and Halo.

shudders Someone literally walked over to them and told them to shut the fuck up.

And that is why I'm not one of those people.

I'm sure there are plenty of fakers but I always have to caution against the "I don't see them using it right now so they must not need it" argument. There are plenty of potential issues that can allow for seemingly normal behavior. My aunt is in her 80s and needs a cane, and yet most of the time you were to watch her she isn't really using it, because she's not going a distance or up a hill or whatever else where pain and balancing becomes a meaningful issue. She can walk perfectly fine most of the time. Most of the time. Still needs a cane for the moments where she can't or it's acting up. Likewise you'll see videos online of people in wheelchairs who stand up or even walk for a distance. Not everyone who benefits from a wheelchair is completely crippled below the belt, some have pain issues/heart issues/muscular conditions/problems balancing without something to hold/etc.

That doesn't mean there isn't fakers, just "I don't see an issue" shouldn't be taken as immediate proof of fakery.

I was once given a pair of crutches by a doctor for a stress fracture and told to minimize weight on one leg for a couple weeks. The pain was never that bad, but it was persistent, and the crutches actually did help it heal. I was perfectly capable of walking almost normally without them, and it felt weird (and probably looked weird) to just set them down and walk from time to time when I needed two hands.

Crutches also suck to use and I wouldn't wish them on my worst enemies.

Unfortunately, you've just outed yourself as otaku-who-thinks-he's-better-than-other-otaku, the missing archetype in your observations. As a fellow patrician in this category, you have my sympathies. I refer you to Roger Ebert's observation on fandom as an explainer for the poor hygiene: knowledge on obscure anime is used in replacement of social normality.

I'm well-acquainted with said archetype:

I know, I know: "'Get a load of this weeaboo,' says man also attending anime screening". Local man who posts on Mongolian basket weaving forum every day has the audacity to call others nerds.

But I sincerely don't think I'm an example of it. But then, I suppose no one ever does.

It's a consequence of living in a liberal, progressive society. There is an overwhelming pressure to not judge people for their individual choices and it is honestly suffocating. It is a very low bar that they are refusing or unable to meet. Or, in other words, to classify you as 'think you are better' is politeness. You are better, straight up, then people who cannot shower or who dress like freaks or who pretend disabilities they do not possess.

Relevant: The Rush from Judgment

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