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 -
More like a quarter of the way towards its conclusion. Low-productivity migrants are very expensive: this blog estimates the net lifetime tax contributions of Somalian migrants in Denmark to be around negative $1.4 million USD. Meanwhile, Givewell estimates that preventing a death from malaria costs $3000 to $8000. For the cost of improving the life of a single Somalian by allowing him to migrate, you can outright save the lives of hundreds of other africans who remain in Africa. (Before you object that saving the lives of poor third-worlders just results in more third-worlders who need saving, note that it apparently only costs $36 to a contraception charity per third-world birth prevented.) Poor third-world countries have a lot of low-hanging fruit where small amounts of money go a long way, so it shouldn't be too surprising that helping third-worlders in their own countries is vastly more efficient than letting them migrate.
The drowning child thought experiment says it shouldn't matter if the child is in front of you or in another country, which is quite unlike the instinctual morality that says cheap foreign aid programs saving millions of lives is a minor side-issue that only becomes morally urgent when one of them manages to get closer and throws himself into the water. Sometimes literally, with those ocean-rescue NGOs that transport migrants to Europe if they go out onto international waters and in some cases deliberately sink their own boats. Old 2016 article, I haven't kept up with how the situation has changed since then:
Time: Don't Blame Rescue-at-Sea Organizations for Migrants Coming to Europe
This is the opposite of trying to maximize the most good for the greatest number in a location-insensitive way. It's like a thought-experiment someone invented to show how certain implicit moral premises are incoherent and produces counterproductive results, except that people are doing it for real. As for what actually qualifies as "the drowning child thought experiment brought to its logical conclusion", I suspect it's some longtermist thing where you realize that the number of people in the future is potentially large and helping them by keeping society from collapsing and advancing technology is dramatically more efficient than anything else. That has a lot more uncertainty though, so providing Africa with bednets and contraception is still fairly reasonable, unlike helping them by allowing migration.
How much better are the conditions of the sort of mobile, young, typically-male 'asylum seeker' who has the resources and gumption to chain migrate halfway across the world. There's not that many countries left where there's genuine daily mortal peril, even if there's a lot where the local economy is Ennui and meh.
Morocco is currently in the news for the Spanish invasion. I've been to Morocco, I've got Moroccan friends (albeit heavily filtered to upper class/resources to get to Asia) and like I sympathize with the complaints of the average working class Moroccan 20 year old that they feel minimal hope, corruption is rife and it's hard to work within the domestic system. However, they're also not desperately poor (outside of a few marginal outlying areas where the attempted immigrants are decidedly not coming from), they have food and they have a reasonable life expectancy. They might be way behind in terms of GDP per capita but the difference between $12k PPP and $60k PPP is not a 5x life quality improvement.
Aside from the fact that low skilled workers are considerably less well off than the typical Spaniard.
That too. Going from upper middle of the developing world to being a Deliveroo drone might increase your savings rate but could easily be a short term deterioration in living conditions
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link