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 -
I think this is a specific symptom of a broader and more fundamental developmental milestone which is something like the inability to perceive/consider/predict second order effects. Things like:
-People who want open borders (First order effect: helps poor immigrants. Second order: causes economic hardship, cultural clashes, crime, etc)
-People who want to be soft on crime (First order effect: helps poor people who turn to crime to survive. Second order: massively increases crime)
-People who want to raise the minimum wage (First order effect: poor people get more money. Second order: prices go up, unemployment goes up.)
-People who want to massively raise taxes on the rich (First order effect: you get more money. Second order: rich people leave and you get less money.)
And so on. It's kind of the same thing as what you said, but I think this framing is a better way of thinking about it. There's the Game Theory thing where one person does a thing and then someone else responds to that and then someone else responds to that, etc, and things only ever settle down if there is a stable equilibrium (or mixed strategy). And some people don't even consider this, that someone might respond directly to the change rather than their behavior being predetermined. It's not that they can't imagine something changing, it's that they don't consider change as part of a causal chain which can be induced by themselves in opposition to their desires. It's the failure to disentangle intention from real outcome. If the Goal of doing X is to cause Y, then any increase in Y is attributed to X, and any decrease in Y from second order effects is attributed to the most direct precursor to Y, and not to X which is further away causally.
To be fair, though, I think people opposed to the measure are often equally willfully ignoring ways that second-order effects could be dealt with/mitigated/redirected to induce beneficial third-order effects, or amount to simple coordination problems. The first country to tax the rich might have suffered capital flight, but nowadays if you are rich your options for escaping the tax-man are really rather slim (and might put your money so out of reach as to be inconvenient). Maybe there is some second-order effect of Europe's relative softness on crime encouraging crime, but there is also the third-order effect that the relatively lesser proportion of outright life-ending consequences from random lost trials means people are not willing to pay so much for lawyers, which lowers the water line of how much lawyers get paid and makes close to everything that touches upon liability cheaper (medicine first and foremost).
I would not call it "equally" ignoring. People who consider second order effects are generally capable of understanding the concept of third, fourth etc order effects, as it's essentially the same concept extrapolated forward. Now, quite a few people are biased and discount the effects opposing their favored position, and there's people like this on both sides. But a biased person can still comprehend the nature of arguments and weigh them and think about them. There's a large contingent of people who literally do not consider second order effects. They're vaguely aware that there might be such a thing, but they don't really understand it, or think about it, or consider them "legitimate" or worthy of consideration on the same level as first order effects. And again, there's people like this on both sides, but the left seems specially tailored towards catering to them (by emphasizing first-order niceness above all in their policy choices), and so there's a much higher prevalence there.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link