site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 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.

3
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

these men aren't grand enough. I see them at their core as peasants, although really greedy ones that stole a lot of money

Yes this is accounted for in my theory, peasants can't perceive non-peasants. You'd have called Napoleon a tinpot despot too. But that's how great men of history work.

I guess you know none of the math about these things and barely use them then.

So you're pretty bad at banter as well as epistemics. This kind of stuff doesn't make sense in 2026, even if that were true I'd find it easy enough to share an LLM-informed "mafs" justifying whatever (I burn billions of tokens a day btw). You could do the same to produce a cogent argument instead of this low effort skepticism. That you don't deign to do so little, and instead just bitterly try to egg me on, suggests absolute disregard for the object level and an interest solely in poop flinging.

It's not hostile. How are you going to cope in 2030 or 2035 if there's still software devs piloting Opus 7

This is a world where I'm viable, and politically it'll be more aligned with my preferences (implied no singularity by 2035 = definitely no American hegemony, sovereign nation states exist, ordinary humans have negotiating power, etc; unless you mean that Anthropic wins so hard they can slow down the releases to plebs to a crawl, which is compatible with it being merely Opus 7, 4-9 years later). So I'll be pretty happy to admit I was missing something fundamental, or just stupid, I guess. Maybe I do have to learn more ML mafs to see why this failure was predictable. I'll try to ask Levent Alpoge for tips.

But I won't credit you in particular, because so far you've proved to be unable to spell out why this scenario is plausible.

Will you go back to writing about important topics?

Would be nice if "important topics" were relevant again and I had anything to contribute by then. But my current focus makes the latter unlikely, so you'll have to find better material in the remaining time.

Justice seems far-fetched.

peasants can't perceive non-peasants. You'd have called Napoleon a tinpot despot too. But that's how great men of history work.

Gee, I'll admit that's interesting. But what is a peasant here, someone that disagrees with you?

But I won't credit you in particular, because so far you've proved to be unable to spell out why this scenario is plausible.

Sour grapes.

I'll try to ask Levent Alpoge for tips.

Maybe he'll have proven or disproven 10 more useless, unaesthetic and boring conjectures by then!

were relevant again and I had anything to contribute by then. But my current focus makes the latter unlikely

What does relevance have to do with anything? All that's ever relevant is whatever people are watching on TV these days. Your AI writings won't change a thing any more than your HBD writings. But I guess maybe you exhausted your social takes, it seems pretty clear to me you're hopelessly bought into the Plato's cave-esque false status hierarchy of Elon Musk and Levent Alpoge and those like them being great men and geniuses worthy of veneration. Didn't you used to be a conspiracy theorist or something? What happened to that?

But what is a peasant here

Specifically I mean what Confucians call Xiaoren (小人): a petty person who understands profit but not virtue, recoils from recognizing people with more abstract, large-scale or idealistic motivations, is anxious about social status, and tries to bring the world down to his level. Aggressive dismissal of "great man theory", in history and colloquial discourse, is driven by the Xiaoren personality profile.

Regarding personality defects of Musk at al., which are similar to those of American industrial titans of previous eras, «The Master said: “There are some cases where a noble man may not be a perfectly humane man, but there are no cases where an inferior man is a perfectly humane man.”»

And:

Zi Gong asked, “Does the noble man also have things that he hates?”

Confucius said, “He does. He hates those who advertise the faults of others. He hates those who abide in lowliness and slander the great. He hates those who are bold without propriety. He hates those who are convinced of their own perfection, and closed off to anything else. How about you, what do you hate?”

Now of course Musk is not strictly speaking a Junzi, but he's not a mere greedy peasant/Xiaoren either. Liang clearly consciously tries to be a Junzi.

This isn't such a big deal as you're making it out to be, nor is it relevant to my beliefs re AGI. I'm not that status-conscious, it's just funny how you recoil at the idea of greatness.

Sour grapes.

This is confusing. Sour grapes over what? How is this idiom even applicable here? Did you mean "cope"? I just want to see a serious, not "on priors, exponential vs sigmoid…" or "it ain't true yet, u can't know nuthin'" argument for a plateau in the current paradigm that happens before AI exceeding human cognitive capability in a meaningful sense in the next 5-10 years. Bulverism about X incentives is also not needed, thanks.
Over the years, people have made several of those in good faith; far as I can tell they got falsified by progress, and now I'm legit out of still-standing examples. One illustrative case is Chollet going on about how DL is insufficient for "far generalization" and you need "something new" in 2022:

These are qualities that are hard to achieve with a big curve. Big curves are a good fit for some things, not so much for some other things. Once you learn to tell which is which, AI trends start making a lot more sense.
Maybe the fundamentals will change overnight, I don't know. But that would require new breakthroughs. If you extrapolate today's technology far into the future, you still see shiny demos with weak generalization power.
We're going to need something new.
To start with, where's my ARC solver? …
So we already have extensive early data on the economic productivity of such models. And of course we have an entire decade of observing the successes & pitfalls of big curves (+ the chorus of breathless AGI predictions people make all the time). We're not in uncharted territory

ARC-1 is saturated by general purpose models. ARC-2 is likewise saturated. ARC-3 is getting saturated at the moment, and it's pretty hard for humans too. When his new ARCs started to crack, he coped that o3 does "program synthesis" (on the mechanical level, it does autoregressive next token prediction, same as any other GPT; the new thing was a rather primitive use of outcome-based rewards, old school RL boffins scoff at this entire subfield). I'm not following his copes anymore. I'm not sure if he'll be able to make another ARC that's easy for humans and hard for frontier AI.

Well, maybe we could quibble about continual learning/loss of plasticity, or the extent of generalization… those are worth improving, but it feels like nitpicking about matters of scale and degree whose relevance is transient, humans also lose plasticity and fail to generalize OOD.

If you make an argument and it comes to be true, I'll concede you were right, or at least you'll get to gloat in case of me not conceding. If this isn't enough of a reason for you to produce an argument, is anything else? I'm not interested in prying it out of you, do what you want.

Maybe he'll have proven or disproven 10 more useless, unaesthetic and boring conjectures

Holy shit man, you're one to talk about sour grapes. I do wonder if you'll have a comeback when they start to solve Millennium Prize level stuff. Probably gesturing at "aesthetics" will remain a convenient out. I promise not to gloat.

But I guess maybe you exhausted your social takes

Yeah guess I'm washed since those don't interest me anymore. Anyway, if nothing I write matters, as you say, why not change the repertoire. Get your conspiracy fuel elsewhere. Kulak may provide.

Don't take it as retaliation, but from my point of view, I think you're having symptoms of worsening paranoid schizophrenia. Over the years, you're getting more bitter and lost in convoluted epicyclical models of reality, more and more things that are products of simple physical truths or human ineptitude appear to be kayfabe, trolling and theater to you, and your critique of me here amounts to saying that I've betrayed my pneumatic calling and insight in favor of Demiurge's illusions. This Gnosticism is a common ailment for functional programmers (see Kanyan here), but the first line treatment is probably still pharmacological. I'm sorry.

P.S. this might be a case of mistaken identity. I'm more than a bit annoyed how there are many "smart" people with very similar behavior and takes who are disappointed and berate me for much the same things. It was not my terminal goal to form one-sided parasocial relationships or earn respect of strangers, and I have never once tried to learn identities of people here, nevermind across platforms and pseudonyms. At any given point I post into the faceless void and my sole social concern is whether and how I can compel more people to read what I want to be read; you can consider this a misguided, futile and suboptimal attempt to have influence. Some readers are deluded enough to believe that the content itself is selected for reception, and feel something like jealousy towards the imagined greater reward signal (other readers). I find this pathetic and repulsive. These are my honest feelings about your whole line of insinuations, and that of others like @aquota. I'm disgusted with your psychoanalysis, your ad hominems and projections, though I still try to be civil and stay on the topic.

Holy shit man, you're one to talk about sour grapes. I do wonder if you'll have a comeback when they start to solve Millennium Prize level stuff. Probably gesturing at "aesthetics" will remain a convenient out. I promise not to gloat.

I'll admit, when I was pondering your comment I was looking at the Millenium prize lists, and I was thinking it would be at least until 2030 until we got answers to the good ones. Maybe an answer to one of the ugly ones next year or in a year and a half, is what I thought. Two weeks after you comment this and we got maybe the most important one.