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 -
Let’s reduce your long post to its merits: intelligence is weakly correlated with success. Thus, success is not an accurate marker of intelligence.
Allegedly smart people who write long posts on the internet love to separate intelligence from success presumably because they have no success but their self worth is tied up in being smart. Putting down “dumb” people who’ve accomplished a great deal is par for the course. But of course most people want success. So why isn’t our poster on the internet successful? They will tell you X, Y, Z (maybe they aren’t anxious about their status). Instead, I think it is a defense mechanism to shield the reality (ie they couldn’t figure out a way to succeed and thus really aren’t all that smart) from their image (ie they are really smart and it’s all of the dumb status strivers who make life difficult for the smart ones).
Yes, this is trivially true across different dimensions of success, regardless of how you want to rationalize your support of Trump.
Did you think you're cooking here?
People can compete on anything, there are countless hierarchies of prestige, aptitude and competence. It is possible to leverage intelligence for greater success in a cognitively less demanding field, and it's correlated with other beneficial qualities, so elite performers, swindlers, sex workers, athletes are usually smarter than their mediocre peers, on top of domain-specific excellence. This, however, is not strictly necessary, so you get people like Yao Ming who are just very blessed on the most relevant dimension of endowment. This is most purely expressed in simple sports like sprinting and weight lifting. In fact, a strictly subhuman creature (a dog, a horse or a clanker) can outperform the best humans there.
But intelligence is extremely correlated with success in cognitively demanding fields. Hence, for example, results of SMPY, and I would never insist that some STEM luminary is "dumb actually" – even if he does say or do stupid things or at least things I disagree with; he may have particular reasons for bias, ignorance or feigning them, or I could just be wrong.
Big politics in the US is not a cognitively demanding field, so your argument is nonsensical. For an outgroup example, Gavin Newsom is a highly successful politician, perhaps a future President, does well in podcasts, and he's generally an accomplished man with an Instagram-perfect upper class White family, with a rich dad, just like Trump. His SAT was 960, which is slightly below the median (he can cope about medical reasons but it's bullshit), he has zero interesting thoughts and there's no evidence he's good at administering his domain. In other words, it's possible to be in the top 0.001% of success while being in the bottom 53% of the population intellectually. This is all obvious. This is, in fact, the promise of American dream (or Middle Eastern dream). You don't have to be a genius to succeed. You don't need truth, or knowledge, or any authentic superiority, you just need to grind and hustle and have "chutzpah". Then again, a rug merchant or a pimp, though a simple creature, is acutely aware of human status signals. He understands that the literati may look down on him, so he develops this kind of retarded doctrine about "success" in general.
Trump has no remarkable successes outside big politics. He's a shitty businessman and a so-so entertainer, roughly Vince McMahon tier. His political views are primitive, his object level knowledge of the world is patchy at best, he's incurious, he's repetitive. We have zero evidence to suspect that he's intelligent. It's just this circular insistence that Americans voted for him so he is "successful" so he's "not an idiot", and then you walk in circles like a smug blind pony. Your model doesn't require intelligence to exist at all, as a variable, and you don't believe truth or reality even matter, they are all downstream of "material success". In your book, Perelman is dumber than Trump because he didn't rally retards to elect him and then use this to enrich his corrupt son-in-law. Perelman doesn't even have a son-in-law, what schmuck. Any illiterate Patel with a highway motel mogs him.
More options
Context Copy link
Why is your model of the world like that? What is there to «figure out» in success? It's not a puzzle or a math problem. There are many smart people who are lazy or too autistic to socialize or work in person without pain and therefore they don't become elected officials or other types of popular (most «successful») people.
More options
Context Copy link
The reason I reject this premise is because it implicitly plays into well known failure states of logical thinking. It’s the same reasoning that allows idiots to say things like “Well if you’re an economist and understand the economy so well, why ain’t ya’ rich; HUH?” That’s not how that works. Just because a referee understands the rules of the NBA doesn’t make them an NBA superstar. Or it’s like saying, “If Karl Marx was so smart why aren’t his followers using the materialist conception of history to predict the stock market?”
People want success on their own terms and not everybody is after the same thing. I have the background knowledge certainly to work in occupations that come close to doubling my current annual salary. I’ve spent decades close to people in infosec, I have personally met and went to dinners when I was younger and sat directly at the table and participated (more of a tag along thing than anything else) with people you can currently find in DefCon videos, RSA Conference talks, one who was in the NSA and who’s wife works at the FBI headquarters in Quantico, one of them who’s a veteran software engineer who’s made single paychecks big enough to retire himself for the rest of his life, and others who are still published authors to this day (I remember being at my father’s job when I was younger after said famous public intellectual’s new book just dropped while he was casually working right there in the office next to him, in cases of cardboard boxes and we were encouraged to take one); and I personally stay on top of new developments in the space. So then why don’t I pursue past leads I still have lying around? Desire. I don’t want that as much as I want other things in life. If I had a family to support maybe I would be on that kind of grind. But I personally don’t need a lot to be happy.
More options
Context Copy link
Bulverism is a logical fallacy where you assume an opponent's argument is false and explain why they hold that view instead of actually proving why the argument is wrong.
Particularly useful for shutting down criticism of "successful" people because there are countless avenues one can measure success by and find the critic wanting.
It’s the “they just hate us cause they anus” defense. You see it all the time in debates where when a person can’t refute your argument, they instead attack your credibility. Yeah well I’m not a climate scientist either but I can still tell you it was hot and dry yesterday.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link