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 -
The strait's open. Live strait watch tracker shows record levels of traffic: https://hormuzstraitwatch.xyz/
I actually want to talk about basic epistemology. Everything on that website is a lie. (People can just like, make a website to publish lies on the internet??? How is that even legal???). That doesn't necessarily mean that there are no object level truths contained on that website, but the website was created with zero intention of seeking the truth or providing accurate information to its readers.
Now I already hear some objections coming, which I want to preemptively dispell.
But phailyoor, that website is .xyz but other website is .com which is trustworthy. This means nothing. Anyone can make a .com without restriction, and domain level censorship only becomes an issue once piracy or other criminal activity is happening.
But phailyoor, the website I looked at ranks on google: This is a more complex argument, but google no longer takes any significant action against black hat seo. Take a look at these keywords: https://www.google.com/search?q=bondo+co https://www.google.com/search?q=hyper+tough https://www.google.com/search?q=yard+machines For each of these keywords there are fraudulent websites run by criminals in the top ranking. I will not get into the details of the scam but I hope you can believe that everything on those websites is lies. Again, they may contain object level truths as a side effect, but the entire purpose of them is to trick the reader.
B-but AI - This has nothing to do with ai or not.
Let's get a bit more into the idea of "everything" being a lie. Consider the expression "a stopped clock is right twice a day." The clock is completely broken and provides no additional information, it is no longer a truth seeking device. Yet at certain times of the day, the clock somehow gets the object level fact of the time correct. Now consider a crate full of thousands of broken wristwatches. Odds are that at any given moment, some of those are telling the correct time. Yet the entire crate provides literally zero information on what the correct time is.
Now lets consider those fraudulent websites in more detail. Maybe as an example consider a fraudulent website that relates to the bondo product, for example b o n d o c o dot com (archive link: https://archive.is/xCi5I). It's true that the website may contain some true object level facts about the bondo product, like the fact that it can be used to fill holes. In fact the ratio of true facts may be quite high. Maybe 99% of the object level facts on that website are true. But fundamentally the website is created with the sole intention to deceive and trick its readers. And I think it should go without saying that this website would not be a reliable source to cite, and any argument that relies on this source is immediately suspect. And certainly you would have to be completely out of your mind to use information from this fraudulent website in your decision to purchase or use the product.
Now if someone instead responds with something like "Great send a link with a better website and Ill use that." that misses the entire point. Spreading and citing a website solely created to deceive is worse than nothing. It's worse than saying "I pulled it out of my ass." It's saying "I deliberately exposed myself to a Chinese scammer and gave him free backlinks because I couldn't be bothered to find a reputable source of information on the bondo product."
No I will not help you find reputable sources of information about the bondo product.
Thanks for listening for my ted talk. Part 2 coming soon.
Side note tangent: This website for ebart https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://www.ebartproject.org/ was once the legitimate website but then it got taken over by scammers. See if you can figure out their criminal enterprise.
A wonderful example of a quote I've become rather fond of.
"With omnipresent sloppification you need to become an expert yourself before [...] anything. Huge cognitive costs."
Its been an insane blessing that I have spent the last ~10 years cultivating a deep skepticism filter for information sourced from the mainstream and from the normie social media, WHILE also cultivating high-signal/low noise channels that are reliable individually and trustworthy in the aggregate (i.e. if one of them disproves or refutes a given story this propagates to the others very quickly).
Epistemic hygiene is important, but one can't give in completely to germophobia.
Its not that I offload my own judgment to them so much as it allows me to quickly dismiss false positives: if I can't find some level of consensus that [X] happened as described then I will assume false until given further evidence. And in the age of AI videos that have an express bridge right over the uncanny valley, I'm vastly privileging events I can view with my own two eyes, physical photons bouncing off the actual atoms, or at least can observe the obvious ripple effects of such.
I've tried to do this, who are some of the generally "best" people you follow? The eternal issue is that even those that try really hard people still have biases and and sometimes as I'm reading I have to stop "oh, need to double check this one, it involved Israel".
You've kind of nailed the point, actually. I'm not saying all the biases 'cancel out' into the ground truth, but if you're following an account with a seeming Israel bias, and an account lacking one, and the one that lacks that bias is calling out/refuting a post by the biased one, and/or you're seeing that ONLY the Israel-biased account is posting about a given event, you can and should probably disbelieve the Israel-biased account unless they corroborate further.
You want a network that values shutting down falsehoods rapidly rather than propagating them. The holy grail is an account that will proactively correct themselves when they make errors.
The type you want to look for (ime) is a curmudgeonly 'autistic' type with deep subject matter knowledge on a given topic. And you should give them extra credence within that topic, and extra doubt on those topics they seem to have a chip on their shoulder about.
High disagreeability is a somewhat double-edged sword, but necessary to counter popular untruths.
There's a lot of Alpha up front in simply muting accounts you encounter often that spout falsehoods/mislead with regularity.
This place is one of the best spots for getting nuance on the news, and I follow a few, like @morlockp, our own TracingWoodgrains, and @hradzka that are willing to voice disagreement with a community, AND accept criticism of their position.
@St_Rev is a HUGE value add follow, the guy is capable of pointing out a misleading narrative or a missing variable from 1000 yards away
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Where's that quote from?
More options
Context Copy link
This isn't about ai but yes ai makes things way worse
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link