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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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Group A generally finds right answers, but for wrong reasons. Group B generally finds wrong answers, but for right reasons. Which group would you rather be in?

How fast can you fail, are we talking locally wrong or globally wrong, and to what extent are As constrained? Though again, this is progressivism/traditionalism/conservatism/whatever Six Foundation thinking is calling itself these days [as A] vs. and classical liberalism [as B].

I feel like there's a reasonable case that Group A is preferable.

Which is why most people are, at the intersection of all identities, generally in Group A (as well as the fact that 'right answers for right reasons' are inevitably incorporated by A when discovered by B). You'd have to be some sort of principled libertarian to be in B, which is why B tends to have a lot to do with those who find wrong answers for wrong reasons.

Yet the fact remains that A is completely unsustainable without B- you claim that A "finds" right answers, but generally speaking, they do no such thing. The reverse is not as true, which creates a lot of existential angst for A (and most A memes are designed to shut down and delay realizing that cognitive dissonance, ideally past one human lifetime).

If a certain type of reasoning generally leads you to right or good answers, doesn't that in itself make that type of reasoning right?

Well, yeah- when A was racist, racism yielded a global maximum of results (or perhaps the predictive power of racism yielding excellent local results lead to the As at the time incorporating it). A rapidly discovered and incorporated the epistemic virtue of racism.

But that's too reductive- it's more accurate to say that racism was a local maximum (which is why As were racist) in a particular time and place. However, once racism stopped being that local maximum, the A at that time was completely destroyed, and a new group A' took over from A.

Naturally, A' claimed they discovered the virtue of not being racist both to siphon power from A, and disavow that the existence of A' owed its existence to grabbing whatever B had for anti-racism and erecting an entire moral edifice around it (as those who choose A have as much a psychological dependence on that morality as those who choose B depend on the idea that the process of correct morality yields positive results). But they're both still A, and once the takeover has concluded, A has 'always been at war with Eastasia', so to speak.

A guess that randomly lands on the right answer is not epistemically virtuous

From B's viewpoint, yes- they might be locally (or even globally) correct but they're also horrible people who should never get anywhere near real power, the Puritans being a classic example (note also that "puritanical" is a B meme).

From A's viewpoint, there's no dissonance here, because they don't perceive it to be random- they are good people and deserve good things.