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 -
On Inferential Distance
There's a pair complaints that get made here on a semi-regular basis to the effect of how "The right" lacks a positive vision/will to power, and more generally the how the whole Left/Right spectrum is incoherent. These complaints are often deployed in tandem with the old Bryan Caplan take about the left is defined by being anti-market and the right is defined by being anti-left. I disagree, and given how I've been accused by multiple users of "torturing the meaning of words" and "doubling down on obvious falsehoods" over the last couple months, and I feel kind of obligated to elaborate.
Entering college life as I did (as Freshman on the GI-Bill Student after 12 years as combat medic), I found it difficult to discount the degree to which certain cultural assumptions dominated the school's culture. I often found myself feeling a bit like Captain Picard in that one TNG Episode where the alien-of-the-week's individual words are readily translatable but their meaning is not. When I first read Yudkowski's post on "expecting short inferential distances" it crystalized something that I had already grasped intuitively but had been struggling to put into words. The concept of "inferential distance" subsequently became something of a bugbear of mine. In 1984 Orwell posits that the key to controlling discourse was to first control the language and I think he was on to something with that. As I've previously observed, for all the talk of theMotte being "right wing" it's userbase is overwhelmingly progressive in background. Being college educated is the default here. Atheism is the default here. A belief in identity politics and Hegelian oppressor/oppressed dynamics is the default here. These assumption (and yes I am calling them assumptions) get baked into the discourse and people who don't already buy into them end up facing an uphill battle if they wish to participate in the discussion. Often times I'll find myself choosing to not bother but I can't help but notice that this amplifies the problem, "evaporative cooling" and all that.
While I recognize that language is more performative than it is prescriptive what I am endeavoring to do here is something like a rectification of names. A lot of what I am about to say is going to be a rehash of things that some of you will have already read before on Lesswrong, SSC, or on theMotte prior our departure from Reddit. But in the interests of engaging with people we disagree with I will attempt to restate my case for the record...
What do I mean when I say "Western Civilization"? I refer to the intellectual tradition that is essentially a marriage of middle eastern mysticism and classical Greek/Roman formalism. This tradition rose to prominance in the first century BC and spread rapidly along the mediterrainian coast ultimately conquering most of Europe and eventually spreading to the new world. One of the core elements that sets this tradition apart from both it's contempraries and predecessors is a belief in "sanctity through service" which in turn translates into requiring a woman's consent for marriage, viewing dogs as high status animals, and regarding slavery with something of a jaundiced eye. There is a debate to be had about to what degree early Christianity created these conditions or was simply a reaction to them but I don't think they matter all that much. It looks to me like a chicken and egg type question as regardless of on which side you fall in the debate the two are inextricably linked. The venn diagram of cultures considered "western" and cultures "heavily influenced by Christainity" (as opposed to other faiths Abrahamic or otherwise) is practically a circle with Jesus himself quoting Homer and Aeschylus in his sermons.
Relatedly, I maintain that the left vs right spectrum are best understood as religious schism within the western enlightment, with the adhearants of Locke and Rousseau on one side and the adhearants of Hobbes on the other. The core points of disagreement being internal vs exterenal loci of control and the "default" state of man. While this model may have fallen out of favor in acedemia over the last few decades I still believe that it holds value in that it "cleaves reality at the joints" by pointing to real differences in how diffrenet classes within the west approach questions of legal authority/legitimacy while still accurately reflecting to the original etymology, IE which side would one be expected to take in the French revolution.
Users here will often argue that the existance (or non-existance) of "an imaginary sky-friend" or individual loci of control are not relevant to whatever issue is being discussed but I disagree. I believe that these base level assumptions end up becoming the core of what positions we hold.
I've caught a lot of flak in this sub for "no true scotsmaning" by equating the alt-right with the woke left but I can't help but notice that they seem to be coming from the same place. That is an underlying assumption on both sides that if only all the existing social barriers/contracts could be knocked down, utopia would be achievable. This is a fundamentally Rousseauean viewpoint where in violence, inequity, and injustice are all products of living in a society. Meanwhile I find myself barrowing pages from Hobbes and Burke, grand ideas are nice and all, but social barriers/contracts are what ensure that the trash gets picked up, and that supermarket shelves get stocked and that I would argue what makes a civilization.
Edit: Fixed link, spelling
I'll have some of what you're smoking if you don't mind.
The problem, Hlynka, is that you are always trying to shoehorn reality into what suits your fancy, rudely at that. This is something I've accused women of doing recently, to some understandable disapproval from @gemmaem, but I did say that this is not so much a particularly female moral failing as a natural outcome of having power (maybe it could have been better described with some of TLP's writings about narcissistic rage, which of course have nothing to do with psychopathology). You serve the greatest power on Earth, one that feverishly seeks to extend its monopoly on violence to the furthest reaches of the Universe, you identify with it, so it is a given you succumb to this temptation as well.
To begin with, while you were indeed accused of torturing the meaning of words and the like in relation to your hot takes on tribal affiliation of right-wingers, the «doubling down on obvious falsehoods» was specifically about your bizarrely hostile – and easily disproven – insistence that language models don't have certain capabilities. You can't deal with that issue by doubling down on your politics.
But since language models and your politics are, in fact, only tangentially related, I'll only comment on the latter.
Your politics are not conservative or progressive in some principled philosophical sense. They are technically center-right but, first and foremost, American – and this pretty much exhausts their content.
All nations are, to an extent, imagined communities, where the actual cohabitation is fortified, like democracy can be, with clever psyops and retcons. Your nation is a Proposition Community – and one heavily reinvented in your lifetime to become as expansive and comfortable to the power brokers within it as possible. The marriage of Jerusalem and Athens can result in any number of political systems, and each one would seek to claim the mantle of Western Civilization as such, this has happened a few times before. Indeed, even the Proposition Nation idea, very infectious as of late, can take many forms. Singapore is the Proposition Nation with mercantile East Asian characteristics; France is the Proposition Nation of Reddit Rationalism. And like Alasdair MacIntyre has said,
The modern American system, however, is a particularly extreme case in that it reduces this civilization to a citizenship and a rather short list of legal precepts (and one more thing we'll return to shortly). Not the people (which drives @SecureSignals or @Hoffmeister25 to predictable indignation), nor an ideology (as those are quickly exchanged), nor religion, nor heritage, as even history is rewritten and reinterpreted at a whim. Who are your people? Degenerates and mongrels (your words, not mine). What is the living spirituality of your people? Something something Jesus quoted Homer when drinking at Moe's, but also live and let live, man; further, myopic pragmatism dressed as virtue. What is your idea? «Grand ideas suck», but you're always itching to bash some egghead's skull in for having the temerity to propose one and expect an argument in return. The power you have amassed, however, seeks expression, and it takes the shape informed by grand ideas you prefer to haughtily ignore until they become received wisdom, the water you swim in, and you become willing to murder and get murdered in their name – with nothing, really, except some confused childish platitudes about good and evil to justify the call.
Naturally this can't be how it works. How it works – coming back to the one more thing – is that you do have a grand idea. The grand idea is circular self-worship bringing the confused identification of Sittlichkeit and Moralitiit to the logically final point where no distinction is, strictly thinking, conceivable; America is its own God. This faith is not grounded in any intellectual tradition, in fact not in any tradition, but remains as jealous as any other. All people who found their beliefs on other frameworks, and therefore are or might become disloyal, are seen as heathens or heretics, depending on their background. In your lingo they are «progressives», but this means less than an Orthodox Christian accusing a Catholic of being a schismatic. In the lingo of your Legal Enemies, enemies playing another part in the two-tact regime of American political worship, defectors from the vacuous self-worship cult can be called «fascists» or «far right». There is an asymmetry between sides of the performance in their ability to publicly make use of those allies, and other slight details, but we've been discussing those asymmetries for years now.
It's about time to scrutinize the median case, which you represent well enough.
What if there is no monopoly on violence to be had? What if our interlocutor's "narcissistic rage" is exactly that? Am I to become a narcissist?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link