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 -
This is perfectly fine for the two of them, and I hope they are happy. Both of them are from a background where they have the social safety net to accommodate it when things go wrong. From a personal point of view for themselves both of them took the utility maximising option and that's OK.
However such actions have a societal negative externality. Firstly from all the other people they slept with who might have wanted to settle down and got their heart broken, those people suffered a negative hit to their utility. But in the grand scheme of things it's comparatively minor compared to the other negative externality they generate (people get their heart broken all the time, it's no big deal). Namely that humans are a monkey see monkey do species and we've completely dispensed with "do as I say, not as I do" even when it's better for people to "do as I say" and this promiscuity leading to a happy ending sends the lower classes a message that yes, they too, can sleep around and still do well for themselves in the end.
Naturally when the lower classes do so they are forced to face the pointy end of the stick your VP/MD pair had the looks/money to cushion away completely. This leads to significantly worse long term outcomes for them compared to if they had just been chaste, found a decent partner (note: decent, not perfect) and committed to life with them, come hell or high water.
At the moment it's considered vulgar for people to really point out that this marriage was successful despite the early promiscuity because there was "buy a mansion on a Greek island" level money standing behind it. Instead social messaging is that sleeping around has literally 0 effect on long term outcomes for (effectively) everyone. This just leads to people trying the promiscuity without the Greek island mansion money and getting burned. No different to a society where people with parachutes jump from airplanes all the time and enjoy the experience and encourage others to do so too because it is fun but its considered déclassé to mention the necessity of the parachute for this act because some people can't afford one. In such a society a lot of people who aren't smart enough to work out the criticality of the parachute but follow the social messaging end up going splat on the ground completely unnecessarily. The same is happening in modern western society.
The way we deal with negative externalities is to discourage them at a governmental/societal level via Pigouvian taxes, social shaming and awareness campaigns. However modern western society seems loathe to admit that there even exists a negative externality in this case despite the statistical mountain of evidence showing it primarily harms the poorest, the exact same group they profess to try and help the most. They say that the first step towards fixing a problem is admitting you have it. Until society openly accepts that we have a problem millions of people each year will continue to go SPLAT!
Do you think stable relationships are generally far easier with money? I’ve seen the opposite anecdotally but not sure about the data.
I think having enough money to be able to cover your "needs" and be able to handle negative consequences of your decisions is generally a positive to relationship strength, see e.g. an alcoholic who can afford rehab Vs can't, the relationship of the second one is more likely to fail.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link