site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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.

14
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

If she's still unmarried and childless in 4 years, I would be pretty surprised (call it 3:1 against). I am not sure how that would affect "my grasp of the reality of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles" because I am not sure what it would mean to affect my perception of someone's grasp of a reality of a group of people.

Do you anticipate that she would have philosophical objections to surrogacy? Because I generally expect "transhumanist enough to support cryopreservation" would very strongly correlate with "willing to use 'unnatural' solutions like IVF and surrogacy".

I am not sure what it would mean to affect my perception of someone's grasp of a reality of a group of people.

Please excuse my poor grammar. What I was trying to convey is the following: you said that "[you are] modeling her as »one of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles, who has bought very deeply into the transhumanist philosophy of that community, (...)«", which implies that you consider her highly competent on the basis of her deep association with a highly regarded group. Thus, if she turns out to be not so competent after all, this will cast doubt on whether we should continue regarding that group as competent.

Do you anticipate that she would have philosophical objections to surrogacy?

No, but that's beyond the point. Professional ethicists are not any more ethical than regular people, and progressive liberals somehow keep buying houses in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, after consulting with their peers as to where the "good schools" are. She will almost certainly not express any philosophical objections to surrogacy, and she probably will not even verbalize any explicit objections to it in her head. She will, however, feel deeply repulsed by the idea that she will need to give up such a fundamental human female experience, and hire a random person to do the job. This is very natural, so natural in fact that it probably hasn't even occurred to her that this might be her own fate when she was freezing these eggs in the first place.

which implies that you consider her highly competent on the basis of her deep association with a highly regarded group.

Ah, I see how what I wrote looks like that. I was gesturing more towards "bay-area rationalists are a very unusual culture with nonstandard beliefs, and she has bought deeply into those beliefs, and she occupies a fairly prominent position within that culture".

A central tenet of those beliefs is something like "fuck the natural state of things, fuck stodgy traditionalists, fuck the people who sneer on anything which seems weird to them. We can do it better because we are very smart and we are willing to do weird icky things if a cost-benefit analysis says it's worthwhile". I would not describe this strategy as "highly competent" so much as "high-variance" -- when it works it works great (see the number of bitcoin multimillionaires, calling out COVID as impactful very early) but when it fails it fails spectacularly (see SBF among quite a large number of other less prominent things).

I expect someone who buys into those beliefs to be far more willing than typical to accept something "weird and icky" like surrogacy if it gets her what she wants. And also I think it just may be a lot less universal than you think for women to crave the miracle of being pregnant and giving birth specifically, rather than craving the miracle of having her own offspring. (For reference, even outside of the rat community I've heard the topic of maybe using IVF come up a handful of times, and I think surrogacy came up in every one of those conversations).