It’s been pointed out recently that the topics discussed in the Culture War thread have gotten a bit repetitive. While I do think the Motte has a good spread on intellectual discussion, I’m always pushing for a wider range (dare I say diversity?) of viewpoints and topics in the CW thread.
I was a lurker for years, and I know that the barrier between having a thought and writing a top level comment in the CW thread can loom large indeed. Luckily I’m fresh out of inspiration, and would love to hear thoughts from folks about effortposts they want to write but haven’t gotten around to.
This of course applies to regulars who post frequently as well - share any and all topics you wish were discussed in the CW thread!
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I've got a number of ideas bouncing around in my head that I just never have the time to try and make the case for convincingly. Headline followed by tl;dr.
A) Oryx and Crake was an instruction manual for biological research - not the cyperpunk zaibatsu dystopia species-level cuckoldry, but the bioengineering. We'll never understand biological systems until we start trying to build them. Preferably with the help of AI.
B) The Bayh-Dole act gave us a sugar high but led to us eating our seed corn. The startup ecosystem and private industry are dependent on uncommercialized, foundational basic research carried out by underpaid and overworked scientists motivated by furthering humanity and/or ego, not profit.
C) Are we witnessing the birth of two transnational ethnicities? Also, the case for globalization.
D) What I tentatively call 'pregnancy autism,' or maybe an autistic attempt to analyze relationships and relationship conflict. Hard to do a tl;dr, but maybe it's an existential crisis inspired by this quote from 'What to expect when you're expecting':
E) Whatever the fuck this bullshit spam is from Nancy Pelosi/DNC that I get daily:
Complete with 2005 html-era formatting highlighting text in red and blue.
F) Healthy at more weights than you thought. IMO, people overstate the health risks of being overweight and don't sufficiently differentiate between overweight/obese and active/inactive.
G) Criticism is valuable, but easy - standing for something is hard but much more valuable. Tied to my distaste for reactionary thought and experience with pitching scientific ideas.
Numbered lists apparently reset after quotes, unfortunately. Apologies for having to use letters instead.
edit: for my own records, the consciousness blackpill.
Kinda reminds me of the revelation I had over a common Russian saying, "anyone can offend an artist". I used to treat it as a statement that slyly makes fun of the artists' thin skin, but then I realized it's literally true.
If you are someone who makes art to make a statement and not just to pay the bills, you have a deeply personal relationship with your own work. You've poured tens, if not hundreds or thousands of hours into it. Hopefully, you've made thousands of people happy. But what do you see? Even if you filter out people whose feedback is "ur book sucks fagit" and pay attention only to the well-written and articulated reviews, you are reading mainly criticism, not apologetics. Someone who is 99% satisfied with your game will still try to spend 50% of his review discussing the things they liked and 50% discussing the things they think could've been done better. They are doing this partly because they want to show how deeply they care about your creative work, partly because they want to be "fair" to help those who are thinking about buying your creative work, but the final result is that 50% of what you read is negative feedback.
After realizing this I changed the way I interact with creators. If I like something, I try to not be economical with my praise. Who cares if someone reading this rolls their eyes at my "fanboyism". Creators deserve to experience the joy their works brought their audience before it has been distilled into a soulless number like the Metacritic score or their Patreon earnings.
For a long time I've been thinking I need to make it a rule to tell someone if I enjoyed reading something they wrote. This is another data point in favor of making that a rule.
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