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.
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Notes -
Morality and Effectiveness - basically I feel like regardless of morals, people should be more concerned with instrumental values. Whether you desire a communist revolution or a Christian revival, work will help that goal along, so laziness should be (more of) a terrible vice in both ideologies. I think a lot of people argue about the ideal end result without putting in even a miniscule amount of work required to get there.
Rationality and Religion - Given many very common rationalist theories such as Many Worlds, the Fermi Paradox (and its rebuttals), and AI, I think it should stand to reason that God or something which would appear to us indistinguishable from God definitely exists. Any alien civilization or AI which has been around for billions of years will be as god to us unless you have utterly absurd projections for the diminishing returns of technological progress. I consider much of the discourse surrounding this (such as Outside View analyses of the Fermi Paradox, which I've already posted about) to be essentially cope around this fact.
Insanely Sane - Given how easy it is to make biological weapons, conduct one-man false flag operations, etc. it's shocking to me how rare those sorts of things are. Is there truly nobody who wants to discredit X cause by joining it, rising through the ranks, then doing utterly repugnant things? Nobody who will give their life to be the worst proponent of a cause they secretly hate? Doing so would be far easier and likely more effective than advocating for the cause that they like, if requiring much more dedication. The point would just be to talk about how strongly tied together logic and conviction seem to be, to the extent that there doesn't seem to be a single person alive both insane enough to cause a tragedy and sane enough to pull it off.
Moral Relativism - Even people (such as I) who claim not to believe it generally seem to act as if it's true. Also, it seems inherently self-defeating. I think a post about its use as a tool to maintain peace, and how that's evolved into seemingly a very dominant ideology, would be pretty interesting. Generally people seem to have mostly given up on finding and spreading objective truth.
That one reminds me of Gwern's "On the Absence of True Fanatics". As well as his "Terrorism Is Not About Terror", wich concludes that "terrorism is a form of socialization or status-seeking"; if that theory is true, then conducting a one-man false-flag operation, like the one you describe, would be precisely the opposite of that, and thus is unappealing to people who might otherwise have a terrorist mindset.
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