site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 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.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I really can't understand the obsession with this guy.

Well, it was a pretty decent Harry Potter fanfic...

...alternatively, it benefits the establishment to have him as the foil for the AI technology, so he distracts from the more realistic problems that might come out of the technology, which are solvable, and which people might want to do something about, if they heard about them. Was it Altman that said Yudkowski did more for AI than anyone else?

I have two main criticisms:

  1. It's way too long and meanders a lot with the Ender's Game homage / rip-off in the middle. Granted that may just be an inherent trait of serialized fan fiction

  2. It fails at conveying it's main idea. The main thesis as I understood is introduced in the scene where he spills some sort of prank ink on Hermione and then teaches everyone a Very Important Lesson about Science: you have to actually try out your ideas and make good faith attempts to prove yourself wrong instead of just assuming your first guess is correct because you're smart. But then he doesn't do any of those things for the rest of the book and instead just instantly knows the right answer to everything by thinking about it really hard because he's smarter than everyone else. Which is how I think Yud sees himself and is why both he and his character are so insufferable