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 -
I hope this isn't too shallow for a top-level comment, but I wanted to share a personal observation about shifts in political views. Specifically, in the last couple of years, I've become a LOT more authoritarian on crime. Part of this is probably me getting older (damn kids, stop cycling on the sidewalk!), but I'd single out two main factors.
(1) A big part of it has been related to noticing shifting views on the issue among city-dwelling liberals (that's my in-group, whether I like it or not). I regularly visit a bunch of US cities for work, and I subscribe to their relevant subreddits, and there's been an incredible shift from "defund-the-police is a solid principle albeit the details need to be worked out" to "lock up the bums now". And similarly, several real life liberal friends who were traditionally pretty anti-police have become much more authoritarian of late, complaining about how e.g. the NYC subway used to be incredibly safe but has now become a creepy unpleasant space to inhabit, and something needs to be done.
(2) I've also had a lot more professional dealings with academic criminologists lately, and damn, it's been a wake-up call. It seems to be one of the most activist domains of academia I've ever encountered (and I deal with sociologists and social psychologists on a regular basis!). Over a few different conferences and dinners, I've chatted with criminologists who were pretty explicit about how they saw their role, namely speaking up for oppressed criminals; empirics or the rights of the wider populace barely came into the conversation. On top of this, there have been some spectacular scandals in academic criminology that have helped confirm my impression of the field. Suddenly, all those papers I happily cited about how prison doesn't work etc. seemed incredibly fragile.
I'm going to add two quick personal longstanding reasons why I'm inclined to be quite authoritarian on crime -
(i) Despite my fallouts with The Left, I'm still broadly a social democrat; I think that an effective state is one that provides good free services to all its citizens, including things like high quality education, healthcare, and public transit. But in order to be democratically sustainable, this requires a certain amount of imposed authority: if public schools become known as a magnet for drugs and gang violence, then middle-class parents will pull their kids out and send them to private schools, and won't give their votes or (more importantly) their organising energy to maintaining school quality. If subways become excessively creepy and weird and violent, the middle classes will get Ubers, and vote for candidates who defund public transit. In short, if the middle classes (who have options) decide not to make use of public options, then public options will die their democratic death. Speaking as someone who likes public options, I think it's essential that fairly strong state authority is exerted in public utilities to ensure that they are seen as viable by the middle class.
(ii) I have a weird sympathy towards Retributivism as a theory of justice and crime. More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed. As soon as we stop regarding criminals as people, but just factors of (dis)production, then I think we do them and our society a disservice; it's treating them as cattle. Instead, I'm sympathetic towards a more contractualist approach that mandates we treat all citizens as autonomous individuals who enter into an implicit social contract by virtue of enjoying the benefits of society, such that we would be doing them a disservice of sorts if we didn't punish them for their crimes. Let me try to put that in a maxim: you're an adult, you're a citizen; you fucked up, now you pay the price. If we didn't make you pay the price, we'd be treating you like a child or an animal.
Obviously lots more to be said here, but I'll save my follow-ups for the comments. Curious what others think.
Do many people disagree with the goal of free high quality education, healthcare and public transport? Well, I suppose there's the issue of 'free' in that someone eventually has to pay for it. But in principle, these things genuinely are supposed to be investments. Not investments in the 'doubling down for the tenth time on this shitcoin that's constantly reaching new bottoms like ICP or California High Speed Rail' sense, actual investments that deliver returns. Public transport is supposed to be economical, it's energetically efficient at least. If construction costs are low it makes a lot of sense. Good infrastructure is important for industry too. Education is supposed to improve the quality of the workforce in economic terms, produce sensible, virtuous citizens. Same with healthcare.
Everyone wants those things, they just have a bunch of other goals as well. For instance, it's impossible to have a high-quality public transport system if it's full of drug addicts, or if you bog everything down in so many environmental reviews that nobody can build anything efficiently.
In Australia, about 11% of 5-7 year old boys (and 5% of 5-7 year old girls) are now on the NDIS disability scheme (for things like 'developmental delay' or autism). My source is paywalled. Costs are out of control, 14% annual growth, 35 Billion AUD this year. I fully expect we're causing considerable damage to perfectly normal boys by medicalizing what could easily be ignored. But people (especially the newish Labor government) don't want to look like they're stripping 'care' from people, they don't want some parent of disabled children sobbing on national media. So their response is to chair an independent report that'll come back in October, aiming to reduce cost growth to a mere 8% per year. If I'm reading the article correctly, the minister involved also wants to spend another $730 million AUD on 'capacity building' to reduce costs in the long run. I have very low expectations.
The issue here is that they're not making use of all the options to achieve utilitarian goals. For instance, a utilitarian might very well come to the conclusion that they should just shoot a certain subset of criminals. Drug Dealer Adam might enjoy dealing drugs, doing drugs, robbing stores, driving stolen cars in street races, exploiting Drug Addict Bella and Catherine for sex and molesting their children, fighting turf wars, doing drive by shootings... But all those things are bad for everyone else. Given that there's no 'turn him into a normal person' gun, a utilitarian might say 'shoot him dead', especially if prison is expensive. But what you see as an excessive utilitarian would always ask for more rehabilitation, more programs, more education, or avoid the subject by talking about 'root causes' and then frame them in utilitarian logic. Unless they have a time machine, addressing root causes won't change fully-formed parasitic criminals.
As it intrudes more on them personally, people get less tolerant of crime (consider the San Fran women who are warming to my preferred cut-them-down approach). I think we'd be better off if decisionmakers had more skin in the game. If there was anything in Stalin's Russia like California High Speed Rail, the NKVD would be shooting and torturing wreckers for weeks. While massive purges have various negative externalities, is there no way to punish people for collectively squandering tens of billions of dollars? Prison, a fine? And what about some rewards if things go well? We could even tack a prediction market on here, make politicians buy bonds that pay off if their policy succeeds to show their sincerity.
I conclude with three beliefs:
If you pay for something, you get more of it.
Defeating enemies is a useful alternative to deterring them, especially if they're weak.
Decision-makers and overseers must have an incentive to get things done efficiently and correctly
They should, because the first doesn't exist, and the latter two are always expensive.
Education was better and significantly cheaper some 70 years ago, before the educationalists and administrators started multiplying. Have you seen that CATO graph of how spending per pupil rose 250% in the US since about 1970, inflation adjusted? Outcomes did not change at all. It's clearly possible to do much better, for much less. I can't find the CATO graph but this is just as good: https://housingtoday.org/animated-chart-of-the-day-public-school-enrollment-staff-and-inflation-adjusted-cost-per-pupil-1970-to-2018/
Japan does healthcare and public transport pretty well. I know their demographics are very different to US demographics. But it is possible in principle to have an efficient, effective health and transport system. It just depends on what other priorities policymakers are prepared to sacrifice.
One of the main drivers of the increased cost and reduction in efficiency in education is progressive sentiments of expanding education access. Most of the students progressives care the most about should be dumped into the workforce at 13. Not being willing to do that drives cost and other stupid trends in education like grade inflation and the reduced value of a HS diploma.
Significantly reducing the school leaving age specifically for the lowest IQ and least functional students seems like it has easily foreseeable and terrible social engineering effects. The thing about kids who are not future engineers because they aren't college material which everyone seems to forget, including politically incorrect HBD enthusiasts, is that they're people who aren't future engineers because they aren't college material. 80 IQ teens with bad values having less supervision and more freedom is in fact a bad thing, and sure that's a little bit unfair to 120 IQ teens who could easily be done with secondary school at 15 or 16 but have to drag out highschool by another two years, but warehousing bright teens unnecessarily causes a lot less damage than having unsocialized dumb adolescents entering their peak criminality years with nothing to do.
If we lived in a world where even poor people mostly had intact families teaching good values in a culture that supported that kind of thing it might be different, but we don't and no one seems to know how to get there on a societal level. 80 IQ single moms are by and large not going to suddenly become fundamentalist Christians raising their kids with the beliefs that hard work is a sacred value from God, honesty and rule following bring rewards, sexual promiscuity is immoral and low status, drugs are evil, etc. And fundamentalist Christianity is more or less the only subculture in America today that has any success with low IQ people, so it's not as if I picked an absurd example.
So, on one hand you are admitting its basically just a prison of sorts, but on the other you want to concentrate the lil inmates there and also subject their brighter peers to forced interaction with them.
More options
Context Copy link
You are assuming that a 15 year old who's pushed out of school necessarily gets a job and a career, and I'm not so sure that's true. We live in a broken society and it seems like lots of these kids would just do drugs and hang around gangs.
Yes there's lots of not-terribly-bright but not actually bad kids around, and lots of them would benefit immensely from expanded school to work programs or Germany-style tracking into apprenticeships. But you'll notice those are well supervised situations where they don't have unlimited freedom to make their own decisions, because making their own decisions and handling freedom is not something teenagers tend to be good at.
This was a widespread course of action 60 years ago. We decided that it was more cost-effective to farm out the job that cohort did to other countries while warehousing them for a few more years- missing that developmental milestone has consequences, but ones that have been successfully privatized (it costs society nothing to have them sit in their parents' basements and lie relatively flat instead).
>gives [demographic] zero chances to develop a trait to the point they're actively discouraged from doing so
>complains that [demographic] don't exhibit that trait
>claims it's immutable biological fact of [demographic]'s inherent inferiority even though history of every time period outside of the last 40 years conclusively proves otherwise
>confused_nick_young.jpg
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link