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.
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Shaming.
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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.
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It's throw-away lines like this that make me avoid commenting here.
Then it's followed up by
Ahh, such steel-manning, such charity - definitely no booing outgroup here!
You can't expect absolute neutrality from people at all times. This forum does have a certain political slant, it's unavoidable. But that doesn't mean you should feel discouraged from commenting if you dissent from the consensus view.
I don't. I expect people to follow the rules such as
Be Kind
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
Be charitable.
Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is
Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
The comment I was responding to violates these. The great grand parent violates these:
The forum is replete with obvious violations of the rules. The mods obviously won't mod comments like this, because then they'd be modding like 30% of all the comments here.
Why not? I have better places to discuss topics like this where. I wish this place were better, because then I'd find much more value out of discussing things here, but c'est la vie. [edit: for instance, I found the /r/slatestarcodex threads much more pleasant and insightful]
The rules are, and always have been, subjectively interpreted, not according to some algorithmic rubric. We do try to be more or less consistent, but consistency and a robotic pretense of objectivity has never been the goal here - avoiding what @ZorbaTHut calls "negative dynamics" and optimizing for light over not heat, is.
The level of strictness with which we apply the rules is a bunch of sliders, not a pair of buttons.
@astrolabia's comment isn't high quality, but I don't really see reason to mod a vague complaint about "elites" and their supposed attitude towards "peasants." It's obviously making use of cheap rhetoric and Orwell memes, but who exactly is he being unkind to or weakmanning? Hypothetical elites who consider the rest of us peasants?
Using cheap rhetoric while making no real argument is, in my mind, the almost the quintessential example of optimizing for heat over light (the anti-goal)
Re unkind: yes, and anyone who supports existing politicians. If you tell me my preferred candidate wouldn't care if millions of US citizens die, and that is a purely rhetorical move on your part, I'd call that unkind and needlessly inflammatory.
Re weakmanning: he is weakmanning the memes he's referencing, since Bruce Bueno de Mesquita almost certainly would disagree with his claims. Though, it's hard to say he's even weakmanning, when he has not actually made an argument (again lots of heat in that comment; virtually no light).
I acknowledge that "unkind" and "weakmanning" are not the best fits, but it definitely fails on
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
Avoid low-effort participation
I know "Don't boo outgroup" isn't a rule, but imo it should be, and that comment fails that.
But, like you, I view the real problem as a heat-v-light one. Unlike you (I think?), I believe that comment offers approximately 100% heat and approximately 0% light.
Edit: It occurs to me, that perhaps I'm intuitively thinking of this as
heat / (heat + light) < threshold ==> bad
and you're thinking of it is
heat - light < threshold ==> bad
So, to my mind, a comment that makes no real contribution and has some heat, is bad. In your mind (I conjecture), a comment making no contribution is fine so long as its heat is sufficiently low.
Don’t boo out group is a reporting bucket.
It's not in the sidebar or the rules. @Amadan can we resolve this inconsistency?
It's right at the top of the page:
Once again, the rules are not an algorithm where we are required to strictly enforce everything that's written, exactly as written, and nothing that isn't. That's not how it works.
You don't like that I didn't mod a comment you think is bad. Duly noted.
Ahh, it's in each Culture War Post, not the rules page or side bar.
I don' think that's a fair summary, but it's evident I'm annoying you and nothing will change, so I will continue to find little value here, because civil, thoughtful truth-seeking isn't really the goal of this forum. C'est la vie.
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