site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 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.

10
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

since this does not seem to clearly violate any existing rules.

Low effort isn't a rule?

Also, if it doesn't violate any rules, but it's obviously something bad for the group, you should add it to the rules so that you can give out a warning next time someone does it.

Low-effort-to-volume ratio, maybe. This clearly had some thought put into it.

I would support adding a "no laundry lists" rule to cover the situation. The ninety-five theses may have had plenty of effort, but this board is not a church door.

95 these are probably a little different, since they aren't 95 disconnected things, but an overarching argument (or maybe a few connected ones). I'd think that it would be more acceptable than this. If some one took one of the long posts we have here but attempted to present it syllogistically, I see no reason why that would be a problem, even though it would then be a long list of statements.

Point taken.

Intuitively, I’d prefer the longpost version to a list. Something about the amount of space it takes up. I’m not sure I can defend that intuition, though.

Low effort is a rule, but I didn't think this post was strictly a violation of that.

And we try to avoid having tons of rules.

The post is low effort per claim, even if it isn't low effort total.

(And a post is supposed to be high effort because of depth, not because of quantity. Multiplying low effort by 73 is high effort in the sense of total quantity of effort, but it's of low depth. Calling this high effort is just taking advantage of a loophole in the rules.)

I didn't see the post as a request to argue for these 73 points on this specific post, but rather as an invitation to engage in a more in depth conversation elsewhere. The poster seems pretty sincere in that desire to engage elsewhere. If they had said "here are my 73 positions, fight me here" then yah, I would have agreed it needed sanction. That is not what they said or seemed to intend, that is just what people did.

I find the invitation to engage elsewhere to be one of the worse aspects of the post. It seems somewhat exclusionary and against the purpose of the culture war thread, which I believe is to have discussion on the issues in the thread.

That sorta makes sense to me. But at the same time we don't really offer audio discussion here.

Maybe if they had asked to have private text conversations elsewhere it would be more of a problem.

But it probably doesn't belong as a comment in the culture war thread, then, and would be better put elsewhere?

Yes, and that is what I said in the post with my modhat on.