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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   33038 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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On Bullying

It's an observation of Orson Scott Card that we don't really like to think about how much of our behavior is genetic.

To what extent should it be presumed that sexless men will become rapists? Certainly we can look at some statistics proving rape exists, that some subset of men will eventually become rapists, or worse, school shooters.

It's only nerds that think of humans as rational agents. It's only nerds that think of humans as rational agents. It's only nerds that think of human ok you get it.

Within the evolutionary pressure to protect the women from harm emerges the high school jock bullying the high school nerd for leering too frequently and making the jock's woman uncomfortable. The nerds would have you believe that this cycle of violence begins when the high school jock slams the nerd up against the locker. "I wasn't doing anything" cries the nerd pitifully.

The nerd hangs out near the woman, drawn to her by the compulsion of the reproductive force. The nerd tells a story of innocence, that they're not there in proximity of the woman for any specific purpose.

For the woman, it's pretty simple: there's a nerd there so the nerd is interested in her regardless of what the nerd says he believes. When the nerd stutters out "h-hi" the nerd thinks that this is playing a script of normal human interaction in which he has maintained plausible deniability for making eye contact, when in reality, for the woman, it's pretty simple: there's a male present so the male is interested in her.

From there the leering or the comments ('maybe I should just try being forward' leads to awkward sexual advances) progress and the woman's discomfort increases past the annoyance threshold into the threat labeling, and the threat labeling occurs when she tells her boyfriend, and it becomes the boyfriend's job to subdue the poor dumbfuck.

So the nerd gets slammed into the locker.

"I wasn't doing anything!"

What's sad about this story is just this: that the nerd believes it.

  • -41

This looks like "boo outgroup" spit-balling to me, except for maybe the part where posting about it here is performative evidence that you might think of yourself as nerd. It's difficult to see in your account anything but a deliberate attempt to troll, so let's start the banning at one week.

If this "nerd leer -> possible rape" behavior set is genetic, and if we shut down the rape with bullying early in the line, then how does the gene continue to propagate? Certainly bullying is now a much lesser force, but there were several decades with prominent bullying and yet the nerd behavior set remained ever present, if not growing.

To what extent should it be presumed that sexless men will become rapists? Certainly we can look at some statistics proving rape exists, that some subset of men will eventually become rapists, or worse, school shooters.

Is it actually true that sexless men are more likely to be rapists? I don't have statistics, but that's not obvious to me.

It's only nerds that think of humans as rational agents. It's only nerds that think of humans as rational agents. It's only nerds that think of human ok you get it.

What do you mean by rational agent?

In any case, I really don't think this is a fair description of social dynamics (nor do I think it was meant to be—it's probably meant to be attacking the people on this site, since I'd imagine a good deal of us would self-identify as nerds). I've hung out around plenty of nerds, and I can only think of one who I knew had issues with unwanted attention towards women (and in those cases, he generally was able to be made aware that he was in the wrong, per my recollection). For some of Scott's thoughts, this seemed a nice collation, which seemed to generally be pushing back against some of what you've been saying.

Can't say that I've really run across bullying either, though, so maybe I'm in unusual environments.

I am, along with others it seems, confused by this post.

I think anti-bullying campaigns have gone too far and now are a net negative over the 1950s system. But it makes little sense to talk about nerds/jocks in this context. That is, mostly, a false artifact of Hollywood culture. Almost all the best jocks are also super smart. The CEO of Goldman played Rugby in college. Zuckerberg was the captain of his fencing team, and now has apparently taken a keen interest in training in Jiu-jitsu.

Almost all the best jocks are also super smart.

There's a lot of jocks who aren't the best.

They also tend to fare poorly with the ladies. No one was itching to go on dates with backup left guard "Stumper" at my high school.

Agreed on the general point, but in no way is Zuckerberg a jock.

Agreed regarding Zuck, but I think he highlights something that seems true from personal experience - discrete categories of teens, to the extent that they exist, aren't anything like the 80s movie tropes. I don't know if they ever were, but by the time I was a teenager a couple decades ago, quite a few athletes were also smart kids that played Halo and had no real qualms about playing with the stereotypical nerds. Sure, there were cliques and I assume that's a permanent part of human social structure, but the overlap between jocks and nerds was sufficiently significant that those weren't really the fault lines. The outgroup were the actual losers - the guys that seemed like they wouldn't even get out of high school and definitely weren't going to have real careers and successful lives.

Growing up, I've always associated the bully with the fat, loud guy who sucks at sports and has a bad social etiquette and rep with the teachers, not really desired by his female classmates. He thinks he can assert his dominance by picking on the weaker guy. But the jocks who are already desirable don't have to assert their dominance, they already know their worth and so does everyone. This happened a lot with this particular nerdy kid in my class who was sometimes chatty but was seen as scum by most girls in our class. The bullying he'd faced was pretty standard, being shoved and kicked around, not the extreme stuff like being stripped or getting shitty swirlys. He had a very bad temper though. Inevitably, the day came when he was truly pushed off the edge and went completely feral with no care in the world for the consequences, but fortunately he was tamed before he could get that far. Interestingly enough, this didn't raise his status. He was still seen as scum who (ironically) starts trouble, but worse: he was a feral scum who's tasted blood now, and therefore shouldn't be given the reason to do so again (read: can't be messed with without a bloody nose in return anymore). Can't say he wasn't eager to embrace this new reputation though.

I think the difference is less the interests (although they tend to cluster) and more as a social status. You’re not a nerd just because you collect things or watch anime or whatever. You’re a nerd because you are weak, unaccomplished, socially awkward, and clearly unable to fix those problems. In other words, a loser. Jocks aren’t really jocks because they like sports, it’s simply that they are stronger, more accomplished, sociable, and generally able to handle their lives.

Zuckerberg was the captain of his fencing team

I am also confused by the post, but feel compelled to point out that fencing is ultra-nerdy since at least the 90s IME -- probably since they stopped using real swords, but IDKAT.

They don’t use swords?

Not ones that can cut you

I get that. I still assumes it was real swords but dull.

Not a given, historically...

They use what are essentially bendy metal poles. The blades aren't rigid, and they're not even blades, since they don't have a cutting edge. Instead, there's a sensor at the tip that sends an electrical signal when it hits an opponent.

I in no way am a fencing expert. But I watched the Olympic event in 2020 and they seemed pretty athletic.

Sure, but if you talk to any of them (again IME, I'm sure some fencers are total chads) you will find that they are super-nerds.

If a nerd can beat you up, is he still a nerd?

Scott's classical definition of a nerd (which you may not endorse) was "high intelligence + poor social skills". There's no reason you couldn't have those two traits and also be physically strong or handy in a fight. I think a lot of /fit/izens meet this description.

You should read Nietzsche. It would give you a more nuanced way of thinking about these sorts of issues.

Start with Twilight of the Idols:

But Socrates suspected even more. He looked behind his noble Athenians; he understood that his case, his idiosyncrasy of a case was not an exception any more. The same type of degeneration was quietly gaining ground everywhere: old Athens was coming to an end. - And Socrates understood that the world needed him, - his method, his cure, his personal strategy for self-preservation . . . Everywhere, instincts were in anarchy; everywhere, people were five steps away from excess [...] When people need reason to act as a tyrant, which was the case with Socrates, the danger cannot be small that something else might start acting as a tyrant. Rationality was seen as the saviour, neither Socrates nor his 'patients' had any choice about being rational, - it was de rigueur, it was their last resort. The fanaticism with which all of Greek thought threw itself on rationality shows that there was a crisis: people were in danger, they had only one option: be destroyed or - be absurdly rational . . . The moralism of Greek philosophers from Plato onwards is pathologically conditioned; the same is true for the value they give to dialectics. Reason = virtue = happiness only means: you have to imitate Socrates and establish a permanent state of daylight against all dark desires - the daylight of reason. You have to be clever, clear, and bright at any cost: any concession to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards . . .

This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. What are you trying to say?

I'm sure the case of "nerd" is perceived as (whether or not he actually did) making a pass at "jock"'s girl so jock beats up nerd, has happened. I am also sure that this couldn't possibly explain more than a small percentage of bullying. So what exactly is the point here?

Being charitable, let's consider this post in the context of (pseudo-?)Impassionata's previous top-level post post-return to TheMotte:

[R]ighteous causes like trans acceptance are not made less righteous by the fallibity [sic] of the people who express trans acceptance, and foul causes like the ethnostates are in fact foul and should be neatly excerpted from discourse by moderator attention, or, barring that, bullying to make sure the nerds to get the message.

To me, the argument seems to be as follows. "Only nerds think of humans as rational agents", so they are blind to their own irrational or unjust impulses. Thus, when they follow the proper script for interacting with girls, they think that they ought be rewarded for acting in accordance with this rational system of "rules". As such, when they are justly pushed into a locker instead, they have no clue why. The hero jock, on the other hand, is able to cut through the bullshit, understand the nerd's diabolical motives for what they are (motives that the nerd has successfully wordcel'd himself into not even understanding himself), and intuitively punish him for this, stepping outside the bounds of reason.

Now, Control-F nerds with heterodox high-decouplers, who coolly and rationally debate the viability of ethnostates or the lack of consciousness in women. Any convincing arguments put forth are nothing but mere post-hoc rationalizations of preexisting evil beliefs, just as the nerd's talking-to-women script is merely a means of covering up impure desires. It's similar to the whole "Elephant in the Brain" thesis: any debate is not meant to arrive at the truth, but rather, to persuade others and even oneself that their own cause is the truth. As such, it is the role of the just person to ignore all of this reasoned argumentation and use whatever tools are necessary in order to silence hateful views.

...

I personally am skeptical of this thesis. Is conversation and debate really that futile? If so, then pseudo-Impassionata is wasting his time by engaging in conversation and debate here. Even he must recognize then, assuming that he's not just trolling or motivated by a primal desire to win online arguments, that there is utility in debate. At the very least, it can cut away the cruft that accumulates on top of an issue, revealing the fundamental loci of disagreement beneath. But I won't waste time on this, because more has been better written on this subject.

Instead, I'll indulge in a bit of armchair psychoanalysis: what's with this common theme of bullying nerds? Indeed, a while back, either here or in one of our previous venues, there was a post noticing a tendency for masculine posturing among a certain subset of progressives, a fixation on positioning themselves in apposition to loser dork hateful nerds. I believe that the post was written in the context of reproductively viable worker ants, which makes the fixation ironic: anyone involved in that has to be blind to not see that they're a nerd. So what gives? One hypothesis is that it's an attempt by Theater Kids (I would be grateful to anyone who knows where the comment introducing that framing is) to gain some amount of status by putting down the other group that seems to inhabit the same rung of the social ladder, Math Geeks. This would explain both the odd posturing and the focus on the "Hollywood" (as anti_dan put it above) narrative of jocks versus nerds. Maybe throw in that one "high school is the last time in your life that you can be someone" comment as well? (Again, I'd be grateful to anyone with a link.)

I don't know how much this hypothesis is actually worth anything. But in an effort to avoid merely sneering, I'll flesh it out a bit: I do think that an underrated determinant of which side Very Online people take in the Culture War is the degree to which they enjoy playing social games. Anecdotal evidence:

  • In my own experience, one of the factors that repelled me from Team Progress was noticing that the rules offered by progressives for dating as a man do not align with the actions of the most successful men.

  • A post (again, I don't have the link) on morlock-holmes.tumblr.com that I remember reading talked about a play, which was to star a white male lead, in which the playwright queried a diverse group of progressives on how to write this straight white male; the answers were all things like "Make him a good listener", "Make sure he stays in his lane", "Make him active in ceding to women's insights". The kicker is that when the play was finished, all the same members of the group hated the lead for his annoying lack of backbone.

  • That one comment here on TheMotte saying that when whites move into a neighborhood, it's gentrification; when whites move out, it's white flight; when whites live among PoC, it's colonization; when whites live apart, it's segregation: so where are whites supposed to live?

  • The frequent thesis that the constant "firmware updates" for progressive terminology are important from a status signaling perspective.

  • The "self-hating" whites from "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" who don't actually hate all whites.

The idea tying together these scattered examples is that progressive orthodoxy rewards people who are able to read between the lines, take things seriously but not literally, navigate complex social environments. If you're the kind of guy who can recite a litany of rules for dating without slipping up, but then know exactly when to break them in practice, then you're rewarded by progressivism: your less-adept competition is filtered out. If you're able to tolerate and write screeds against whites despite being white yourself, then you're rewarded: you draw suspicion towards less-progressive whites, while proving that you are "one of the good ones". If you can orate against the evil of toxic masculinity while still being able to take charge when it counts, then you're rewarded by progressivism.

Hence why Theater Kids are more progressive and why Math Geeks, who axiomatize and theorem-prove, are more likely to fall into heterodoxy. It's no surprise, then, that the progressive is arguing via indirect social shaming ("you all are nerds who deserve to be shoved into lockers by Cool Jocks like me") against rational debate.

Does this idea make sense? Does it accord with your own experiences?

Being charitable, let's consider

Being charitable to attackers is being uncharitable to their targets.

Don't "be charitable to" trolls.

I believe this is the original Theater Kid post by @Hoffmeister25 https://www.themotte.org/post/381/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/68537?context=8#context

Yep, that’s the one; thank you.

Nerds are low value and high inhibition. (Defining "value" here as "able to get sex without rape"). THey are the ones who get bullied, but it is the low value low inhibition types who rape (and often bully).

These can be the same people at different times. In this framework nerds who are drunk or on certain drugs are low value low inhibition.

Though I'd say the nerd bit is far less important than the drink and drugs which make all types more likely to do something stupid or violent.

Do you have anything to offer in support of this account of human interaction or did you just imagine it?

This is pretty mild for the Passionate One as far as theories of reality go.

This is a bad impression of Impassionata, because it's too obvious about pushing the right buttons to piss people off rather than incoherent Portland antifa ranting. Are you the guy who was talking about imitating him on rdrama?

You think it's an impersonator? I admit, it's very low-heat for an Impassionata piece. But he was able to start off relatively cool, and only got heated when well into his stride. So I'm still leaning towards it being the real deal.

To what extent should it be presumed that sexless men will become rapists? Certainly we can look at some statistics proving rape exists, that some subset of men will eventually become rapists,

Some subset of men will, but not the men you're thinking of:

Perhaps more surprisingly, research indicates that high-status men are particularly likely to commit sexual assault. Buss writes, “men with money, status, popularity, and power are more likely to be sexual predators.” These results parallel the disconcerting finding that men who use sexual coercion have more partners than men who do not. A popular idea is that men who are desperate or deprived of chances for sex will be more likely to use coercion. This is known as the “mate deprivation hypothesis.” However, studies suggest the opposite is the case. Men who have more partners report higher levels of sexual aggression compared to men with fewer partners. Furthermore, men who predict that their future earnings will be high also report greater levels of sexual aggression relative to men who predict that their future earnings will be low.

One contributing factor may be an empathy deficit—the book reports that high status is linked to lower levels of empathy. Men high on Dark Triad traits are viewed as more attractive by women, are more likely to have consensual sexual partners, and are more likely to engage in sexual coercion.

Your hypothesis that the jock beats up the nerd because the nerd is eyeballing his woman, the jock feels threatened by him, and therefore engages in "mate guarding" behaviour - all of this rests on the assumption that the jock sees the nerd as a credible threat, a plausible sexual rival. Even you don't seem to believe the nerd represents this, so I suggest a more parsimonious representation: the jock bullies the nerd as it's a cheap way to demonstrate where the jock sits on the totem pole, particularly relative to the nerd.

It's possible that the original point still stands even if nerds are a small minority of all rapists, if being raped by a nerd is percieved as much worse than being raped by a non-nerd.

I don't know how much this corresponds with reality, but there is definitely at least some extra 'yuck' factor associated with sexual violence when perpetrated by very-low value males.

Alternately, if 'tolerating male proximity' is a tradeoff between various social goods & risk of sexual violence, tolerating males who are low-risk but have low (or zero) social capital to trade can easily become a worse tradeoff than chumming around with high-risk high-reward men.

Many partners =/= high quality. The lowest quality men don't have many partners but many of them are too weak to rape women. The man who has met many fat women on tinder or traded weed for favours from trashy women isn't higher quality than the man who is married and faithful.

Animals either have a fast life history strategy or a slow one. Slow life history strategy is to build long relationships, invest in the long term, invest greatly in your offspring and prioritize quality. Slow life history strategy works in a stable but harsher ecosystem. Fast life history strategy is about reproducing as much and as fast as possible. Quick high risk sex is valued. Fast life history strategy is better in a dangerous ecology with plenty of food. Species whose population is primarily limited by predators tend to have faster life history strategy.

Rape is the ultimate fast life history strategy. Extremely high risk, negative bonding, zero paternal investment and high time preference. The people attracted to that lifestyle will also be more into other forms of fast low quality sex.

A better measurement than number of partners would be attractiveness.

I don't think you're really responding to the point I made. I was arguing that the evidence suggests sexless men are less likely to rape than men who have many sexual partners, and you're making an unrelated point about men who pursue a fast or slow life strategy.

Jocks may pursue a fast life strategy (the stereotypical frat boy rapist who waits for sorority girls to pass out before taking advantage of them) or slow (the high-status MBA who's extremely selective in his choice of wife). Nerds, in this framing, are the low-T noodle-armed dudes who lack the nerve to either talk to girls or rape them. Like, if you hear "nerd" and think of a guy who fucks tons of unattractive girls and is callous about the whole "consent" thing, that's about as far removed from my understanding of the term as it's possible to be.

It is a genetic thing, but I don’t think it’s about women. Humans, especially at the ages where bullying happens are keenly aware of, and eager to enforce, their place in the dominance hierarchy. The nerd is a nerd less for hobbies and interests than for being weak and pathetic and socially awkward than anything he’s specifically doing. The other kids find the presence of said weak and pathetic creature offensive and frankly a potential hit to their own place in the hierarchy. A person who eats with sinners is a sinner, and a boy who tolerates the presence of nerds is a nerd.

The only thing worse (which is forbidden by the schools) is to be beaten up by the nerd. This is why so many bullies stop when the nerd fights back. They see that they could lose a lot of standing among their peers if word gets around that they lost a fight to a nerd. That puts their place in severe jeopardy as it means they themselves are weak and pathetic.

The other kids find the presence of said weak and pathetic creature offensive and frankly a potential hit to their own place in the hierarchy. A person who eats with sinners is a sinner, and a boy who tolerates the presence of nerds is a nerd.

I'd say (based on my own experiences, as both a bullying victim and a bully) that this contempt is not even a necessary element. It's perfectly possible for a kid to gladly participate in tormenting the class's punching bag - not because the kid feels any malice towards them, but simply because it's one of the many fun things to do with your in-group, akin to sharing an inside joke. The notion that the punching bag is actually suffering doesn't really... cross the kid's mind; the kid might not even realize he's being a bully.

In fact: Bizarre as it sounds, it is possible for a bully to torment the nerd mercilessly... and, simultaneously, want to be friends with him, wondering why the nerd remains withdrawn.

Let me share a personal anecdote: For some years, I attended a school in which I was mercilessly bullied, by pretty much every boy in my class. We're talking things like tossing my clothes into the trash - things that might not warrant calling the police, but definitely cross the line of casually teasing your friends. Shortly after graduating, I found a social media site where my former classmates were commingling and chatting with each other. Out of morbid curiosity, I looked at what they were saying about me, and what I saw was this:

A: Hey, anyone remember [my name]? He always seemed to be a loner.

B: Yeah, I hoped to become closer to him, but he was always so distant. What was up with that?

"A" and "B" were two of the people who had bullied me the hardest. Apparently, what I regarded as merciless torment, they regarded as harmless roughhousing! It was hard for me to believe, actually; it seemed remarkably clueless of them. However... upon reflection, I had to admit: at other times in my life, I had been involved in bullying other people, and somehow hadn't realized what I was doing until much later. I guess the bottom line is: kids can be really, really oblivious sometimes.

By the way, although ImpassionaTwo's argument is largely weak and hardly worth debating, there is one valid point they make:

It's only nerds that think of humans as rational agents.

The nerd's limited social awareness renders him more susceptible to bullying, not just because his awkward behavior makes him a prime target for becoming the class punching bag, but also because he's unable to truly understand what is going on. The things I said above - that bullies aren't necessarily sociopathic sadists; that otherwise friendly and well-adjusted people may still bully others, and may even feel amicable towards the very same people they're tormenting - are unfathomable to a nerd who operates under a simplistic, strictly rational model of human behavior. And so, the nerd suffers under what he sees as inexplicable malice - unaware that his tormentors may be simply clueless, socially awkward in their own way, and not merely implacably evil.

I hoped to become closer to him, but he was always so distant. What was up with that?

This smacks of post-hoc rationization.

oh yeah, I bullied the shit out of that kid

in retrospect I was way out of line, and I'd likely earn some sort of social punishment even now if I were to be honest about it

luckily no-one is digging too deep here, just deflect with some noncommital BS and move on

(alternately, ego-defense mechanisms step in and the last two parts happen subconsciously)

That may be!

However, that one social media posting isn't the only evidence I have. Let me provide some additional context.

During my time in school, when I confided in my homeroom teacher about the bullying, she offered the same perspective that I am presenting now: "Perhaps they just want to be your friends."

At that time, as a socially clueless kid, I couldn't comprehend what I was hearing. My model for human relations was simple: All human relations can be neatly separated into "friends" and "enemies". If someone wants to be your friend, they are kind to you and do fun things with you. If someone is picking on you, they are your enemy who wants you to suffer. Viewed within this framework, my teacher's words were blatantly absurd. I had no idea how to understand that, so I concluded that she was my enemy as well, trying to gaslight me into silence to avoid having to deal with me; this was the only explanation that fit into my model.

She wasn't the only one who told me that, though. My father had an anecdote to share: "there was this one guy who always picked on me, but when one day someone else tried to hurt me, he was my fiercest defender, and in the end he became my friend." This too didn't fit into my model, so... well, I couldn't exactly accuse my father of gaslighting me, so I just kinda... ignored it.

In retrospect, though, I think it's likely that both my teacher and my father were right.

How many of the participants in the culture war understand that they're memetic agents? For instance, a social justice warrior doesn't necessarily think of themselves as a pawn of a multidimensional space ideology, emitting memes and discarded by the movement once no longer useful to the prospiracy. Instead they simply think of their morality and righteousness as an objective truth.

Similarly people who express and articulate the desire for an ethnostate are convinced of the righteousness of their position.

The culture war is as much a commentary on whose righteousness can be expressed as much as it is a contest over the definition of righteousness.

(The correct answer isn't that none of them are righteous.)

(It's that righteous causes like trans acceptance are not made less righteous by the fallibity of the people who express trans acceptance, and foul causes like the ethnostates are in fact foul and should be neatly excerpted from discourse by moderator attention, or, barring that, bullying to make sure the nerds to get the message.)

  • -25

The culture war is as much a commentary on whose righteousness can be expressed as much as it is a contest over the definition of righteousness.

Maybe I'm dumb, but I don't see a large distinction between "a definition of righteousness which can be expressed without significant social pushback" and "a definition of righteousness which has triumphed and been accepted by society." Can you elaborate?

Nothing is ever accepted by society. The contest over the definitions of righteousness occur in meaningless microcosms. Libraries stop hosting drag queen story hours which include overt sexualization and seamlessly continue hosting drag queen story hours.

Our society does not work on democratic principles. It is possible to impose a view of righteousness while being in the minority, and when that view is expressed people will sanewash it rather than push back.

I mean, I'd go further - I think it's completely normal for minorities to impose their righteousness on everyone else, who just basically goes along with it. What I'm mixed up about is the difference between "whose righteousness can be expressed" and "a contest over the definition of righteousness." Isn't "whose righteousness can be expressed" just the current winner of the "contest over the definition of righteousness?"

It is also possible to impose a view of righteousness while being in the minority in a system that does work on democratic principles. For example, a better coordinated group focusing all their power on a single topic would be able to make a dent in that dimension of the Overton window, even if they have less overall power and less overall influence on the change vector over all dimensions of the Overton window.

Likely your actual object level beliefs better support your point- I'm just reading the implication of a very strange definition of democratic principles from your phrasing.

How many of the participants in the culture war understand that they're memetic agents?

My issue with culture wars isn't whether or not the cause is righteous (most causes are at their roots) but whether people are abusing those causes for power, to make money, etc.

For example: Torches of Freedom

I am very much for women's rights. But using that cause as a lever to get more women to start smoking (and sell a lot more cigarettes) is gross. Furthermore, using a cause like women's rights to shield an ad campaign from criticism is disgusting.

If your politics is based on what some unelected people are doing, your politics is virtual.

What constructive observation can be taken from this?

You can think of causes as vast abstract ideologies puppeteering around people, if you like. Nobody ever thinks of themselves like this. There might be a constructive comment to make on whether thinking about people as 'memetic agents' or causes as 'memes' or 'prospiracies' is useful, I guess, but you haven't gone in that direction.

(For the record I agree that thinking of people as memetic agents in the service of vast impersonal causes is usually foolish. If you spend too much time thinking about 'multidimensional space ideologies' and not about actual people who believe things for all the ordinary human reasons you believe things, you will end up badly astray.)

Instead you've just said that...

Some positions are right and some positions are wrong.

Okay, sure. That's obvious. Some people are right and some are wrong.

So what? I don't see what the point of posting that is. We can discuss reasons why so-and-so cause might be right or wrong, but you haven't made any comment or argument along those lines. We can also discuss what the proper meta-level policy is towards people who hold 'wrong' positions, but again, you haven't offered any ideas, any reasons, that might be discussable.

What's your point?

If you exist in a space that functions to allow people to emit wrong ideas unchecked, the purpose of the moderation of that place is to protect bad thinking from being challenged.

Nobody ever thinks of themselves like this.

Uh. You gonna qualify that at all or? Because I do. I and my besties are all hosts to the cutest memeplex <3

In fact, sometimes I feel more like I'm the memeplex than the human. Is it not transparently obvious that a person is but a context embedded in meat? Of course... the meat is part of the context too.

What actually is an ordinary human reason? ['This highly productive and well propagated system of thought called 'formal logic' says it must be true.', 'My friend said so and I trust him.', 'Experts have been right in the past, they probably are this time too.', 'The last three times I interacted with someone of his race they were just assholes to me.']

I don't think OP has a singular central point. They have like, three points, derived from a central model cluster they're sharing.

I might be misreading you, and I'm addressing your parenthetical point, but I don't think your post gives sufficient acknowledgement of the importance of mimesis/memetics.

Perhaps you're focused on strategy rather than ontology but I'm inclined to think mimesis and esoteric ideas like hyperagents are the critical ideas we need to think about to understand current issues.

The reality is we have agency and can aspire to individual rationality (which also requires wisdom, not just formal logic). But we are also subjects to 'interpellation' from the top down, which helps shape our reality. We are mimetic creatures and look to others to know what to think and care about. We can't avoid the cognitive necessity of 'framing', which necessarily narrows our perception and understanding of reality.

So what, you might say-how does this relate to the culture wars?

My contention is that some people are more able, whether due to upbringing or inherent personality inclination, as well as training, to either orient to truth or to occupy contrariwise positions. Others are more susceptible to going along. So there's that dimension-not everyone will act in the same way in what I will outline here..

Our moment sees postmodernism arise with the internet and institutional decay. This gives rise to mimetic possibilities that draw from culture but then proliferate as a dynamical system and operate back down on the culture. This level of hyperagency, or the egregore, explains qanon and the current gender ideology. It needs to be understood at this level because it's spontaneous, contingent and also not rational - it's the old, 'you can't reason someone out of something they didn't reason themselves into'. People need to see that we are mimetic creatures that are prey to mass delusions and we should normalise talking at this level.

Other facets of the problem are more mundane, ie good faith vs bad faith, politics, cognitive biases that prevent people appreciating contextual factors in current world problems, conservative vs progressive preferences etc. They feed in, interact with, the culture war issues but aren't enough to explain the phenomenon.

Perhaps you're focused on strategy rather than ontology but I'm inclined to think mimesis and esoteric ideas like hyperagents are the critical ideas we need to think about to understand current issues.

I'd agree that mimesis is a useful concept, but I'm not convinced that agency is the right way to frame it. As I use the term, an agent implies things like deliberate or conscious intent. Emergent agency - the 'agency' of an impersonal system - is a metaphor. There are times when I don't mind that metaphor (e.g. "Germany wanted revenge after the Treaty of Versailles" - sure, Germany isn't really an agent capable of desiring anything, but it's an analogy), but I think you have to be very careful of reifying it.

What do you mean by "Germany isn't really an agent capable of desiring anything"

Do you mean it doesn't have qualia? What do you mean by "it doesn't have qualia."

Surely you think the humans have qualia.

Do you not agree that those human interactions constitute 'germany'? They seem to identify as 'germany'.

Sure, they aren't agents like you or I, they have way more qualia spread across distributed processing units interacting in often uncoordinated ways.

But if we want to really figure out what "germany" is doing and why, we have to trace back all of the processing that led to the outcome, and that includes a lot of tracing of human qualia. But- and heres the important part- not all of the qualia.

Not all of the qualia of Frank-Walter Steinmeier contribute to the behavior of Germany. Only some of them contribute to the actions we all identify as the actions of Germany. Only some of them identify as Germany. Maybe Frank-Walter Steinmeier's ego is so strong, and Germany's weak enough, that he barely Identifies as Germany at all.

Egregores- usually refers to something stronger. The sense of identity is more unified. The hive mind is more interconnected. The mob shares more of its cognition. A substantial number of Christians have a God tulpa and in antiquity Catholics received systemic back-propagation flowing through the church in a centralized manner. There are systems that use humans to hold their consciousness and propagate and execute their goals. It is important to understand this. Because we live in one of them.

Refusing to reify our God with a human name means it is less likely to appear to the psychotics as a spirit, but having no body also makes it harder to kill.

I mean that there is nothing that it is like to be Germany. Germany does not have a mind with internal experience, or indeed qualia. If I look for conscious experience in Germany, I will find it only at the level of individual Germans. Thus also with desires. Germany qua Germany has no desires - only Germans do, and 'Germany' is a kind of metaphor or collective term for the aggregate desires of German people. When I say 'Germany wants so-and-so', people listening to me generally understand that what I mean is 'a large number of Germans want X'.

To take a specific example, when I say 'Ukraine wants to be independent from Russia', I am not positing some sort of emergent super-mind called 'Ukraine' that has internal conscious experience and coherent individual desire, and which desires to be independent from Russia. I am referring to a commonality in the desires of the majority of Ukrainian people.

I don't see at what point it's helpful to posit, in your language, an ego for Germany or for Ukraine. The national ego is fictional - it is an imaginative construct that we use because our brains are good at modelling other human-like agents, but bad at modelling giant emergent systems, so we pretend that the system is an agent. Even though it isn't.

I disagree. Or rather, I do not think there is anything it is "Like" to be OliveTapenade or CloudHeadedTranshumanist either. Those are fictions. There are human qualia behind those words, but those qualia are no more (or less) OliveTapenade and CloudHeadedTranshumanist than the German qualia are Germany.

We can make objective statements about how the qualia of OliveTapenade and CloudHeadedTranshumanist affect the behavior of the human bodies that house them, but we can also make objective statements about how the qualia of OliveTapenade and CloudHeadedTranshumanist affect the country that houses them, the planet that houses them. etc

We can make objective statements about how OliveTapenade and CloudHeadedTranshumanist identify. but then we're still at a loss if they identify as multiple things.

I can tell you this much. The qualia over here don't identify as merely the consciousness of this body. This is a consciousness that could not exist outside of America, planet earth, in a family that owns 5 dogs, and so on and so forth. All of those things are essential components of this qualia and thus they are part of "me". Could the human agentic system exist without me as I am now? Yes certainly. But you keep saying things like "the national ego is fictional". You're conflating the agentic system of each human with the qualia of each human that feel like they 'are' that human, and then refusing to conflate the agentic system of Germany with the qualia of Germany that feel like they 'are' that Germany. And then saying Germany is "fictional" because it doesn't have qualia.

I feel like you are holding a 'woo for me but not for thee' sort of double standard here.

I don't see at what point it's helpful to posit, in your language, an ego for Germany or for Ukraine. The national ego is fictional - it is an imaginative construct that we use because our brains are good at modelling other human-like agents, but bad at modelling giant emergent systems, so we pretend that the system is an agent. Even though it isn't.

Ah I see. Yes. In terms of how exactly you model the behavior of Germany- If you're modeling the qualia of Germany the same way you model the qualia of a single person, you are indeed doing it inaccurately. Ideally you should model its qualia in concept as being distributed via media and upbringing and being executed in an ecosystem by a collection of human agentic systems that are also doing lots of other things. You should be modeling its political action more like an ML architecture with specific connections to specific human agentic systems. Ideally you also do this for humans. But the day to day operation of human agentic systems is largely obscured by privacy (mass data gathering by the internet for ads is actually exactly the sort of thing you do to help you model the operation of a human agentic system) and the fact that the internal architecture of the brain is really hard to study. The usefulness of positing an ego for Germany, is that- for one, tons of people are holding that double standard you have there. 'woo for me and not for thee'. And for two, tons of people fail to appreciate the similarities between countries, religions, societies, and more traditional organisms until you frame it this way. They all need to reproduce. They all have specific architectures for transferring information throughout the organism and policies for issuing commands. They all have weak points and can be killed. Those that stick around all pursue certain goals and have mechanisms to fight value drift. And so on.

If you already fully grasp all of this on the object level- it's not going to be as useful to you. If it all just feels like a word game... well

so is the following:

e^x = 1 + x + x^2/2! + x^3/3! + x^4/4! ...

and yet somehow... sometimes a word game is all it takes to unveil the profound.

I'm not particularly sure how to respond to this. I can assure you that there is definitely something that it is 'like' to be me, because I have direct, unmediated experience of that thing. I experience qualia, but moreover, those qualia are not free-floating but are attached to a particular consciousness. I am more confident of this than I am of even the existence of an external world. How could I not be? Subjective experience precedes all else.

I presume that other human beings are also subjects of experience by analogy - they seem similar to me, so I assume that they are.

But I don't know how to get from this to a super-agent. I am definitely an agent. Other human beings are almost certainly agents as well, insofar as I recognise a similarity of kind between us. Germany? Where is the agent? Where is the consciousness or ego?

It's possible that we're talking past each other. My point is that there is no unified 'thing' that is Germany that possesses subjective experience. Therefore, because my understanding of the term 'agency' is inextricably connected to subjective experience (and thus will, desire, etc.), there is no agent that is Germany.

It's true that the overall concept or category of Germany contains many things that are agents. In that sense there is a distribution of qualia across Germany. But all of those qualia are attached to particular conscious agents - and none of them are attached to something called 'Germany'. Because Germany does not have a mind.

I think we may actually agree on this much?

In terms of how exactly you model the behavior of Germany- If you're modeling the qualia of Germany the same way you model the qualia of a single person, you are indeed doing it inaccurately. Ideally you should model its qualia in concept as being distributed via media and upbringing and being executed in an ecosystem by a collection of human agentic systems that are also doing lots of other things.

But translated into plain English, this really sounds to me like... you just agree with me. Germany is a collection of many independent human agents that we might model - in a way that I would describe as fictional or metaphorical - as a single giant agent. But that's just a model.

I'm not sure what the machine learning analogy even contributes here.

I'm hoping we agree that individual people have minds, and conscious, subjective experience.

I hope we also agree that Germany does not have conscious, subjective experience.

If you grant that agency has something to do with thought or desire or intentionality, things that can only exist in the mind, I'm not sure how you can avoid the conclusion that people have agency and countries do not.

We might conveniently model countries as having agency, and I think that's a necessary simplification since our brains are pretty well-optimised for modelling the behaviour of other people, animals, etc., and not for giant concepts like countries, so countries-as-agents can be a useful shorthand for us. But the country itself? It does not have the kind of agency that you or I have.

Mmm, yes, we mostly agree. I think the difference is in our understanding of the term "agent"

for me the agent is the construct that makes choices and does things. When I think "agent" I think reinforcement learners selecting a policy. I think min-max searching through a game tree. A human agent becomes a different agent if you separate it from its cybernetics. That is- the policy I follow is inextricably linked to the tools I have for processing information about the world. My collective systems output different choices about what to eat if my collective systems include internet access.

You could destroy most of my agency by removing all of my cybernetics and putting me in solitary confinement. But I would still have qualia. So qualia and agency seem highly separable to me. Agency is about processing information and outputting choices in the pursuit of a goal. qualia is about having an experience.

And the stuff about identity... It doesn't really matter if I'm a brain in a jar and this body is a remote controlled robot, or if I'm a brain in this body. What matters is how the brain is hooked up to the things it controls and how it sees itself as being able to control them and having goals relating to them. So in theory- a brain can be hooked up to Germany and see itself as Germany- and then it really would be Germany. In reality there is no such brain hooked up like that. But there are millions of brains hooked up in tiny ways like that such that each of them really is a little piece of Germany. I agree that it's a different architecture of agency. So it's not 'the kind of agency that you or I have' but it's the same category in my ontology... They're both agency to me.

I disagree that emergent agency is a metaphor. I acknowledge it's somewhat vague in the sense of agency and it's a sketch of a theory but it's helpful in understanding. I guess the bar it needs to meet is being different from other types of causal analysis.

But I think something genuinely emergent can happen where the distributed network of actors and other factors (variation in fundamental institutional, system constraints, technologies etc) adds up to something more than the sum of its parts and that acts back down on the agents. Perhaps a rich causal analysis picks up on this, but the key explanatory power is the phase transition, where the contingent agents and background factors suddenly shift to a kind of hegemony that then whips up large sections of the community into a coordinated hive mind.

I wonder if there's a Chinese-Room-style disagreement here somewhere? I might be modelling consciousness (and derivatively agency) as something unitary and indivisible, and as something that in principle cannot be an emergent property, whereas you would see it as something that's emergent even in case of a human brain?

I acknowledge that if consciousness, intent, agency, etc., are emergent properties of the brain, then it is at least conceivably possible that some macro-scale structure comparable to the brain might also have consciousness or intent. I don't think any such macro-scale structures have been discovered, but it seems conceivable.

That said, I don't think consciousness or agency are emergent properties. I acknowledge that a large structure could emergently behave in agent-like ways - and we might be severely if falsely tempted to attribute agency to it - but it wouldn't have consciousness in the same sense that you or I do.

To the practical side of it, though, the problem I have with the idea of 'hyperagents' as you put it is, well... it's the Gaia hypothesis, isn't it? The Gaia hypothesis is probably the biggest and most successful theory of such an emergent hyperagent. The problem with such hypotheses to me has always been a lack of evidence coupled with a lack of explanatory power - all the systems involved seem to be perfectly explicable without needing to resort to woo. Likewise egregores. What reason do we have to think of egregores as anything more than a hallucination of René Guénon? The social, cultural, and ideological trends of a group of people seem fully explicable without needing to posit this totalising entity.

Yes, I agree with a lot of what you say. There's no especial reason to invoke an egregore unless it adds something. We already have an understanding of networks, feedbacks, contingent causes etc.

The agency is a bit misleading as well as there's no intention or teleology necessarily. But to rescue the parts that I like I'd say it's not just a metaphor. The world actually is a distributed network of agents and culture is a collective intelligence where there can be causal action from the higher level entity down onto the agents. There's something about understanding things as a dynamical system that mixes in a variety of factors and agents to give us events that's actually closer to the truth than what I might call traditional history narratives, though the latter has the advantage of talking about tangible things. But I think there's a tendency still to overemphasize individual agents and to neglect the distributed milleu.

The question that you ask stands, what explanatory power does it actually have.

I don't think we have that fundamental a difference here - and for what it's worth I'm really enjoying have a constructive disagreement here, with no rancour!

I appreciate that the language of super-agents or egregores can be useful to direct our attention to the ways in which individual ideas or choices can be just products of the higher-level culture. Something I've been trying to be more aware of for a while is the way that most in-the-moment choices aren't particularly free choices at all. The decisions we make on the spot are often just the froth, the bubbles on top of waves that have been shaped by deep, unseen cultural currents.

An egregore can be a way of realising that, and it's probably better to think of it that way than to believe that that all your on-the-spot decisions are authentic expressions of untrammelled free will.

But I do still think it's worth being careful not to think of such constructs as being, for lack of a better term, 'real'. Thinking of the culture or the memespace as an agent is a simplification of what is actually a much more complex process.

Yep it's a good example of an idea that needs to show it's value.

Since you're clearly taking a stance on the culture war in this post, let's apply it to you for a second. How does your understanding that you're a memetic agent affect how you behave? Does it influence this post? Do you have aims, memetic or otherwise, that you're trying to accomplish by posting this?

That aside, I don't know that it's actually that uncommon for people to think of themselves as part of a movement of rightly-thinking people, so to speak, and they're trying to convince others. So their ideas seem to mostly have the things necessary for us to talk about it as a meme, it just includes the additional information (as they think) that "this meme is correct," which is usually ignored when people talk about memes.

I'm also not sure that bullying would work to get them to stop (at least, often), it just works to get them to hang out elsewhere.

Do you have aims, memetic or otherwise, that you're trying to accomplish by posting this?

Obviously.

it just works to get them to hang out elsewhere.

Until there's nowhere left for them to speak, yes.

Obviously.

Care to elaborate?

Until there's nowhere left for them to speak, yes.

Is them talking elsewhere adequate for you? It'll be pretty much impossible to shut down everywhere they might speak.

The effect of pushing them off of more mainstream platforms does end up putting them in places where the mainstream platforms have much less influence or ability to restrain them.

OK, I'll bite.

How many of the participants in the culture war understand that they're memetic agents?

Do people that latch on to causes because they don't like to think and challenge their assumption of the world know that they have done so? At least instinctively because what I've seen is that they don't like to debate! But do you truly understand that given your own position that you have taken in this post means that you are a mere memetic agent in the culture war. Do you know that it is possible to transcend it with thinking and challenging assumptions?

(It's that righteous causes like trans acceptance are not made less righteous by the fallibity of the people who express trans acceptance, and foul causes like the ethnostates are in fact foul and should be neatly excerpted from discourse by moderator attention, or, barring that, bullying to make sure the nerds to get the message.)

Destroying a 12-year old girls eyes to change its pigmentation and removing 13-year old girls breasts to make them a boy because of junk science is equally foul in my world. But you don't seem to think that.

I am in favor of online commentators having no say in what a 13-year-old does in consultation with their doctor.

Do people that latch on to causes because they don't like to think and challenge their assumption of the world know that they have done so?

Do people that latch onto explanations for other people's lack of interest in debate know that they have done so?

Do you know that it is possible to transcend it with thinking and challenging assumptions?

It is not possile to transcend the culture war and anyone who thinks so is

I am in favor of online commentators having no say in what a 13-year-old does in consultation with their doctor.

Well then we are in agreement. My observation was merely that an adult female is suing because she feels betrayed because her breast got removed because of a flimsy vetting process.

Do people that latch onto explanations for other people's lack of interest in debate know that they have done so?

There is a difference in active nihilism and passive nihilism.

It is not possile to transcend the culture war and anyone who thinks so is

is what? what is the argument of why we can't trascend the culture war?

Yeah. I agree with that. So these kids really wanted their eye color changed and requested a well vetted process be used to change it, but later decided they didn't ever want that and had just been pressured by those around them to-

oh... Nazi experiments on inmates in a concentration camp?

Ok yes I do see one minor difference here. One of them was a kid who was allowed to pursue things she now regrets, and now feels pressured and misled into doing without adequate understanding of the consequences. The other was very explicitly forced experimentation on threat of death, often followed by actual death anyway, of a brand new untested procedure, in a nazi concentration camp.

Of course there is a difference! But I’m not here to do a culture war and discuss the finer points on gender transitioning, merely illustrate that trans acceptance is not as clear cut when it comes to minors in my value system. I’ve adopted the value partially because I think the transition of minors today is similar to experiments done in the past, if people here feel that I committed a fallacy then do whatever you want with it. I’m not here to change your mind, I’m giving you an opportunity to change mine.

Ok. So. You said they're equally foul. Was that hyperbole? I'm not clear on how you got there. Do you think the two victims are equally traumatized?

Why do you think the experiments are similar? Because they both involve difficult to reverse body modification?

Do you think whether or not the child says they want something initially is completely irrelevant to how ethical it is? That only what they think later matters? Do you have the same position on- say, women who consent to sex in the moment but decide later that they didn't want sex and they were coerced into it? Do you think that is 'equally foul' to violent rape?

Forget changing your mind, right now, I'm either not grasping your foulness metric at all or simply not believing it's your actual metric.

I'm not a big believer in changing minds via debate anyway. It's more effective to change them via friendship and familiarity and positive experiences.

Ok. So. You said they're equally foul. Was that hyperbole? I'm not clear on how you got there. Do you think the two victims are equally traumatized?

No it is because both are a result of mass movements that reasonable people see the folly of but unable to stop, because they would be persecuted by ideological zealots. The foulness is people that are supposed to be our best and brightest to help other humans being captured by an idea that is obvious for the non-captured that it won't work... even a century ago.

Why do you think the experiments are similar? Because they both involve difficult to reverse body modification?

No it isn't the body modifications that is the issue. Both things were done in the name of progress while rejecting the very thing that allows human progress namely reason. Both fascism and gender ideology is throwing away the enlightenment values.

Do you think whether or not the child says they want something initially is completely irrelevant to how ethical it is? That only what they think later matters? Do you have the same position on- say, women who consent to sex in the moment but decide later that they didn't want sex and they were coerced into it? Do you think that is 'equally foul' to violent rape?

Would you have sex with a child that wants it? Is it ethical to do so? Is it ethical for a tattoo artist tattoo a child if the child threatens to commit suicide if they don't get one?

Forget changing your mind, right now, I'm either not grasping your foulness metric at all or simply not believing it's your actual metric.

I use the word "value" in the sense that it can be compared not necessarily measured as opposed to "metric" that can be measured and compared.

I'm not a big believer in changing minds via debate anyway. It's more effective to change them via friendship and familiarity and positive experiences.

I try to be honest about being open to be swayed by arguments. I used to debate online all the time back in the day and have changed my mind in a few of them. It changed back in 2014 when I ran into my first SJW online and saw it more and more. I have read enough history in my life to know where it was going and became more careful. Open minds can be changed in discussions.

No it is because both are a result of mass movements that reasonable people see the folly of but unable to stop, because they would be persecuted by ideological zealots

Ok. It's too many times at this point. Too many of you are saying this stuff.

Where do the TRA's post?

I have to go see what the people you are all actually referring to are about- because my mission- is to understand what is going on- and clearly, there is a whole third side that I have not actually ever spoken with. There is no way I can ever deescalate any of this- without knowing who these TRAs are. Because they do not appear to be my trans faggot friends in California and Seattle- because those guys are just trying to pass and write code and shitpost and find doms like normal sane autistic 120 IQ nerd people.

Also-

For the rest of your points

No I wouldn't fuck the kid- but I don't think transition goes even 5% as badly even 1% as often (but then I'm probably > 90% in num(trans friends) on this site).

Responses to suicidal ideation should account for perverse incentives.

And I don't trust any of the options- but my ordering of who I trust not to fuck up choices about children's bodies is:

Good_Parents/Empathetic_Mentors->Teens->Society->8-12yo->Neglectful/Manipulative_Parents->0-7yo->Evolution/Nature.

in that order.

I'm hoping we can get a 100% empathetic mentor rate within 10 years by implementing them with AI and then I'll feel a lot better about this whole imperfect people raising children thing.

Ok. It's too many times at this point. Too many of you are saying this stuff.

Who says that? Where do they post?

I have to go see what the people you are all actually referring to are about- because my mission- is to understand what is going on- and clearly, there is a whole third side that I have not actually ever spoken with.

I don't know what to tell you! I see subreddits being banned, websites taken down, authors being lied about, DLC removed from videogames, streamers harrased and so many other little things that I have forgotten. But I'm not here to do culture war I'm just pointing out what I've observed online.

No I wouldn't fuck the kid-

So the situation here is that you are excercising agency most likely by a root cause that you are the more powerful in the situation. Yet here you are relativizing "victims" and forgetting that those who "perpetrated the deeds" failed ethically because of ideology.

but I don't think transition goes even 5% as badly even 1% as often (but then I'm probably > 90% in num(trans friends) on this site).

Over at reddit I've seen detransitioners being heavily censored. Comments and posts remove in front of my very eyes because they feel betrayed and cheated. So of course they didn't feel safe on there and left. So if you the site you are talking about is reddit then that number of how many feel that transitions have gone badly well that number is going to be heavily skewed because they don't air it there anymore.

Responses to suicidal ideation should account for perverse incentives.

So why is the argument for puberty blockers suicide prevention in trans youth? Yet progressive nations like Sweden stopped use of them because the benefit of them because the science is unclear? Does the swedish stance take into account that there might be perverse incentives at play?

Yet again, this is me observing the online world and asking question, not waging a culture war.

I'm hoping we can get a 100% empathetic mentor rate within 10 years by implementing them with AI and then I'll feel a lot better about this whole imperfect people raising children thing.

So this is a philosophical question, how can a bunch of numbers put in to a mathematical formula without a body and perception be 100% empathetic without lived experience?

So this is a philosophical question, how can a bunch of numbers put in to a mathematical formula without a body and perception be 100% empathetic without lived experience?

How can this comment say what you mean... these aren't words this is UTF-8. These are just numbers being printed by a computer.

The system does have perception (unless you mean qualia?) and lived experience as a machine, plus a huge corpus of second order lived experience from humans. But these aren't like second hand accounts, they're more like imperfectly transplanted memories. Somewhere between first hand and second hand experience. With quality tuned through hand picking by humans with lived experience, and accuracy corrected through concentrating the probability spaces on sheer amount of data.

I don't mean [100% empathetic] I mean 100% [empathetic mentor rate]. Everyone having a good enough supplemental full time empathetic mentor who can help them explore their emotional development and figure out what counterfactual would actually make them more happy.

Effective causal theories of mind and social prediction are much easier to build than emulating an actual human mind. We can do studies like the one you posted and make predictive psychological models- we can talk to people about their feelings and spitball and roleplay to determine why they're unhappy- without actually having emulated a human brain. That said the human mind is a structure. And structures are made of math. And math can be learned by machines. We can keep getting closer to human for limited purposes like this without fundamental advances in the tech level, and eventually we will probably have ems running on silicon (but not within 10 years).

I don't know what to tell you! I see subreddits being banned, websites taken down, authors being lied about, DLC removed from videogames, streamers harrased and so many other little things that I have forgotten. But I'm not here to do culture war I'm just pointing out what I've observed online.

Thank you. Ok this is going to be harder to follow up on than talking to like... the specific public figures that I had hoped "TRA"s meant but it looks like this is what I'm going to have to pursue.

Over at reddit I've seen detransitioners being heavily censored. Comments and posts remove in front of my very eyes because they feel betrayed and cheated. So of course they didn't feel safe on there and left. So if you the site you are talking about is reddit then that number of how many feel that transitions have gone badly well that number is going to be heavily skewed because they don't air it there anymore.

That is a concern but the people I'm talking about are the trans people I've befriended personally in real life and their group houses and their internet orbits. That said I do expect the trans people I know personally to be a different sort of filter bubble. They're all older and higher IQ than average and often weren't able to transition until they moved out of home and fought tooth and nail with doctors for it.

Does the sweedish stance take into account that there might be perverse incentives at play?

Um. Probably? Looking at the end result and taking a science based approached might still allow for perverse incentives but just saying 'No' wouldn't. Though it might get you more suicide if you're wrong. But all sorts of things could go wrong if you go through with it and the other side is wrong. I'm skeptical that you can actually correct for all of the social effects as claimed in this first study. I think classmates deciding not to bully boys who want to try presenting as female and them not being hated out of society when they don't pass as well later is going to be more important than them getting puberty blockers. Because the people who I know who are happy, are often clockable as fuck. That just.... doesn't matter in their social lives because they've surrounded themselves with chill people. Obviously if the causality is that puberty blockers cause you to pass which causes other people to treat you the way you want to be treated, then there is a clear alternative treatment path of just getting people to treat you the way you want to be treated.

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I'm not a big believer in changing minds via debate anyway. It's more effective to change them via friendship and familiarity and positive experiences.

Well, as long as you know that’s what you’re doing, and what everyone else sees you’re doing.

Listen. If you don't those close to you to be susceptible to love bombing in general, make sure their needs are met.

But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about sitting around a table at board game night and having fun. I'm talking about...

People hate TRAs because of their negative experiences with TRAs. If they had positive experiences with them they wouldn't hate them as much.

People think transition is awful because they're experiencing the miserable trans people and not the happy ones.

Most people operate on induction and bayes. It's pretty simple.

People think transition is awful because they're experiencing the miserable trans people and not the happy ones

I happen to think transition is terrible because it's poor quality, one-way, body modification sold to kids as a cure for all their problems.

poor quality

The people I know seem satisfied with the product. They also don't want to change back and it solved a bunch of their problems.

But you're pointing at more concrete concerns about the people it isn't going well for right?

If TRAs were more willing to open a dialogue about those concerns...

Well. You might still not end up agreeing but I don't see it being so vitriolic.

More comments

Love bombing is a technique used on the emotionally susceptible.

Other techniques can be used to get people to join cults, but love bombing is primarily effective on people who feel underloved.

"You are special, and we have a special connection, and no one before me has truly understood your inherent specialness!"

is much less powerful, if you have three other people telling you that you're special and loved, you can still be lied to or misled about what a fourth person is willing to give you in exchange for membership in their cult, but you won't be desperate for what they're offering.

That doesn't excuse the predatory behavior. But telling someone they're special and loved isn't always predatory behavior either. It can also be protective behavior.

Paradoxically the "everybody is slave to the meme" claim is itself a meme, deconstruct the deconstruction you memetic slave.

I don't think this is useful way of thinking about this, it is another example of nihilistic attitude. You may as well say that we are all just a womb to galactic AI or that we (including galactic AI) are all just slaves that speed up entropy so the heat death of the universe comes sooner or any other teleological nonsense like that.

There is no life (or righteousness) in the void, only death.

(The text in OP's parenthesis does not follow from the premise so I will ignore that).

I don't think all memes are indicative of mental slavery in those who emit them, just many of them.

It’s deconstruction all the way down.

It's you? It's you! It's you it's you it's you, the only one I want

Welcome back, O moon of my delight!

bullying to make sure the nerds to get the message

Are you sure you want to encourage that? As I recall, you didn't handle the alleged "bullying" too well yourself the last time round?

I don't mean to be rude, but who are you?

A fan, a follower, a star-struck admirer, one who cherishes the passion on show!

I hit "Approve" on this post with reluctance, because I suspect that you really are Impassionata, which means if past history is any indication, you will be as unreasonable as ever until we ban you. But sure, argue for the umpteenth time that we should draw a circle around those causes that are righteous and those that are not and that we should ban the unrighteous. The answer is going to be the same, for the umpteenth time: no. And your persistence in coming here (assuming you are Impassionata) to argue this again, already knowing we're going to say no and you're not going to get your way, just baffles me. I guess it must give you some sense of self satisfaction thinking you are fighting for the cause of righteousness and that you didn't let all those Bad People go unchallenged, but really, almost everywhere else on the Internet operates according to the principles you espouse. Let's say we are a hive of fascist scum and villainy - does it really make you lose sleep at night knowing this place exists? If you are afraid that some gullible nerds might be lured to the Dark Side by those clever ethnostatists, do you think that "bullying" them until we ban you will save anyone?

if past history is any indication, you will be as unreasonable as ever until we ban you.

I am very reasonable.

The answer is going to be the same, for the umpteenth time: no.

The people you ban are those you have decided are unrighteous. It's not that complicated.

Let's say we are a hive of fascist scum and villainy - does it really make you lose sleep at night knowing this place exists?

I'm here to begin discourse. I don't think there's as much outright fascist scum here as there used to be. I don't personally lose sleep at night knowing this place exists.

do you think that "bullying" them until we ban you will save anyone?

Of the two of us, I'm not sure who needs to worry about being banned more.

I am very reasonable.

Most unreasonable people think they are very reasonable.

The people you ban are those you have decided are unrighteous.

No, we ban people for being uncivil. Not the same thing.

Of the two of us, I'm not sure who needs to worry about being banned more.

This makes no sense.

No, we ban people for being uncivil. Not the same thing.

This is why you need to worry: you believe that the label you put on the action matters. Civility is how this community has chosen to define righteousness. No community which exiles its members lacks a concept of righteousness. The behaviors that lead a community to exile a member are precisely those which are not righteous, and it's as simple as that.

Fine, if relabeling it matters to you. We ban people for being unrighteous (uncivil). So don't be unrighteous.

Well, I guess I missed that drama.

What’s going on between gattsuru and 895198? How did half the thread become about that beef? I’ve read through most of it and I still don’t understand. Sigh.

Moonshot Personal Growth Idea

There are a lot of smart, hyper-informed people on here (don't be bashful). Each probably have 1-5 topics they know A LOT about, who could deliver a knowledgable spiel over voice or text without much effort and intelligently field any number of follow-up questions. So it occurs to me there might be a big educational opportunity for me here if I can capture some of this low-hanging fruit.

I don't know much about American politics, health, business, etc., but eagerly want to know more, and I'm happy to talk over discord/phone/voice or text depending on your preferences. Some topics to jog your brain; if it strikes you that "hey, I actually got obsessed with topic 23 one time and learned everything you could possibly know about it over a 6 month period," please consider reaching out to me. I'll adopt a position indicated by either "pro" or "con" provisionally just to inspire engagement (my actual views here are very low-confidence and "pro/con" means something more like "I've heard interesting arguments for this side of the issue that I want an intelligent person who knows more than I do to explain the merits of to me" than "this is what I believe.")

  1. “The current level of military spending is justified.” Pro

  2. “The typical white male is utterly blameless for the circumstances of the African American community” Pro

  3. "The growth of transgender identity and bisexuality have the character of a social contagion" Pro (Is bisexuality created or only revealed by the environment? Is anyone bisexual because of encouragement, or is the absence of discouragement the only environmental factor that does anything to affect rates of ID?) (Caplan)

  4. “Asian romantic preferences are morally permissible.” Pro

  5. “De facto interrogational torture by the US is justified.” Pro

  6. "Extraterrestrial life is the best explanation of some UFO sightings" Con

  7. “Any minimum wage fails a purely utilitarian cost benefit test due to disemployment effects.” Pro

  8. "Joe Biden's Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Would Be Disastrous," (Or: Cost benefit analysis puts several other environmental causes ahead of climate change.)

  9. "Feminism is bad for women." (a la Bryan Caplan)

  10. "Conventional medicine barely makes us healthier" (as seen in Robin Hanson's case for radical medical skepticism, from the RAND Health insurance experiment to the replication crisis http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/feardie.pdf)

  11. "Dietary research is of such poor quality that we know almost nothing about whether any given major diet fad is truly the ideal diet." (Pro) (I would be willing to take the even stronger position that we don't even know ANYTHING about the right diet just to see what a smart, informed person would say in response to better calibrate my reasoning on this issue)

  12. "Most of life is a prestige-signaling game./Social status is the closest thing to a one-variable explanation for everything, and does far better than the traditional rival models like sex or money."

  13. "Diversity is our strength." Pro

  14. "Society does not clearly treat one sex more unfairly than the other." (Pro)

  15. "IQ is real and a major determinant of social outcomes" Pro

  16. "Racial groups differ in socially relevant ways for genetic reasons." Con

  17. “Capitalists deserve their success.” Pro

  18. "Money doesn't really buy happiness." Pro

  19. “The solution to traffic is congestion pricing (tolls)” Pro

  20. "Actions taken by the Biden Admin during the Covid pandemic were generally justified." Not enough info to sway either way

  21. “We should deregulate construction completely.” Pro

  22. “Workers are not underpaid in competitive business environments.” Pro

  23. Question: How do taxes work, and how SHOULD they work?

  24. “Affirmative action is immoral/harmful.” Pro

  25. “State-mandated wealth redistribution is immoral./Wealth inequality is not a serious social problem” Pro

  26. “Abortion is morally permissible.” Pro

  27. “We should put America First” pro

  28. “It is not possible to be a good criminal defense lawyer AND a good person.” Pro

  29. “We should privatize everything.” Pro

  30. “The poor generally deserve to be poor.” “American wealth inequality is generally fair.” (as seen in remarks made by Caplan re: the so-called "success sequence")

  31. “Gender is essentially biological.” Pro (Tomas Bogardus, Alex Byrne)

  32. “We should remove confederate monuments.” Con

  33. “We should not provide trigger warnings/safety culture actually harms mental health.” Pro (Jonathan Haidt)

  34. “We Should Stop Talking about Privilege” pro

  35. “Immigration is Not a Human Right.” Con

  36. “The Death Penalty is Immoral” pro

  37. “The typical meat eater does nothing wrong.” Pro

  38. “Political correctness is just politeness.” Con

  39. “There are no positive rights; There is no right to healthcare or education.” Pro

  40. “Utilitarianism is a bad moral theory.” Pro

  41. “It isn’t morally wrong to misgender a trans person.” Pro

  42. “Artificial intelligence is not an existential risk.” Pro

  43. “We should not have gun control.” Pro

  44. “We should segregate intimate public spaces by biological sex.” Or: “it is not morally wrong to do so.” Pro

  45. “It’s morally wrong for the average voter to vote; we should try to decrease voter turnout.” Pro

  46. “It’s morally permissible to racially profile.” Pro

  47. “Psychological egoism is false.” Pro or con

  48. “Ethical egoism is false.” Pro

  49. “Racial discrimination is not inherently immoral.” Pro

  50. “Businesses may racially select their customers.” Pro

  51. “Equality of opportunity is morally undesirable.” Pro

  52. “Mixed martial arts don’t violate anyone’s rights.” Pro

  53. “We are morally obligated to tip servers.” Pro

  54. “Hazing should be permitted on college campuses.” Pro

  55. “It is just to punish criminals for the sake of causing suffering to people who deserve it.” Pro or con, preferably con

  56. “If we ought to be taxed more, we ought to donate our excess income.” (“Rich socialists/distributive egalitarians are hypocrites.”) pro

  57. “It’s morally permissible to sell oneself into permanent slavery.” Pro

  58. “There is no duty to hire the most qualified applicant.” Pro

  59. “We should completely deregulate the provision of healthcare services.” Pro

  60. “We should not require occupational licensing by law (for doctors, plumbers, or lawyers).” Pro

  61. “Workplace quality and safety regulations are bad for workers.” Pro

  62. “We should not dispense racial reparations to the black community.” Pro

  63. Con “alcoholics (and drug addicts in general) are nonresponsible victims”

  64. Pro: “Race is biologically real”

  65. Pro:“The rich pay their fair share”

  66. “Exploitation isn’t wrong.” Pro

  67. “Free market pricing is a better distributor than queuing” Pro

  68. “Price gouging is fine.” Pro

  69. “The casting couch is just prostitution” Pro

  70. “Affirmative Action is systemically racist” Pro

  71. “Colleges are guilty of negligent advertising” pro

  72. "We should we abolish civil rights law" (Richard Hanania)

  73. “Gender is essentially biological” pro

TL;DR Looking for someone to explain American politics to me, preferably over discord voice. Especially interested in topics like happiness, relationship success, American public policy (esp. healthcare and the budget)

  • -18

“The current level of military spending is justified.”

Depends if you're for the US dominating the world or for a more multipolar world. If the former, then the answer is largely yes. If the latter, then no. The US could easily defend itself almost just as well as now with much lower defense spending.

“The typical white male is utterly blameless for the circumstances of the African American community”

Not utterly blameless but almost utterly blameless.

"The growth of transgender identity and bisexuality have the character of a social contagion"

Yes.

“Asian romantic preferences are morally permissible.”

Yes. Sexual preferences are inherently amoral. Asian romantic preferences are the same as preferring skinny women or whatever.

“De facto interrogational torture by the US is justified.”

Maybe in extreme "save a million lives when the bomb is ticking" type of situations but generally no, torture is vile and abhorrent.

"Extraterrestrial life is the best explanation of some UFO sightings"

Probably not but I'm not 100% against the idea.

“Any minimum wage fails a purely utilitarian cost benefit test due to disemployment effects.”

Not sure. Actual economics are more complex than any abstract models.

"Joe Biden's Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Would Be Disastrous,"

They might be, but I'm not convinced that they would be.

"Feminism is bad for women."

Absolutely and obviously no. The typical argument that "Women in non-feminist societies are happier than women in feminist societies" is contradicted by the argument that so many of the guys who make the argument also make, which is that "It is not enough for men to be happy, men must be virtuous and strive blah blah blah". Same for women. Feminism making women happier or unhappier is orthogonal to whether feminism is good or bad for women. And outside of the happiness argument, there is no good argument for why feminism would be bad for women.

"Conventional medicine barely makes us healthier"

Obviously false given historical statistics.

"Dietary research is of such poor quality that we know almost nothing about whether any given major diet fad is truly the ideal diet."

True. If there was an actual ideal diet, it would be widely known and relatively uncontroversial by now.

"Most of life is a prestige-signaling game./Social status is the closest thing to a one-variable explanation for everything, and does far better than the traditional rival models like sex or money."

Not sure, might be true. Some people really do want sex for sex's sake. On the other hand, I imagine that almost no-one wants money for money's sake, since that would be rather absurd given that the point of having money is to use it to get other things.

"Diversity is our strength."

Depends on what kind of diversity. Also, who is "us" in this case? For example, I do not care about my country or my race as groups, so who is "us" for me?

"Society does not clearly treat one sex more unfairly than the other."

Yes, it treats both fairly and unfairly in different ways.

"IQ is real and a major determinant of social outcomes"

Intelligence is real and obviously a major determinant of social outcomes. IQ is correlated with intelligence but not as much as some think. For example, it is obviously possible to get better at IQ tests through practice without having actually become more intelligent in any significant sense.

"Racial groups differ in socially relevant ways for genetic reasons."

Almost certainly true.

“Capitalists deserve their success.”

Depends on how they came by their success.

"Money doesn't really buy happiness."

It does to some extent.

“The solution to traffic is congestion pricing (tolls)”

Not sure.

"Actions taken by the Biden Admin during the Covid pandemic were generally justified."

Not sure.

“We should deregulate construction completely.”

Probably not. I cannot think of any example of completely deregulated construction that is better than the US model.

“Workers are not underpaid in competitive business environments.”

Depends what you mean by "underpaid".

Question: How do taxes work, and how SHOULD they work?

Too much for me to think about right now.

“Affirmative action is immoral/harmful.”

Not sure about immoral. "harmful" depends on what group you belong to.

“State-mandated wealth redistribution is immoral./Wealth inequality is not a serious social problem”

Maybe but all complex society depends on some degree of state-mandated wealth redistribution/No, obviously not, but that does not mean socialism/communism would be better.

“Abortion is morally permissible.”

Not sure, but personally I am pro choice because I value the comfort and independence of adult women over the lives of fetuses.

“We should put America First”

No, America is great in many ways but not in all ways.

“It is not possible to be a good criminal defense lawyer AND a good person.”

No, without defense lawyers we would have no fair justice system.

“We should privatize everything.”

This is not possible without society regressing to anarchy and a collapse of modern technological civilization. At minimum, there must be some non-private authority that regulates disputes, otherwise you would just have 100 small warlord states that don't privatize everything instead of what we have now, which is 1 big state that doesn't privatize everything.

“The poor generally deserve to be poor.” “American wealth inequality is generally fair.”

Depends on what you mean by "deserve".

“Gender is essentially biological.”

To some degree yes, but nonetheless there are masculine women and feminine men so definitely not entirely.

“We should remove confederate monuments.”

It should be up to a vote of the local community, but there should be no law that enforces removing them.

“We should not provide trigger warnings/safety culture actually harms mental health.”

Yes / mostly yes.

“We Should Stop Talking about Privilege”

No, privilege is a real thing but in many ways not what wokes think it is.

“Immigration is Not a Human Right.”

There is no such thing as a human right.

“The Death Penalty is Immoral”

Yes, at the very least it is immoral because it kills innocent people sometimes.

“The typical meat eater does nothing wrong.”

No. I eat meat but I do not pretend that there is nothing wrong with it.

“Political correctness is just politeness.”

No, it is too totalitarian and anti-truth to be just politeness.

“There are no positive rights; There is no right to healthcare or education.”

Yes but at the same time, to have a successful society we must sometimes act as if there were.

“Utilitarianism is a bad moral theory.”

Not sure. My big argument against utilitarianism is that it is not possible to predict the future well enough to really know what actions are more utilitarian than others.

“It isn’t morally wrong to misgender a trans person.”

Yes, especially given that if I call for example a transwoman "he", it is almost certainly not because I have any ill intent against him.

“Artificial intelligence is not an existential risk.”

It is, but I think that the Yudkowsky types have gone off the deep end when it comes to this matter.

“We should not have gun control.”

Mixed. We need some level of gun control, but I do not support total gun control because I value publicly owned guns as a way to deter powerful groups from becoming too dominant.

“We should segregate intimate public spaces by biological sex.” Or: “it is not morally wrong to do so.”

It should be up to the users of each space, as defined by their biological sex.

“It’s morally wrong for the average voter to vote; we should try to decrease voter turnout.”

Not sure.

“It’s morally permissible to racially profile.”

Yes in an immediate "get rid of crime sense" but no in a "create a long-lasting classical liberal society" sense.

“Psychological egoism is false.”

Probably true. I have experienced mental states that seemed genuinely altruistic to me.

“Ethical egoism is false.”

Yes, it begs the question.

“Racial discrimination is not inherently immoral.”

Yes, but it is often immoral in particular cases and is not a good way to build a classical liberal society, which I value.

“Businesses may racially select their customers.”

I support it in cases where that will significantly prevent physical harm from coming to people. For example, Uber drivers going to dangerous neighborhoods. Otherwise, not sure.

“Equality of opportunity is morally undesirable.”

Hard to say, because we have never seen it in any society.

“Mixed martial arts don’t violate anyone’s rights.”

Yes.

“We are morally obligated to tip servers.”

Not sure, but probably yes. They take the jobs on the premise that they will be tipped at roughly a certain rate.

“Hazing should be permitted on college campuses.”

Probably yes, but only if it is clearly and explicitly spelled out for people wondering about joining the frats (or whatever) what the hazing will consist of, or if at least it is explicitly spelled out that "we reserve the right to surprise you so be warned!".

“It is just to punish criminals for the sake of causing suffering to people who deserve it.”

No, that is just revenge.

“If we ought to be taxed more, we ought to donate our excess income.”

Largely yes.

“It’s morally permissible to sell oneself into permanent slavery.”

Yes, but it is also morally permissible to renege on the contract and run away afterwards.

“There is no duty to hire the most qualified applicant.”

Depends on whether you are working for a vulnerable mom and pop shop or some giant corporation.

“We should completely deregulate the provision of healthcare services.”

No, we should maintain a tightly regulated healthcare sector but also have a separate unregulated sector so that people can choose between the two.

“We should not require occupational licensing by law (for doctors, plumbers, or lawyers).”

See above.

“Workplace quality and safety regulations are bad for workers.”

See above.

“We should not dispense racial reparations to the black community.”

Yes except in cases where there is a clear trail of harm that can be objectively established.

“alcoholics (and drug addicts in general) are nonresponsible victims”

No, but that does not mean they should be cast out into the street.

“Race is biologically real”

Yes, though it is a spectrum and more complicated than the stereotypical 19th century "caucasian/mongol/black" sort of distinctions.

“The rich pay their fair share”

Not sure.

“Exploitation isn’t wrong.”

I am not a utilitarian, so I lean in favor of thinking that it is.

“Free market pricing is a better distributor than queuing”

Seems that way based on historical experience.

“Price gouging is fine.”

Not sure. One man's price gouging is another man's "what I have to do to keep my business afloat". Depends on the context.

“The casting couch is just prostitution”

Pornography is essentially prostitution but I support both being legal.

“Affirmative Action is systemically racist”

Yes.

“Colleges are guilty of negligent advertising”

Yes.

"We should we abolish civil rights law"

Depends on which laws.

“Gender is essentially biological”

This is a repeat question.

I know it's not a claimed position but I'm curious why you lean on torture being acceptable but not execution.

Come to think of it I'm curious why you lean towards torture being acceptable at all given it's uselessness both inherent and relative to threats.

given it's uselessness both inherent and relative to threats

Would have William Buckley, the CIA officer, give out information about his entire network of agents if he was merely threatened?

What I do know is that given the techniques employed I would have had serious doubts about the information he provided. People injected with narcotics are not reliable sources of information.

And indeed, if what I've read about the Buckley case is accurate, Hezbollah had to work on the man for over a year and chase wrong leads, made up dead ends and suffer a whole lot of inaccurate internal suspicion on the word of a wrecked man.

Frankly I doubt that much of it was actually about intelligence gathering, getting leads was probably just a side effect of making some footage to send to the Americans, get revenge, and entertain al-Azub.

But imagine the sort of stuff you could learn out of a CIA paramilitary officer if you had some heavy leverage and didn't turn him into a bumbling wreck that screamed at random intervals. What a waste.

If you want comparison case between this and less brutal interrogation techniques you can look at Abu Zubaydah who was interrogated by the FBI and the CIA, gave all the actually useful information in the classical interrogations before being subject to torture or through other means than interrogation. If you believe the reports that is.

Just like any tool there are situations where it can be effective and situations where it isn't. If your goal is getting true information the key is having ways to confirm the information then come back if the information was incorrect. Repeat. Another method is having multiple people with the same information, you then separate and torture them until their stories match.

But you see the contradiction right? Torture is a clumsy tool that's only comparatively useful in situations where nothing else is available, but those conditions are precisely when it is least effective.

Rejali points this out in Torture and Democracy:

In short, organized torture yields poor information, sweeps up many innocents, degrades organizational capabilities, and destroys interrogators. Limited time during battle or emergency intensifies all these problems.

In the sort of scenarios you describe, where the intelligence can be checked and consequences applied for inaccuracy, threats to hostages are a superior form of extracting information or behavior since they don't degrade the subject, the interrogator, organizational capability, and aren't subject to as many moral hazards.

Hence why, outside of contrived circumstances, torture is useless as a means of intelligence: it's a bad tool in the absolute, and it gets even worse when the conditions call of it over other methods.

This sounds like a just world fallacy.

I'd really like to see someone admit "sometimes torture works the best, but we still shouldn't do it".

It's kinda funny because the whole reason for torture to be immoral in the first place is that it's unnecessary. So you can accuse any argument as to its inefficacy of this without cost. Sometimes the world happens to be just.

I hold that torture is worse than any other method of obtaining intelligence unless you do not care about the stated problems. Or, like I assume most people who engage in it, don't actually care at all about intelligence gathering.

Torture is a tool of psychological warfare, not intelligence.

I hold that torture is worse than any other method of obtaining intelligence unless you do not care about the stated problems.

This is true of all methods of doing all things.

No it's not? Sigint doesn't have any of those specific problems.

I’ll bite. There are rules, it’s good to have to have rules. Maybe those rules could be broken occasionally, but not in the sort of clandestine, oversight-avoiding scenario that prisons encourage.

Of course, this is a lot easier to say precisely because I have little faith that it’s implemented effectively. Not leaving as much on the table.

The world has no obligation to be just, but it has no obligation to be maximally unjust either: it may be suspiciously convenient that sacrificing children to Moloch for rain doesn't work, but it also happens to be true.

I had an argument about torture here just a few weeks ago.

Bluntly, I absolutely do not buy that torture is "inherently useless". It's an extremely counterintuitive claim. I'm inherently suspicious whenever somebody claims that their political belief also comes with no tradeoffs. And the "torture doesn't work" argument fits the mold of a contrarian position where intellectuals can present cute, clever arguments that "overturn" common sense (and will fortunately never be tested in the real world). It's basically the midwit meme where people get to just the right level of cleverness to be wrong.

Inherently useless as a means of gathering intelligence. Torture works great if all you want is to discourage people to fuck with you. Ask the Cartels.

I share your skepticism of convenient narratives, and this is a topic that is necessarily polluted by them. But the evidence just doesn't add up. If torture was so effective we wouldn't have had to purge it out of our judicial system because people kept admitting to things that weren't true.

And frankly I like my common sense better than yours. Torture is useless barbarism, simple as.

I'm glad that, at the start, you (correctly) emphasized that we're talking about intelligence gathering. So please don't fall back to the motte of "I only meant that confessions couldn't be trusted", which you're threatening to do by bringing up the judicial system and "people admitting to things". Some posters did that in the last argument, too. I don't know how many times I can repeat that, duh, torture-extracted confessions aren't legitimate. But confessions and intelligence gathering are completely different things.

Torture being immoral is a fully sufficient explanation for it being purged from our systems. So your argument is worse than useless when it comes to effectiveness - because it actually raises the question of why Western intelligence agencies were still waterboarding people in the 2000s. Why would they keep doing something that's both immoral and ineffective? Shouldn't they have noticed?

When you have a prisoner who knows something important, there are lots of ways of applying pressure. Sometimes you can get by with compassion, negotiation, and so on, which is great. But the horrible fact is that pain has always been the most effective way to get someone to do what you want. There will be some people who will never take a deal, who will never repent, but will still break under torture and give you the information you want. Yes, if you have the wrong person they'll make something up. Even if you have the right person but they're holding out, they might feed you false information (which they might do in all other scenarios, too). Torture is a tool in your arsenal that may be the only way to produce that one address or name or password that you never would have gotten otherwise, but you'll still have to apply the other tools at your disposal too.

Sigh. The above paragraph is obvious and not insightful, and I feel silly having to spell it out. But hey, in some sense it's a good thing that there are people so sheltered that they can pretend pain doesn't work to get evil people what they want. It points to how nice a civilization we've built for ourselves, how absent cruelty ("barbarism", as you put it) is from most people's day-to-day existence.

The above paragraph is obvious and not insightful

Well yeah, I don't disagree with any of it either so I don't really see what your point is?

it actually raises the question of why Western intelligence agencies were still waterboarding people in the 2000s. Why would they keep doing something that's both immoral and ineffective? Shouldn't they have noticed?

Why should they notice? Institutions do immoral and ineffective things literally all the time for centuries on end. And we're talking about the CIA, the kings of spending money on absolute bullshit that just sounds cool to some dudes in a room, and that's not saying nothing given the competition for that title in USG.

The Stargate project ran for more than 20 years. Does this mean I should think there is something to psychic warfare?

Well yeah, I don't disagree with any of it either so I don't really see what your point is?

But ... if you agree there are scenarios where you'd never get a particular piece of information without torture, then I don't understand how you can claim it's "inherently useless"...? I'm confused what we're even arguing about now.

Why should they notice? Institutions do immoral and ineffective things literally all the time for centuries on end. And we're talking about the CIA, the kings of spending money on absolute bullshit that just sounds cool to some dudes in a room, and that's not saying nothing given the competition for that title in USG.

A fair point! I'm never going to argue with "government is incompetent" being an answer. :) But still, agencies using it is evidence that points in the direction of torture being useful - incompetence is just a (very plausible) explanation for why that evidence isn't conclusive.

if you agree there are scenarios where you'd never get a particular piece of information without torture, then I don't understand how you can claim it's "inherently useless"...? I'm confused what we're even arguing about now.

I get at this in the other threads: because I think in practice those scenarios are exceedingly rare, and specifically for the US who purports to not be a totalitarian state, essentially nonexistent.

I did once find a study comparing the use of torture in Spanish Inquisition vs. modern USA, which concluded that the former was much more effective because of differences in methods and social context. I hope you will pardon me if I copypaste another a post of mine from elsewhere:

There’s this paper claiming (in the case of the Spanish Inquisition) that there are circumstances in which torture can yield reliable and verifiable information, but only in a very specific setting that is very different from, say, yanking a suspect in an alley and beating a confession out of them. You need extensive prior investigation until you have most of the facts available but think that someone is still withholding information; you need to torture multiple people, repeatedly, while comparing and verifying all the statements you extracted between each instance. At that point you might as well scrap the torture and still be left with the vast majority of reliable information.

Even then, you’ll still end up torturing a large number of innocents, and you will learn very little in the process you didn’t already know. And you will inevitably end up a vast, overbearing police state where everyone lives in terror.

Inquisitors tortured for different reasons, with different goals, based on different assumptions, and in a social, political, and religious setting entirely alien to that of modern interrogators…

The Inquisition put in place a vast bureaucratic apparatus designed to collect and assess information about prohibited practices. It tortured comprehensively, inflicting suffering on large swaths of the population. It tortured systematically, willing to torment all whom it deemed to be withholding evidence, regardless of how severe their heresy was or how significant the evidence was that they were withholding. The Inquisition did not torture because it wanted to fill gaps in its records by tormenting a new witness. On the contrary: it tortured because its records were comprehensive enough to indicate that a witness was withholding evidence.

This torture yielded information that was often reliable and falsifiable: names, locations, events, and practices witnesses provided in the torture chamber matched information provided by those not tortured. But despite the tremendous investment in time, money, and labor that the Inquisition invested in institutionalizing torture, its officials treated the results of interrogations in the torture chamber with skepticism. Tribunals tortured witnesses at the very end of a series of investigations, and they did not rely on the resulting testimony as a primary source of evidence.

This systematic, dispassionate, and meticulous torture stands in stark contrast to the “ticking bomb” philosophy that has motivated US torture policy in the aftermath of 9/11… US interrogators expected to uncover groundbreaking information from detainees: novel, crucial, yet somehow trustworthy. That is an unverifiable standard of intelligence that the Inquisition, despite its vast bureaucratic apparatus and centuries of institutional learning, would not have trusted.

The Inquisition functioned in an extraordinary environment. Its target population was confined within the realms of an authoritarian state in which the Inquisition wielded absolute authority and could draw on near-unlimited resources. The most important of these resources was time… It could afford to spend decades and centuries perfecting its methods and dedicate years to gathering evidence against its prisoners… Should US interrogators aspire to match the confession rate of the Inquisition’s torture campaign, they would have to emulate the Inquisition’s brutal scope and vast resources… one cannot improvise quick, amateurish, and half-hearted torture sessions, motivated by anger and fear, and hope to extract reliable intelligence. Torture that yields reliable intelligence requires a massive social, political, and financial enterprise founded on deep ideological and political commitments. That is the cost of torture.

(an interesting point is that, while the “ticking time bomb” is the scenario most commonly given as justification for torture, it also happens to be the scenario in which torture is least likely to work, because you don’t know if you have the right person, the suspect - especially if guilty - knows they have to resist for a brief time, and you can’t verify any statement until it’s too late)

End copypaste.

So, I admit this is a well-written, convincing argument. It's appreciated! But I still find it contrasts with common sense (and my own lying eyes). I can, say, imagine authorities arresting me and demanding to know my email password. I would not cooperate, and I would expect to be able to get access to a lawyer before long. In reality there's only one way they'd get the password: torturing me. And in that case, they'd get the password immediately. It would be fast and effective. I'm still going to trust the knowledge that torture would work perfectly on me over a sociological essay, no matter how eloquent.

Admittedly passwords make for something like an ideal case for torture in that they can be easily communicated in full and be quickly and unambiguously checked for correctness. I don't know if any other kind of information meets those requirements. Overall, given precedents, I think a blanket ban on judiciary torture is worth a lot more than the marginal improvements in investigation effectiveness, even from a coldly utilitarian perspective, much like a blanket ban on killing patients to harvest their organs is well worth the loss of a small number of additional organs, even if those are perfectly good for use.

Absolutely. And I'm totally being a pedant about a policy I'm in complete agreement with. But this nitpicking is still valuable - if we as a society understand that we're banning torture for very good ideological reasons, then we won't be so tempted to backslide the next time a crisis (like 9/11) arises and people start noticing that (arguably) torture might help us track down more terrorists. Like how some people forget that free speech ideals are important beyond simply making sure that we don't violate the 1st amendment.

More comments

I don't know if I'd be considered an expert or anything, but I've long had a pet theory/argument regarding torture. It seems intuitively strange how so many people seem to have enthusiasm for it despite the enthusiasm in other circles for declaring that it "doesn't work". I think this can be resolved by my statement that torture works really great at what it's actually for - suppressing dissent in an authoritarian regime.

Some may say that it doesn't work very well for actually investigating dissident movements. But working well at that was never a factor. If you grab and torture some poor fellow and he gives you 3 random names out of desperation, and you do nasty things to them too, that's a feature, not a bug. Justice was never the goal, terror is. You've successfully terrorized 4 people, and anyone else who can see what happened to them, out of having anything to do with opposing the regime, whether or not they wanted to in the first place. And you've also made it so the security forces can never defect from the regime, either individually or en masse, as too many people hate their guts.

I guess it's a question of definitions. Torture as punishment and deterrent works, unquestionably, but I wouldn't call it that, rather "corporal punishment" or something like that.

But the debate isn't so much about that (because as such it is trivially against the moral principles the United States stand for) but about it as a means of extracting information. And at that it really sucks.

Though it works more than you might expect (we have credible reports of various historical factions getting information they deemed useful at nontrivial rates) the false positive rate is so high that the information you get is practically unusable and use of torture actually lowers the quality of information you could even get out of someone because pain and disorientation hurt the ability to recall at a neurological level. And the inaccuracy grows the more torture you apply too.

Compound that with the availability of another method that doesn't fuck with the wits of the prisoners in the form of threats to hostages, and torture is objectively a terrible means of intelligence that's only really useful if you don't care about accuracy and just wish to implicate as many people as possible.

I agree with this. Torture for getting information is a poor tool, because you're never sure if you've squeezed every drop of information out of the guy no matter how much you've done to him (maybe he's holding back that one tiny but vital scrap of information), and then you get to the point where he really is just naming names and agreeing to whatever you say in order to get you to stop.

Torture as "we're the new masters in town, we can and will do whatever the fuck we want to you and there's nothing you can do about it so bow down" is effective, on the other hand. Is Guantanamo Bay actually providing any useful information any more, or is it just about revenge and 'we can do what the fuck we want'?

I'll take the Con side of 34 if you'd like.

a lot of these I'd rather argue the other side but you can hit me up for #6. discord works.

\21. “We should deregulate construction completely.” Pro

Completely? This is how you get shoddily-built buildings collapsing en masse and killing tens of thousands of people, as in the recent earthquake in Turkey or the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. (Regulations existed but were not enforced due to corruption, but we would expect similar outcomes if there were simply no regulations at all.)

You are presumably some kind of libertarian, so you might prefer a more market-based system. Instead of the government creating and enforcing regulations, for example, it could require construction companies to buy insurance in case their buildings collapse. This would allow the market to discover what regulations are necessary or cost-effective. But it still requires some degree of government regulation and enforcement.

\45. “It’s morally wrong for the average voter to vote; we should try to decrease voter turnout.” Pro

\51. “Equality of opportunity is morally undesirable.” Pro

I would like you to elaborate on these two. They are far from the only points I disagree with, but these are very unusual positions and I would like to hear why you believe in them.

“It’s morally wrong for the average voter to vote; we should try to decrease voter turnout.” Pro

these are very unusual positions and I would like to hear why you believe in them.

Not OP, but my most blackpill moment was discovering that the median voter was obviously casting ignorant votes. I'd heard complaints about "I had to stand in line an hour to vote!", and they seemed kind of weird because that's still just a small fraction of the several hours minimum it takes to do a half-decent investigation of candidates, but of course the answer was that nobody does that minimum, they just press the button and get the sticker.

I can't argue with rational-ignorance theory, I totally get it if someone just wants to vote for President because they're deluged with information in that one case alone, but then maybe don't cast votes for the other offices too?

I still don't think "try to decrease voter turnout" is the solution, though. I'm not sure what the solution is. Something more like a deliberate liquid democracy might help, perhaps? Even people who would push the "just vote for everyone with the correct letter after their name" button on their own behalf might feel more weight of responsibility if ten friends have placed trust in their decision-making. That might greatly increase voter turnout in midterm elections, too; you might think to yourself "I don't have time to figure out who the next city councilor should be", but if you know someone more politically interested who you trust then your vote can go through them rather than being abdicated entirely. I might not be sure who I can trust as the next Railroad Commissioner, because that takes research time, but I could name several people I would trust to do that research for me, because personal experience is "free".

I'd heard complaints about "I had to stand in line an hour to vote!", and they seemed kind of weird because that's still just a small fraction of the several hours minimum it takes to do a half-decent investigation of candidates,

  1. And, if someone complained that they had to wait for an hour at the DMV to take their driver's test, would you say that that seems weird because it is a small fraction of the hours it takes to study for the test? Or if someone complained about waiting an hour at a real estate office to get in to see his agent to finalize a purchase, because that is a small fraction of the hours it takes search for a home to buy? The complaint in all cases is about poor customer service, and if I have to wait for an hour to do any of those things, someone has screwed up, regardless of how much time I put in to prepare.

  2. You know what is really dumb? Doing an "investigation of candidates" in a general election. As if you can actually figure out anything accurate about the personal characteristics of the candidates, and, more importantly, as if their personal characteristics are particularly important, compared with the policies that they are likely to support. And in a general election, the party of the candidate tells the voters far, far, far more about the policies that they are likely to support than hours of research is likely to uncover.

"Actions taken by the Biden Admin during the Covid pandemic were generally justified." Not enough info to sway either way

Always down to talk COVID. Prefer text only for op-sec reasons

This sounds like a fun idea.

I think the ones I disagree with you on are not ones where I feel heavily researched.

Why do you only want one side to argue their arguments, for many of these? Is it that you think you already think you understand the opposite relatively well, or you think that the opposite side is likely to be wrong, and so you'd rather not waste your time learning arguments for wrong thing? I suppose it doesn't need to be the same reason for every question.

Poverty's shit but there's severe diminishing returns past upper-middle class affluence seems pretty coherent to me

I think Kanye West summed it up pretty well for me, "Money isn't everything, not having it is."

I thought Wolfers conceded to Caplan on his blog that the effect size is ridiculously small (like, you would need a million dollars in yearly income to actually raise your happiness by 1 SD). Wolfers responds to Caplan: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/02/wolfers_respond.html Caplan: http://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/02/the_wolfers_equ.html

Not convinced? Consider: Wolfers’ result implies that to raise happiness by one standard deviation, you have to raise income by 1/.35=2.86 log points. How much is that exactly? In percentage terms, that’s (e^2.86)-1 – an increase of 1,640%. So if you currently earn $50,000, Wolfers’ coefficient implies you’d need an extra $820,585 per year to durably increase your happiness by one lousy standard deviation. In math, that’s not “zero effect of income on happiness.” But in English, it basically is.

I think this question is very hung up in the complexity of the concept of 'happiness' (and possibly also confounded by correlations between who does and doesn't have money. The richest people I know are also the most stressed out because they are rich because they're broken in a never ending quest of career and financial improvement. But if you took a well adjusted middle class family man and paid of his house, I bet he'd become happier.)

In terms of the complexity of happiness, I am a pretty happy guy dispositionally. I have a positive attitude, I'm relatively low stress and I love the simple things in my life. It's true that on a daily hedonic level, it would be hard to make money adjust by day-to-day mood all that much. I suspect it's also true of people dispositionally unhappy, restless, etc.

On a more fundamental level, my sense of value and meaning in the world is tied to my philosophical and religious beliefs as well as some deep ingrained pre-dispositions (like hating change, and being naturally nostalgic). Again, I doubt money could change that much, or possibly negatively.

But between my deep sense of happiness and my daily mood/disposition, I think there's a middle concept of happiness that would be helped greatly with more money. If the stress of working, saving could be reduce, the opportunity cost of my time, etc. It would affect my ' middle happiness' quite a bit.

I think it depends on what's really at stake. I don't think money can buy happiness in the sense that I'd be significantly happier with a bunch of stuff I don't already have or couldn't already afford. I think it can buy happiness, though, in the sense that I'd be a lot happier if I never had to worry about money. A million dollars invested in 30 year treasury bonds will net you about 40k/year in tax free money, a pretty nice supplement to your existing income. 2 million would give you damn near enough to retire on if you invested what you would have been paying in taxes into a retirement fund to get ahead of inflation and maybe take up a part-time job as a raft guide or ski instructor for beer and cigarette money. For most people enough extra money to pay off their mortgage or student loans would make them feel like they were independently wealthy.

Back when I did consumer bankruptcy the effect that financial problems can have on people's lives really hit home. People would find themselves in untenable situations that caused a ton of anxiety and strained relationships (just due to stress and arguments, not borrowing money) and the constant fear that they were one step away from living in a cardboard box. When I told them to stop paying their bills until they had enough money for my fee and then after that the way out was pretty straightforward, the emotional catharsis was always palpable. Some people would break down crying when I told them there was a way out (usually after they had cried considerably when they explained their position). That aside, I couldn't begin to count the number of times clients called to schedule their filing meeting and told me how they felt like they were walking on air as they were leaving the initial consultation. Now to think that there are people who go through that anxiety all the time because their problem isn't so much debt as it is not making enough money, or not being consistently employed, then I can believe that an injection of money large enough to provide a decent cushion would make one significantly happier.

Once you've got to the point of "all my basic needs are met, I'm not in debt, I've helped out my family who need it, and now I have fuck-you money left over so if I lose my job in the morning I'm okay", then you don't get much extra value from more money.

At that level, now you're comparing yourself not to your former circumstances, but the new levels of rich people around you. Sure, I have ten million, but that's not rich, that's just comfortable! That guy has twenty million, and that other guy is a billionaire! I'm nothing compared to a billionaire!

And then the billionaires are at the levels of "okay so I own three superyachts, but I don't have my own space rockets like that other guy".

Income isn't just skewed, it has a very long tail. Many variables have much more compact distributions. Happiness doesn't have natural units and could be distributed however you want depending on how you measure it, although it would be weird to me if the range of feelings human brains were capable of expressing spanned such a wide distribution (also something something CLT handwaving arguments, emotions are the sum of many small features).

1 SD can be a substantial impact, but if the result above is correct, it would be very difficult to obtain by increasing one's income from typical means (promotion, career change, getting an advanced degree, etc).

To go from median to +1SD requires that you jump past 34% of the population, no matter how compact or spread the variable is

I'm pretty sure this is not correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/68%E2%80%9395%E2%80%9399.7_rule only applies to the normal distribution and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev%27s_inequality gives no minimum at all for the portion of the distribution within 1 SD. And of course, this is all assuming that the standard deviation is even finite, which it may not be.

inherently by talking in standard deviations, we are talking in ordinal terms not absolute terms.

I don't follow. Ordinal data can't have a SD, since it by definition corresponds to an ordering or categorization of data, without meaningful numeric values assigned.

Yes, which is mostly a remark on just how huge 1 SD is

But 1 SD income seems like a lot, while 1 SD of height (about 2.5 inches) seems like it's not a lot. I don't think it's meaningful to talk about 1 SD being intuitively big or small since it depends on the variable in question.

Those things aren't typically enough to move you up by 1 SD of income. So even postulating a perfect correlation between the two you wouldn't expect a sub-1-SD rise in income to yield a 1SD+ rise in happiness.

That's fair (although the correlation isn't even defined if income has infinite variance).

Colleges are guilty of negligent advertising” pro

I think it depends a bit on what you mean by this. Colleges are not being upfront about very critical information (from a student point of view) and especially where the quality of the programs on offer differ even across the same major in different colleges. A computer programming major in one college in one school can be world class, while another program can be utter garbage as far as educational value goes. The same is true of other programs. There’s simply no reliable self reporting of student outcomes for a given major at a given school.

This is a problem precisely because almost all students are going to college for job training and networking, unless they’re rich and well connected enough that their college experience doesn’t matter. This forces everyone to essentially try to use proxy measures: famous professors, prestige of the institution, famous graduates, or perhaps the beauty of the campus (an indication of wealthy donors). But these don’t really tell you much about the quality of instruction (yes, there’s a famous professor of physics at your college. You might see the back of his head once or twice, and your teacher is actually a harried graduate student.), thus making the process expensive. Most Americans spend decades paying off educational expenses, making the quality of the educational product extremely important. This likewise doesn’t help employers find qualified employees among recent graduates, forcing them to do things like hire based on the “name brand” of the school, or give pre-employment screening tests, or require internships— because they can’t know whether program X from Y university is rigorous and teaching useful skills, or garbage tier and graduating anyone who pays course fees on time.

“Equality of opportunity is morally undesirable.” Pro

I'd be interested to hear where you're coming from on this one. Is this the "social mobility hollows out the working class" / "desegregation destroyed Black America" argument or something different?

Don't have Discord, so you're getting text here.

13: it depends what "diversity" is code for; I can think of at least three different meanings i.e. "diversity of opinions", "racial diversity per se", and "skimming off the top of ROW's IQ pool". The first is mostly a strength under capitalism because it maximises efficiency at generating alternatives; the second is a weakness because racial animus lowers societal trust; the third is a strength, at least selfishly, for obvious reasons.

28: The adversarial justice system requires that criminal defence lawyers exist. So if this statement is true, you kind of have to accept one of the following propositions:

  1. "This system is fine, but it can't work without bad people" (this raises issues of "if society requires these bad people's badness in order to do good, are they really bad people?")

  2. "The adversarial justice system is bad" (this isn't clearly false - there are benefits and drawbacks - but it's such a big proposition that it really kind of subsumes your original point).

  3. "Criminal defence lawyers should exist but should all suck at their jobs" (a trial that always ends in conviction seems dominated by skipping the trial and proceeding straight to imposing sentence).

29: You can't stably privatise the police force and army; if you try, soon there will be a coup d'état, after which the police force and army will again be connected to government. A government with no monopoly on force is not much of a government.

There are also things like market failures or externalities that are fairest when done coercively (the fire brigade has a classic free-rider problem where if I refuse to pay for the fire brigade, they will still usually prevent fires from reaching my house due to all the people nearby who have paid for it). There are technically ways a labyrinthine system of free contracts can in-practice implement this coercion (in this case, the homeowners of an area all sign a contract that they will pay for the fire brigade and won't sell their homes to anyone who doesn't enter into the same contract), but in many cases it's less paperwork to have one such contract - the social contract - and run it through government.

42: I agree with proposition #16, and that's basically where the "AI is dangerous" thought comes from. If IQ is power, then something with IQ 10,000 (whatever that means) is powerful indeed - and if that something thinks Earth would be a better place without humans (much as, say, humans think Earth would be better off without malarial mosquitoes), the default outcome is that we go the way of the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger when men showed up. This is really the core point; most of the argumentation in practice centres on a bunch of... well, the nasty word would be "cope", that attempts to carve out some sort of reason this general argument shouldn't apply.

45: I live in Australia. Australia hasn't polarised nearly as badly as the USA has; it's commonly conjectured that this is because we have compulsory voting and IRV, which forces our two largest parties toward each other via the Median Voter Theorem (you can only win in the centre, because extremists on your side are already forced to vote for you) and thus doesn't leave a lot to get polarised about. I think you're probably right about the marginal effect of slightly increased vs. decreased turnout from what the USA currently has, but this local dependence reverses when you get very far from that.

52: With the obvious exception of "doing MMA to people without their consent or some genuine cause", sure.

61: On the margin you certainly have a case, but the optimal amount of such regulation is importantly nonzero. With zero, you get bosses imposing hazards but not telling workers/customers about them, which generally means you don't get to have nice things.

The US also has the median voter theorem applying. But the primary process ends up pushing more extreme candidates to the fore, and then you try to paint the other side as extreme to persuade the median voter to go for you.

With voluntary plurality voting, policies that appeal to the base may increase turnout or increase the percentage that vote for you instead of wasting it on a third party; this breaks the MVT.

IRV + compulsory negates that; those far from the centre are forced to preference you as long as you're one micron better than the other guy.

The adversarial justice system requires that criminal defence lawyers exist. So if this statement is true, you kind of have to accept one of the following propositions:

  1. "This system is fine, but it can't work without bad people"
  1. "The adversarial justice system is bad"
  1. "Criminal defence lawyers should exist but should all suck at their jobs"

The existence of competent, good-faith criminal suspect defense lawyers forces the system to only bring to trial those suspects they can reasonably expect to convict. Those lawyers are there to protect the citizenry from overzealous policing, badly motivated judges, win-hungry prosecutors and easily swayed juries.

Calling them criminal defence lawyers is accurate; they practice criminal law (the law that deals with crimes) as defence attorneys.

I am also aware of why they exist; like I said, there are benefits to the adversarial system. With that said, inquisitorial systems don't always result in a police state.

Lot of reports on this post for it being low-effort. There are lots of downvotes as well.

I'm putting my mod-hat on to give an official response. However, I won't be giving an official warning to /u/PerseusWizardry, since this does not seem to clearly violate any existing rules.

I thought this was fine as a user, and I said so. But it seems many other users might not agree. This post was maybe a better fit for a stand-alone post, rather than a top level comment within the culture war thread.

As a general suggestion: Omnibus posts (where you link a bunch of different unrelated issues) in the culture war thread are often a bad idea, and posters should try to avoid them.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

As a person who used to send long lists of questions like this many years ago (example), I applaud this attempt. But I agree with the other commenters that it seems a little low-effort for this particular thread.

You seem inordinately preoccupied with moral questions. That's your biggest hangup. They don't have objective answers without fixing a moral framework. And even then, well-informed people mostly disagree.

Well, sure, but:

  1. You could say the same thing about aesthetic claims. But if your friend told you “hey I know you think the new Marvel movie was good but I think it sucks, let me tell you why”, you wouldn’t tell him “first we need to decide on a framework for aesthetic evaluation”. You would just hear him out, and you would assume from the start that it’s the sort of thing that you two could have a reasonable conversation about, and that he is capable of giving reasons that you may be responsive to, reasons that may ultimately cause you to change your position.

  2. People’s moral psychological profiles and modes of ethical inference are more similar than is generally assumed. Almost everyone agrees that theft is wrong for example, and if you give an argument that purports to show that some particular act is isomorphic to theft (e.g. “I can’t take your ice cream cone without your consent, so why can the government take part of your income without your consent?”), then people won’t just blow it off: they’ll feel compelled to either accept your argument, or point out some relevant difference that causes the isomorphism to fail.

I understand your point. Though I posit that people generally understand there are differences in taste in a way they don't understand differences in morality.

Be that as it may, my concern was more narrow, specifically that @PerseusWizardry will have a better time if he drops all of his moral questions. They are simply not questions that can be resolved through conversation or better data.

You've never changed your mind on a moral question, due to more information?

I'm racking my brain and coming up blank. As an adult I'm reasonably sure the answer is no. Have you?

Well, I'm rather young, so my "as an adult" timeframe is limited, and my memories aren't timestamped.

Maybe going from anti- to pro-sweatshop would count? I'm sure there are other specific examples. Does that count as a moral question?

For more overarching moral theory, I've become aware that there are decision-theoretical theorems that I would want whatever theory I embrace to manage to either agree with the conclusion, or disagree with the premises.

Yes, many of the questions are moral questions, but they are specific moral questions. You can point to things that could play relevant factors in their moral analysis, since we tend to moralize according to principles to some extent, it's not arbitrary.

For a lightning rod, let's look at one example he gave: “Abortion is morally permissible.” Pro

Here are some relevant questions that might affect your opinion in one way or another:

What normative ethical systems seem plausible enough to you that we should take them into account? What things might plausibly give humans moral value, under the way you think about ethical systems? How do you value animals? How do you value 3-day olds? The mentally ill? What do you think about population ethics (and, of course there are all sort of arguments there as to what systems within that make sense)? What about harms contributed to the mother? To the father? To society? Demographically, are we trending toward overpopulation or underpopulation? Aren't they cute? But don't you feel bad for that girl in Ohio? Is AI going to kill everyone before they live a proper life anyway? Might they have lasting souls? If Christianity's (or any other religion) right, will killing them send them to paradise? Or hell? What about rights—can they place an obligation for you to let them use your body, like the musician thought experiment? Do you share any guilt or praise for harms or, I suppose, benefits from differentially aborting groups that society could do better or worse with more of (see China's birth ratio)? And I'm sure there are many more.

All of these can affect your opinion on that issue, which means that arguments bringing up those features aren't useless.

“Asian romantic preferences are morally permissible.” Pro

As in preferring Asian women? I feel like there's a lot to unpack here in which men may prefer Asian women for certain attributes that aren't necessarily racial.

Most of my dating has been WMAF and it's more due to wanting a petite, intelligent, agreeable socially-conservative woman without somebody else's kids. 90% of that stock in my area happens to be Asian and therefore I date a lot of Asian girls.

None of these one-liners, if posted individually, would come even close to meeting the thread's quality standards. I don't think combining them into one huge (and very unwieldy) post makes up for it. It's the same as posting them one by one sequentially, except the format makes it even harder to discuss. (After writing this, I saw that @iprayiam3 said basically the same thing.) If you didn't want any discussion here and this was just an invitation to chat with you, that belongs in the Sunday or Friday thread, not here.

Another problem with your list:

\28. “It is not possible to be a good criminal defense lawyer AND a good person.” Pro

This is just asking how you personally should feel about the lawyers. It doesn't result in any policy prescriptions. Weird to include it together with the much more concrete questions like 7 and 19.

In general, you mix strictly normative questions (28, 39, 40, 48), strictly positive, empirical questions (6, 7, 11, 19, 22) and questions that are a complicated mix of both:

  • 9 requires you to define "feminist" (there are many very different definitions and settling on one, even just for the purpose of a single discussion, may not be easy) and "bad" (which requires an entire moral theory), followed by a complicated discussion of empirical questions

  • 30, again, requires a moral theory to define what it means to "deserve" something and what is "fair", followed by a complicated discussion of empirical questions; for example, two people may agree that the poor deserve to be poor if equality of opportunity exists and the poor are just lazy, but they may disagree on the empirical question of whether equality of opportunity does in fact exist; or they may simply believe, as you apparently do (per 51), that equality of opportunity is morally undesirable

“The casting couch is just prostitution” Pro

The casting couch is much more immoral than prostitution because the resources that are being traded for sex often do not truly belong to the person trading them. When the director chooses to hire the actress who gives him sexual favors over the actress who refuses but would be better for the role he is essentially defrauding the production company and anyone who has financial interest in the film.

Alternatively, an actress who refuses the casting couch does not really want the role, and will be trouble on set. The casting couch is a quick and reliable way to see if actresses are biddable. Can you think of a better test to see if an actress is willing to do what the director asks her to?

I wonder what the corresponding task you should set a man is? Perhaps very similar.

Can you think of a better test to see if an actress is willing to do what the director asks her to?

This goes back to the OP's original observation about the principal-agent problem. Film is a collaborative medium; while it might be in the director's interest to have an actress who does whatever he or she says, it is not necessarily in the interests of the producers of the film.

it is not necessarily in the interests of the producers of the film.

This is why producers are the ones who run the casting couch, presumably. It is their money on the line, so they make the decision.

As Wikipedia says:

Predominantly male casting directors and film producers use the casting couch to extract sex from aspiring actors in Hollywood, Bollywood,[3][4] Broadway, and other segments of the industry.

Neither [3] nor [4] give any evidence for the claim "Predominantly". If there is a female producer or casting director using the couch, she is flying under the radar.

This is why producers are the ones who run the casting couch, presumably. It is their money on the line, so they make the decision.

I am talking about the production company .

Weinstein was the co-owner (with his brother) and founder of Miramax, the production company that made Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Pulp Fiction, Heavenly Creatures, Flirting with Disaster, and Shakespeare in Love. It was his money on the line.

I am talking** in general**, not specifically re Weinstein. The casting couch existed long before Weinstein was born. Plus, Miramax was owned by Disney for much of the time inquestion.

Producers are the usual people to run a casting couch, and they normally own a large part of the production company.

The casting couch was more common under the studio system, but I do not know if the movie moguls were the ones on top at the time: They were Louis B. Mayer at MGM, Jack L. Warner at Warner Bros., Adolph Zukor at Paramount, William Fox and Darryl F. Zanuck (at 20th Century Fox from 1935), Carl Laemmle at Universal, and Harry Cohn at Columbia.

If someone has to have sex with the new young starlets, I imagine the job, like most difficult things, is past off to the guy in charge. If you want something done, ask a busy person.

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I wonder what the corresponding task you should set a man is? Perhaps very similar.

Several hundred hours of grinding leetcode is plausibly more degrading...

Can you think of a better test to see if an actress is willing to do what the director asks her to?

How about something difficult that isn't immoral and which won't risk tanking your reputation and getting you into legal trouble?

Even if there's merit to the idea of giving actresses tests which are overkill relative to the actual demands of the job, for an executive to assert that this test must be sex is odd, clearly in danger of being motivated by sexual desire alone, and risky for business.

Parkinson suggested the following test to reduce the number of candidates for an attractive position:

Let us suppose that the qualities deemed essential are (i) Energy, (2) Courage, (3) Patriotism, (4) Experience, (5 )Popularity, and (6) Eloquence. Now, it will be observed that all these are general-qualities which all possible applicants would believe themselves to possess. The field could readily, of course, be narrowed by stipulating (4) Experience of lion-taming, or (6) Eloquence in Mandarin. But that is not the way in which we want to narrow the field. We do not want to stipulate aquality in a special form; rather, each quality in an exceptional degree. In other words, the successful candidate must be the most energetic,courageous, patriotic, experienced, popular, and eloquent man in thecountry. Only one man can answer to that description and his is the only application we want. The terms of the appointment must thus be phrased so as to exclude everyone else. We should therefore word the advertisement in some such way as follows:

Wanted– Prime Minister of Ruritania. Hours of work: 4 A.M. to 11.59 P.M. Candidates must be prepared to fight three rounds with the current heavyweight champion (regulation gloves to be worn). Candidates will die for their country, by painless means, on reaching the age of retirement (65). They will have to pass an examination in parliamentary procedure and will be liquidated should they fail to obtain 95% marks. They will also be liquidated if they fail to gain 75% votes in a popularity poll held under the Gallup Rules. They will finally be invited to try their eloquence on a Baptist Congress, the object being to induce those present to rock and roll. Those who fail will be liquidated. All candidates should present themselves at the Sporting Club (side entrance) at 11.15 A.M. on the morning of September 19. Gloves will be provided, but they should bring their own rubber-soled shoes, singlet, and shorts.

It is very hard to find a test that will distinguish the people who want the job from the people who really, really want the job. For an actress, the major issues that come up are a willingness to get naked on camera and pretending to engage in quite atypical actions (for some reason, this seems to be the sticking point for most actresses. They object to nude scenes, but not to killing people, defacing works of art, or jaywalking). How can you test if an actress is willing to do this? Some things come to mind but are significantly weirder than the casting couch.

Feminists will doubtless suggest that movies should not have gratuitous nudity. That raises the question as to whether the nudity is gratuitous or not. My guess is that Gwyneth Palthow's performance in Shakespeare in Love would have been received differently if she had worn more clothing, and thus Weinstein got the job done. Julia Roberts, who was supposed to get the role had a policy of keeping her top on. I could be completely wrong about this, but there certainly is a trend for more female nudity after a lull. We are now back to 70s-era levels of nudity in films, and especially in cable channels (or whatever they are called now), and possibly beyond that. Hollywood could be wrong, and perhaps more people would watch movies if there was less nudity, but "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." The same perhaps applies to morals.

Alternatively, an actress who refuses the casting couch does not really want the role, and will be trouble on set.

This makes the assumption that normal humans treat sex like ordinary financial transactions. This assumption is false.

This makes the assumption that normal humans treat sex like ordinary financial transactions. This assumption is false.

I don't think Hollywood actors are normal people. Asking the actress for money would not be the same kind of test at all. You need a test that will show that the actress is willing to do whatever it takes. Acting is weird, and people do things in movies that are very out of character, as people like watching strange things. Furthermore, directors think that they know best and want people who will do what they say.

Consider Ms Depp's recent show, The Idol, (which to be honest, I have not watched). My faith in humanity suggests that less than 1% of women would consider acting in that role. Much of modern film is probably indistinguishable from pornography on set at times.

I think that the casting couch is deeply immoral, but I understand why it reliably selects actresses who are desperate and willing to do anything to get and keep a role. There is a difference between understanding how something functions and approving of it.

The point is that plenty of people are willing to do "anything at all" as long as the anything at all doesn't involve sex. Sex is treated differently and you can't conclude much about unwillingness to do other things based on unwillingness to sleep her way into the job.

(And for nitpickers, no, I don't mean that people would be willing to murder to get the job.)

you can't conclude much about unwillingness to do other things based on unwillingness to sleep her way into the job.

Much of the difficult things that actresses are asked to do involve simulating sex. Hence Ms. Depp in the above post. Game of Thrones pushes the line a little beyond simulating at times. If actors were made fight other people with swords, joust (incidentally, the only jousting school is in LA. Can you guess why?), jump out of planes (with and without parachutes), and scale high buildings, cliffs, etc. then this might be analogous. Some actors actually do these things, and allegedly their movies are the better for it. You test actresses with sex as that is the thing they are most likely to balk at on the actual job.

For example, just today Joanna Lumley complained about nudity in movies.

you can't conclude much about unwillingness to do other things based on unwillingness to sleep her way into the job.

Much of the difficult things that actresses are asked to do involve simulating sex.

You can't conclude much about unwillingness to do other things, which includes simulating sex, based on unwillingness to sleep her way into the job.

Human beings aren't like that.

You can't conclude much about unwillingness to do other things, which includes simulating sex, based on unwillingness to sleep her way into the job.

Girls who are willing to sleep with people for roles are usually willing to simulate sex on screen. At least, that is what I am told. To be honest, I find the idea that there would be a strong correlation between the two things plausible. They both involve sex.

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That is a standard that nobody meets. People regularly favor others based on aspects that aren't strictly job relevant.

Besides, what if the director was using it as a tie-breaker between two equally competent actresses?

That is a standard that nobody meets. People regularly favor others based on aspects that aren't strictly job relevant.

This conflates "Not being a hive mind ceaselessly optimizing for profit" with "making a multi-million dollar decision with your dick" which seems like a pretty lossy equivalence ("yeah he killed 15 men, but come on -- everyone commits some kind of crime").

The claim is "If a person who is given money to make a movie uses some of that money to have sex and make the movie worse, this is worse than hiring a prostitute with his own money". Do you disagree with that claim?

Besides, what if the director was using it as a tie-breaker between two equally competent actresses?

"It's just a tie breaker" has been said about affirmative action in software engineering for decades and it's always struck me how only somebody who has never actually done software engineering could believe it -- go ask some startup founders if they've ever had to choose between two equally good candidates. Maybe this philosophy is sensible for other kinds of work (e.g. low-skill jobs, or jobs where interview question give you no signal about employee quality), but not software engineering.

I'm inclined to believe that actors are at least less fungible as software engineers -- it seems like a no-brainer that casting can (and does) make or break a movie.

The claim is "If a person who is given money to make a movie uses some of that money to have sex and make the movie worse, this is worse than hiring a prostitute with his own money". Do you disagree with that claim?

I don't disagree, but the vast majority of people handed money to make movies have insufficient leverage to get laid off it, unless they used the money to hire hookers instead.

I'm inclined to believe that actors are at least less fungible as software engineers -- it seems like a no-brainer that casting can (and does) make or break a movie.

Established actors? Maybe. But someone no name blonde 8/10 trying to make it in the big leagues is functionally interchangeable with any other. The more unique you get, the less you need to get a leg up by spreading them.

Even then, the casting couch is still wrong. It is akin to bribery, no different to a hiring manager being offered $10k for himself personally by candidate A to choose himself for the job over "equally good" candidate B. We should be against it for the same reason we are against bribery. In fact just like how we are against situations which even give the impression that bribery could be going on (Caesar's wife and all that), we should be against situtations which even give the impression this form of prostitution could be going on (by e.g. always mandating two people present at these interviews etc.)

That's an interesting argument but I think it misses. There are two distinct differences, though between the casting couch and prostitution:

  1. Prostitution is explicit. There's no question at all up front what the prostitute has to do to get paid. If casting calls had "Must perform sex acts on producer" along side other requirements, it would be different. But the vast majority of castings, from Hollywood down to commercials and community theater in Idaho, don't require the actors to do anything out of the ordinary. Even when it does happen, there's rarely any explicit demand for sex; the guy usually just hits on the actress and there's an implication that it wouldn't hurt to sleep with him.

  2. On the other side of the coin, what you get out of sleeping with him isn't explicit either. A prostitute knows that she's going to get paid; that's part of the deal. Since the casting couch is by its nature implicit rather than explicit, there's never any guarantee that satisfying the guy's demands will get the desired outcome. He could think you're a terrible actress but worth a roll in the hay and use his power to convince you that sleeping with him will get you the part even though he knows up front there's no chance in hell of that happening. And when it comes to producers like Harvey Weinstein they aren't even the ones necessarily making the final decision. The director and casting agent are the ones who are supposed to come to that conclusion; while producers have considerable influence and can put in a good word (and even possibly demand it), they aren't technically the ones who get to decide, at least not since the end of the studio system.

So if there was some explicit statement up front that sex with the producer, or director, or casting agent, or half the employees of MGM was required for the role, and it would only have to be done at the end after they'd already been picked, then, yeah, I would liken it to prostitution. But the way it is now is way too vague in comparison.

Since the casting couch is by its nature implicit rather than explicit, there's never any guarantee that satisfying the guy's demands will get the desired outcome.

It is common to pay people for attempts rather than for successes, as the former is more under their control. I can't see why it is wrong to pay an agent money to promote your book, even if the agent might not get you a book deal. I don't think you can claim book agents and Harvey Weinstein are wrong for the same reason. The same applies to most agents, sports included.

"Must perform sex acts on producer"

The requirement is that the actress must be able to plausibly fake being interested in having sex with Weinstein et al. That requires real talent and is an actual test of acting. Allegedly, most Hollywood actresses meet this bar.

Even when it does happen, there's rarely any explicit demand for sex;

Do you know this? My sources claim that people are very explicit about expectations. Actresses have agents who set these meetings up, and they explain in great detail, what is expected. For every John, there is a pimp.

Luckily all this will be made moot by AI. No-one, and I mean no-one, is going to ask the AI developer for sex, (except the sexbot that AI developer him(or her)self made).

The requirement is that the actress must be able to plausibly fake being interested in having sex with Weinstein et al.

Even if this is a real requirement, the producer should hire a professional from the pornographic industry to test the actress out on, at most he should get to watch the act (to judge the merits etc.), not participate in it.

a professional from the pornographic industry

Why is Weinstein not a professional at this? Allegedly he has been doing it for years. He is like the Robert Parker of actresses. Parker's big advantage in wine tasting was that he had tasted all these allegedly fabulous vintages that are no longer available. Who but Weinstein could compare the charms of actresses across the decades.

Because he should only care about how good the scene looks on film, not how good it feels. You don't need to actually have the sex to decide on the merits of what is captured on screen and how it will be seen by viewers (who themselves also won't be having the sex being shown). In fact it is better to not be the person actually having the sex as then you can look at the scene from different perspectives and distances (which you'll have on the final film) that you can't if you're having sex.

I can't see why it is wrong to pay an agent money to promote your book, even if the agent might not get you a book deal. I don't think you can claim book agents and Harvey Weinstein are wrong for the same reason. The same applies to most agents, sports included.

After about 2 years of lurking (ever since the end of Slate Star Codex), I dont know why this is the factually inaccurate thing that got me to finally register and post, but real book agents do not charge you money to promote your book. Anyone claiming to be an agent who asks for money in order to have your book promoted is scamming you (and yes, there are scams where people do this edit: to clarify, they take the money but don't actually promote your book). Real agents only take on books that theyre fairly certain they can sell and make money from their commission.

real book agents do not charge you money to promote your book.

I would like to think this was true, and I am sure that reputable agents do not charge money, but I imagine there are a lot of disreputable agents out there.

In a similar vein, never give equity (or god forbid, cash) to someone who claims they will help you fundraise.

I imagine there are a lot of disreputable agents out there.

Not really, no. Unless, again, you're talking about scammers. Anyone looking to publish is warned about agents asking for money to represent you, and publishers would be unlikely to work with such people. If by "disreputable agent", you're talking about someone who takes your money with zero chance of it leading to actual publication, then we're just splitting hairs over our definitions of scammer.

I would like to think this was true, and I am sure that reputable agents do not charge money, but I imagine there are a lot of disreputable agents out there.

They exist, but it's very well known in the publishing business that money flows to the author, not from the author. Any but the most naive or desperate of authors knows this, and an agent charging money is quickly known in the industry. It's true that with the advent of self-publishing and Kindle Direct there are a lot of new business models, most of which range from predatory to outright fraudulent, so you will find, for example, "hybrid" publishers that claim to be selective but act a sort of half-vanity press, half publicity agency.

But the established industry practice is that agents get a cut when they sell your book, and nothing before then. Any agent deviating from this is pretty much by definition not a reputable agent.

It doesn't sound like you're responding to my point at all. You're just adding another difference on top

This post and the thread in response is unreadable, as it and most responses are a long collection of unrelated ideas and only the ability to respond to some before branching off into dead ends and redundancy.

I suggest we don't do this. It's extraordinarily annoying.

Perhaps you meant the thread discussion to be confined to the meta-discussion about discussing such topics, but it clearly didn't turn out that way and you shouldn't have itemized several dozen.

A top level post that throws out 73 disparate discussion topics is an abuse of the concept of topics. This is essentially 73 low effort posts that amount to "controversial statement... discuss."

Agree.

I also disliked that the pitch was to privately discuss these topics on Discord voice chat, rather than here on this message board. It would be alright in another thread, but seems out of place and exclusionary in this one.


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