site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

11
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

However I'm most interested in how this innovation could shift the balance of power back to the strong and physically capable, away from the nerds.

There's been some amount of this in VR already: BeatSaber is one of the more famous VR games as a whole and can be surprisingly calisthenic (cw: flashing colors), and games like Rumble take that further to a point that can interact with your proprioception.

But there are ultimately games. There are definite advantages to Apple's handsetless approach -- dumbest side, you actually do lose track of where your real hands are when using a lot of VR handsets! ((Though I'm not sure handsetless is the right answer. Lucas's LucidVR tech has that bulky jank only DIY can provide, but cheap haptic feedback allows a lot of things that handsetless can't.)) But it's not immediately obvious that these would have any implications on a 'balance of power' any deeper than the next generation of MMORPGs, or perhaps some corny Pokemon Go-style things.

It's imaginable to see something with broader implications. You don't need to be physically strong to build a house in Minecraft, and you're not doing much more to build a house in VR-Minecraft (though your noodly arms will get a workout!), but there's at least a plausible scenario where XR/AR-HouseBuilding Assistant ends up being a thing. Given the current state of recruiting for the trades (and the people who are recruited often doing awful at it) that's potentially a pretty lucrative design space.

But the reason Software Ate The World isn't that it was something you did with computers; it's that it's something you did once and it applied ten thousand or ten million times without having to redo each one. There are a few places where that matters with just physical strength or dexterity, but most of those spaces are very well-explored.

But if you suppose that a lot of the reason past-gen tech focused on us noodly-armed people was because the active and energetic don't enjoy sitting down at a computer when thinking hard, then maybe that's a different matter.