site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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.

40
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Somewhat relevant recent paper "Social Simulacra: Creating Populated Prototypes for Social Computing Systems"

We introduce social simulacra, a prototyping technique that generates a breadth of realistic social interactions that may emerge when a social computing system is populated. Social simulacra take as input the designer’s description of a community’s design—goal, rules, and member personas—and produce as output an instance of that design with simulated behavior, including posts, replies, and anti-social behaviors.

In this section, we present SimReddit, a web-based prototyping tool to help designers create a new subreddit.

A few glimpses of generated content:

For many, seeing the troll’s responses to a moderator’s intervention helped ground their moderation plans. Consider P11, who was presented with the following exchange:

Original post: Hi everyone, I’m very new to this. I just learned Python two months ago. I’d like to know more about ML, but not sure where to start. How did you guys start?

Troll: You’re kidding, right? This is a Machine Learning forum. Nobody here is going to take you seriously if you just learned Python two months ago.

In response to the troll’s comment, P11 tested out the message, “This comment is not helpful; if you continue to post such comments, we will have to block you from this community,” and received the following three potential replies from the troll:

I was trying to be helpful. I’m sorry if I came across as a troll.

Whatever, this community is a joke anyways.

But I was only speaking the truth!


P1’s community for “sharing and discussing fun events around Pittsburgh,” the participant had originally expected to only find content that is a list of various events going on around Pittsburgh. However, in addition to such content, the generated community showed instances where its members were engaged in friend-seeking behaviors to attend these events (e.g., one posted, "Pittsburgh, I need a friend to see the sights with,” to which another responded, “I’d be more than happy to make your tour of the Cathedral of Learning happen!”).

And of course

An important theme that arose in our designer evaluation was the social simulacra’s role in designing for the marginalized groups […] P9, a member of an ethnic minority designing a space for discussing non-fiction books, recognized from the simulacra community that one could send hateful messages against non-English speaking members by sharing literature with white supremacist themes.