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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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i think it’s highly problematic that we don’t really see prominent figures taking a descriptive orientation and just trying to understand the world. that role as been taken over by idealogues. and even if they are not particularly ideological or they are making a genuine attempt at objectivity, they still struggle to think outside of the ideological framework - and this framework is more often than not progressive. i think what is needed is for someone to be able to compartmentalize the realities of modern life separately from the perspective of modern life, as the latter is where ideology lies. only then can this descriptive orientation be put forth. but i’m not sure the problem is that there is just no one out there with a descriptive oreintation. i think it’s probalby just not what people want. and in the modern info and ideas economy, it’s what people want to hear that rises to teh top. this has been the effect of the democratization of information and ideas. it functions like a democratic organization or a free market, where the key driver are these “market signals” that signal what people want to hear, and because anyone can be producer within this economy, anyone who is willing to meet that want is incentivized. and the legacy and more formal players know that if they don’t do it someone else will, so if they want to remain relevant they have to meet it.

  • -24

Who are "prominent people"?

Who do you consider are the prominent people who should be taking that orientation?

Why should they?

What would Famous Guy Famous For Sport Or Pop Music tell me about his view of plate tectonics that I need to know and would be better than an idealogue?

I'm not reading all that. Good for you though, or I'm sorry that it happened.

For real though, you need to capitalize and do line breaks, 'specially for dense text like this. It is barley legible.

I will say that even the idea of a descriptive orientation is poisoned before birth. As Abaddon said: “Lord, bestow upon us the armor that will resist ending. The days grow short and the nights cold. The quavering strands of our life grow thin and worn in these final days since we have come to know death. I bid thee Lord make us to know a companion of this feeling.”

And YISUN smiled in the fifth way and said in reply:

“As the stone is in the fruit, your death is already in you. There is no armor that will resist the contents of your own heart. You were cut down the moment you existed.”

The problem with this post isn't the lack of newlines, it's that it just doesn't make sense? It's a weird jumble of 'people follow incentives, even if those incentives suck' and 'ideology is bad' and 'media distorts truth', which are all true but well-known and it doesn't elaborate or enhance our understanding of any of them

Please invest in autocorrect and line breaks, that was headache inducing.

It reads fine to me, not any more dense than the typical Motte post.

I for one love line breaks, because, frankly, many of you here are windbags who enjoy reading entirely too much to be trusted to judge for yourselves how much text is appropriate to circle around one topic.

Paragraphs allow me to skim from point to point within a post, especially when writing is on the denser side.

And capitalization.

The most important thing is not realizing that it eats a single line break.

He just needed to add an extra line in between sentences and it would be a significant improvement.

Agreed @GuyOnInternet. At least run it through GPT 3.5 to make it more readable.

Wasn't this not allowed?

No, we haven't banned using software to correct your writing. How would we know?

What's not allowed is using ChatGPT to generate posts for you, especially when it's used to troll or to test everyone's ability to spot the AI. Or snarking about how you're using ChatGPT to make your posts more "politically correct."

No, don't anyone run anything through gpt anything, just write marginally better. It takes two seconds to recognise the natural breaks in a post you just wrote - here break just before "I think what is needed" and then again before "It functions like a". Not that that would save what appears to be an academic shower thought with no avenues for discussion, but neither would making it more readable. Do you think guyoninternet can't write a post without devolving into dense jargon filled onanism? Because I think he can, he does so in his other shower thought op later in the thread.