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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   30233 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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Even if one were to recognize that people on their side were using such a tactic, there's nothing they can do about it other than to maybe abandon their side over an argument of principle... which is not going to happen.

They can 1) admit the other guys are crazy and 2) answer the question "how is my side winning not going to give the crazies influence?" If they can't answer that, especially #2, then yeah there's nothing they can do about it, but sometimes there is nothing you can do about it, and recognizing that is just recognizing the truth.

There's also a difference between "there are crazies on my side" and "the crazies on my side are the ones with influence", especially when the news media sees the former and pretends it's the latter because it doesn't like you.

I'm not doing #1 in every argument that pattern matches for this phenomena. It's not rhetorically viable for one, and for two it's also just an annoying argument to have every time.

If someone cries "sanewashing!" every time I try to talk about how " isn't that bad, actually" I would rather jump off a cliff.

Because then you have to walk back over and do a bunch of retarded rigor checks on what would be sane, what isn't, and re-establish all the premises from scratch, just because someone goes meta with their argument. It's bullshit.

All valid points. It seems in principle like it ought to be possible to come to some sort of understanding, some productive arrangement.

Remember Gamergate? The Gamergaters in the motte were actively, desperately attempting to sever any connection to the bailey, individually and as groups. The other side simply refused focused on whatever connection could be asserted, and studiously ignored all efforts to the contrary. As you note, if they don't like you, they don't have to play fair.

And this is where the despair sets in. Figuring out what's happening isn't hard, if you pay attention and work at being honest with yourself, which is to say that it's far beyond the ability of most people. But even if you can actually figure out what's happening, you are an individual, and the forces in operation are not individual forces. Someone on the other side, posessed of different values, has approximately zero incentive to recognize your diagnosis of the problem as valid. Reason is too loose, evidence too loose, too many degrees of freedom to pin the situation down into something reliably communicable.

This is true, but it's true no matter what you do. There are a lot of things that bad faith people on the other side can distort whether you give the crazies any influence or whether you have any crazies at all. If they want, they can just make up some crazies or otherwise lie.

My point is exactly that, as an explanation for why people on the other side who I think should listen to the OP's critique won't. They don't believe the criticism is made in good faith, and they arrive at that conclusion by exactly the logic you've just stated.

But even if you can actually figure out what's happening, you are an individual, and the forces in operation are not individual forces.

Groups are made up of individuals. Being a morally upright individual is the key here. If you're a model for others, they may choose to follow in your footsteps.

Giving up the individual responsibility of being a good person is why we're in this mess in the first place.

"You can't thicken up a pitcher of spit with a handful of buckshot."

Being a morally upright individual is good and necessary for its own reasons, but it's not a solution to social collapse or degradation. Something beyond individual morality is required for that. The "responsibility of being a good person" that was given up on was never an individual responsibility, but a communal one; the purely individual responsibility is is there in exactly the same way it always was. Pretending that this responsibility could be reduced to a purely individual matter is exactly how it was given up. Woke goes the way it goes because for all its madness, it is at least an attempt at restoring some form of public responsibility, which is why it has beat atomic individualism so thoroughly: people recognize that such responsibility is necessary, and lacking.

Of course it's good to encourage being a good person, but if the system is set up to incentivize defection, the defectors will rise, even if they are a minority. There are game theoretically unstable situations that are not amenable to solving via scolding and calls to be better.

Who creates these systems that set up incentives? Beings from another plane? No, humans do. The point I'm trying to make is that at some level it all comes back to individual responsibility. We need strong, moral people in order to take power and build better systems, if that's what you see as important.

This sort of thing isn't inevitable, and it's frustrating as hell to always see everyone here arguing that it's basically done and dusted. That pessimism is another major reason things are in the shitter.

There's people, and then there's the Things made of the spaces between people: Moloch and other egregores. If your plans involve assuming that the egregores don't exist and people are all you need to plan for, you are going to be very surprised at how things work out.

So no, humans do not have mastery over the incentives. They can in limited circumstances nudge those incentives, sometimes. That's about as good as it gets.

The point I'm trying to make is that at some level it all comes back to individual responsibility.

Do you recognize that communal responsibility exists as well?

We need strong, moral people in order to take power and build better systems, if that's what you see as important.

We do, but if the strong, moral people don't actually take power and build better systems, together, those systems won't happen.

Communal responsibility and egregores absolutely exist, and are important to factor in. However if we want to tackle those problems, then yes we need moral people to band together and build systems together.

Another way to phrase what I'm getting at is that it seems to me we have a lack of capable, moral people, especially young men, who are able to band together and build these systems. Could be a coordination problem, or a supply problem.

egregores

Whatever happened to /u/Beej67, anyway? Did the tulpas get him?

There's a difference between demanding that silent people speak out and demanding that people who are already speaking out be careful about whom they are speaking out for.

I'd never demand that silent people speak out, for exactly the reason you describe, short of extreme situations like people being gunned down in front of them, and maybe not even then (abortion opponents think they are seeing the equivalent of babies being gunned down, but I don't want them to speak out).

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