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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   30160 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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The recent obesity post on the Motte got me and my (progressive) wife talking about the fat acceptance movement. Ultimately, I was mostly driving at "Even if I don't like when I see what I believe to be undue hatred of fat people, I think the fat acceptance movement is primarily a bunch of hatred-filled people who want to control other people's desires and shame everyone else in order to fill the empty void in their own lives". My wife (as she usually does) was going with the argument of, "That's not what it means to me, and it doesn't matter if there are hatred-filled people in the fat acceptance movement, because I've personally gotten good ideas from the fat acceptance movement. I've taken away the concepts that we shouldn't cast moral judgements on people. And even if being fat were a moral failing, we shouldn't hate people over it, and even if we hated them, we shouldn't treat them poorly. And also standards of beauty change over different times and places". I basically replied that I believe she is sanewashing a movement that primarily works based on hatred, not love and reason, and I suggested to my wife that people like her are "laundering credibility" in social movements like this.

This idea of laundering credibility is nothing new to me, I've been thinking about it in one form or another ever since I had my anti-progressive awakening over a decade ago. I have often talked in the past about a similar concept, what I call a "memetic motte and bailey", which I believe to be more common and more insidious than normal motte and baileys. In a normal motte and bailey, as Scott describes it, it's a single person retreating to the motte, but harvesting the bailey. But in a "memetic motte and bailey", there are many people out in the bailey who believe the bailey, and there are a few credentialed or credible people in the motte who probably believe the motte. And those people provide the deflection for those in the bailey.

I call this memetic because this system seems to arrive naturally and be self-perpetuating, without anyone being quite aware of the problem. If questioned at all, people are easily able to say (and seem to truly believe), "those crazy bailey people don't actually represent the movement. You can't claim a movement is hateful or worthless just because of a few fringe crazies". And they point to well-credentialed professors and the like, who take more academic and reasonable stances, as the actual carriers of feminism, etc. Meanwhile the supposedly "false", hatred-filled, bailey feminism sweeps through the hearts and minds of every other progressive, and captures the institutions that actually matter and enforce policies.

I've seen other people engaged with the culture war, who dance around the idea of "laundering credibility" in one form or another, but I'm not certain I've seen it called out as such, and I don't think I see it focused on nearly as much as I think it should be. In fact, I remember one time when people either here or on ASX had gotten mad at me for "misusing" the term motte and bailey to mean this memetic-version. But if you ask me, this version is much more prevalent, insidious, and difficult to deal with than the standard single-person motte and bailey. It truly is a memetic force. It's self-perpetuating. It spreads because it doesn't even register as a thing to those who benefit from it. They by and large don't seem to even notice the discrepancy. And it's very difficult to stop, by those who want to stop it. Even those who don't benefit from it and can sense that something is wrong may be entirely bemused by the tactic, enough to make them be unable to actually speak up and properly fight against it. I've never really known how one can deal with it, but I've always felt that the first step is to notice it when it's happening and call it out as sophistry on a grand scale.

I have often talked in the past about a similar concept, what I call a "memetic motte and bailey", which I believe to be more common and more insidious than normal motte and baileys.

We've discussed similar concepts in the old place some years back, under the term "distributed motte and bailey". The basic problem is that while it's pretty obviously a thing and quite pernicious, there's pretty much zero way to discuss it productively across the divide. 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.

Seeing the larger pattern was one of those things that inclined me toward pessimism about the potential outcomes of the Culture War.

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.

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.

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.

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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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