site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31055 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 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
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The article starts with so much sneering and name-calling that I wasn't sure if it was worth continuing. But I find a rare opportunity to defend a progressive (not woke but the more financially-focused ones) claim, so that's something unusual.

For instance, consider the standard progressive claim that white Americans as a group own vastly more wealth than black Americans. But when you control for class, it turns out that working-class whites aren’t that much wealthier than working-class blacks.

Eh, that's almost a tautology. There's no reason to control for that. Nobody who finds it a problem that blacks have less wealth would find "well, that's because they're more likely to be lower-class" to make it better. Controlling for (e.g.) age makes sense. Controlling for class controls out something you're looking for.

Now on to other things.

The problem is that terms like “non-Hispanic white” and “Hispanic,” even when used by the Census Bureau, are decidedly arbitrary and unscientific.

"Unscientific" is just a boo-word here. But "arbitrary"? No. They have fuzzy boundaries, yes, but in practice they are not arbitrary. Chances are very good that a Spanish-speaking immigrant from a Spanish-speaking country, or their Spanish-speaking children, will call themselves "Hispanic". As for the racial categories, we know from this astounding study that they (at least white, black, and Asian) correlate incredibly well with something physical and pervasive -- race can be determined from medical images of different parts of the body even when either the detail or gross structural information is removed.

Many of them believed that there were three European “races”—the Nordic, the Alpine, and the Mediterranean

Four, actually, he forgot Adriatic. But these were considered sub-races of Caucasians, so even if the beliefs of the scientific racialists were relevant (which they aren't), the gotcha doesn't work.

He then goes on to more sneering, taking an exchange between Razib Khan and Steve Sailer in VDare (which has no pretensions of being a scientific journal) as being somehow representative of 'race-realist “science”'.

In the decades and centuries to come, all sorts of group differences in biology, including perhaps group differences in various kinds of intelligence, may well be identified. But this will be done in laboratories and other controlled settings by actual scientists, by geneticists and biologists and physicians. It won’t be done by right-wing shock jocks poring over statistical tables and publishing their “research” in trade-press books and club newsletters written and edited by their fellow true believers.

It won't be done by "actual scientists" because it's taboo, which leaves plenty of low-hanging fruit to be picked up by "right-wing shock jocks poring over statistical". Because some of this stuff isn't subtle at all. Sailer's prediction (that Lind sneers at) that "Eurasian" kids in the future would do very well on the SAT-M and would thus prosper in the technology-dominated economy was made in the year 2000; it could be tested NOW by serious scientists. But they won't, because it's taboo. Especially if it turns out to be true.

I'm not familiar with the historical Nordic/Alpine/Mediterranean/Adriatic classification system, but it corresponds pretty well to the clear pattern of differences between Germanic, Romance, and Balkan (and Slavic more generally) countries. The North Germanic and West Germanic distinction is a bit more subtle, but it's still there.

I don't have a strong opinion on how much of this is genetic and how much is cultural or otherwise path-dependent, but if you look at HDI rankings, there is almost a complete disjunction between Germanic, Romance, and Balkan countries.

I think your last paragraphs sum it up for me, it would be a fascinating topic for me if you had visibility of scientists arguing science at the individual issue level, so that you could get a sense of the thing. Instead you have people many levels up with their understanding and particular biases and material is locked into that frame, which actually limits inquiry and learning.

The same goes for global warming, there is actually a real world phenomenon of global warming (to whatever degree, causes and impact that it is) and funnily enough reality doesn't care about what the left or right happens to think about the issue. But the debate is culture warred out - people tend to start with their politics and build out from there and so we don't really progressed, it gets frozen in time.

It's a shame Lind carries all these low quality anti-HBD viewpoints and sneers into his article. A guy like him genuinely has inroads with "eugenicons" like the ones he mentions due to his well fought anti-immigration effort.

Even as a soft Marxist materialist he has salient arguments backing up his anti-immigration position that could easily be leveraged into a critique of 'blind' HBD promotion.

The most obvious point he could hammer home would be the fact that a lot of the anti-immigration rhetoric from the right in general revolves around it being bad for the working class. Well, can't we, for the sake of argument, assume that dropping HBD on the working class might also, potentially, be bad? That seems to be a belief of Lind's and I wish he would spend more time on expanding on it rather than fumbling the ball on HBD.

I mean in fairness ‘academic success of hapa children’ is totally the sort of thing that could be studied if it was framed right(paens to ‘unintentionally benefitting from white supremacy’ or whatever).

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats