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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29743 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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Speaking from my own experience in the corporate world I have experienced enormous cognitive load trying to pick and choose every single word I utter on the web, for fear of angering some white progressive who will deliberately misconstrue my words and read offense into even the most benign terminology, presumably to gain some sort of moral ammunition to volley in my direction when the opportunity presents itself, and can then return victoriously to the tribe for having felled another deplorable.

Even themotte isn't safe from such behaviour. Our well-read Russian friend (currently in exile in Turkey) accidently used the Russian notation for quotation («I am a Berliner.»). After an accusation of anti-semitism (ironically, not by a leftist) due the second poster mistaking guillemet for the triple parenthesis, a third poster explained the difference. Someone reported the third poster to the admins and his post was [removed]. This was the straw which broke the camels back and led JabbaTGreek to lead his flock to independent pastures.

What effects does needing to change the way you speak, your accent, the language(s) and vocabulary you use, have upon your own internal notions of self, the external representations of your identity to the world at large, and indeed, the way you think?

Orwell's thoughts on this topic are well-known, inability to express dissent leads to an inability to even think dissentient thoughts. But on the second hand, lingusts today think that while the Strong Sapir-Whorf (language determines thought) is false, the Weak (language influences and shapes thought). Mathematicians also agree that in their field at least, their version of WSW (notation influences mathematics) is also true. Correct notation makes it easier make generalizations which are true, and correctly obscures feneralizations which are false.

Having charity and kindness being rules here was a mistake. Our great enemy has no concept of truth as we'd understand it. I'd accuse them of being habitual liars, but the dichotomy of truth and lies simply is not in their world view. In this environment where you are required to take their truth-void statements "charitably", it's impossible to grapple with them. Think of Darwin.

Furthermore, they have hacked our empathy to such an extend that our truth is offensive to them and cannot be spoken under rules dictated by "kindness". We are constantly forced into using their terminology. It's not mutilating and sterilizing children, it's "Trans health care".

If this place in an experiment, it's failed.

  • -15

Having charity and kindness being rules here was a mistake.

Not sure what you mean by this. Charity and kindness in debate have been norms that have been useful for far longer than wokeism, even if wokeism is taking those rules to the extreme. Baby and the bathwater, and all that.

Charity is one of those things where some people need more, some people need less, and you can't aim the advice at the people who need it. And the reason we've come up with the quokka idea is that rationalists have a habit of not understanding that attacks are attacks and treating them with excess charity, like Scott not thinking that Cade Metz was malicious from the very start and if he had only been nicer to Metz, Metz would have written a completely fair article, or like this post.

It's not always bad to be a quokka.

Scott's star has never shined brighter. How many billionaires read his writing? I think I remember he's making 600k/year from Substack. Probably more now.

Scott may be a quokka but it's working for him.

Meanwhile nobody cares about this Cade Metz creature except that he wrote about Scott. That will probably be his epitaph: "Wrote a hit piece on a beloved and respected public intellectual". Writing that just now makes me feel sorry for the guy. Scott crushed him like a bug without even meaning to.

What does 'quokka' even mean here? Scott intentionally hides his belief in [thing about race] while still hinting at it once in a while (e.g. in the Galton Erlich Buck post). I don't think he has any illusions about the media being good and nice on that topic.

Scott's star has never shined brighter.

At what cost?

When was the last time he wrote anything people here bother quoting anymore? Besides "Scott wrote a thing which is a good opportunity for my more interesting post on the topic" type deals.

When was the last time he wrote anything people here bother quoting anymore?

I think there's something to this, but >80% of scott's old posts that I like the most aren't about the culture war. Control Group Is Out Of Control, Different Worlds, etc. Those seemed to have slowed down too (probably?) so I'm not sure if that's the cause.

I thought Radicalising the Romanceless was some of his best work to be perfectly honest, and I think that gets incredibly culture-warry. But to continue being honest I haven't been reading Astral Codex Ten nearly as much as Slatestarcodex and the writing seems less compelling when I do.

Scott Alexander went from being one of the best writers in the world writing the most interesting articles with a comment section of gold attracting the best thinkers in the world getting to the naked causes of many problems we now face to Scott Siskind, a forgettable content producer who makes good money on substack.

If Cade Metz is a forgettable nobody, it makes this story all the more tragic. I think in a couple decades, people will still talk about Scott Alexander and some of the articles he wrote. I do not think the same is true of Scott Siskind.

Maybe I'm being harsh, but watching Scott cower and slink away to come back different was such a disappointment to me.

Meanwhile nobody cares about this Cade Metz creature except that he wrote about Scott.

We're in a bubble. Scott seems important only because of that. And Metz is a Times writer. This inherently means that a lot of people care about what he says.

That will probably be his epitaph: "Wrote a hit piece on a beloved and respected public intellectual".

Plenty of people told similar lies about Gamergate. It's pretty obvious by now that none of them will be chiefly remembered for those lies. We don't control the discourse, and in most places where it's relevant you can't even suggest that anything said about Gamergate was a lie. And yes, it still gets brought up every so often.

And this pattern extends back in time. "White Flight", the history of race relations generally, erasure of the anti-suffragettes, and so on. The control has existed for much of the last three hundred years; what changed is that some few people have become aware of it.

Scott's star has never shone brighter.

His star shone brighter when he was, briefly, one of the best writers in the world, looking directly at the nature and causes of the core problem eating our society.

I'm sure he's making more money now, but then he had a solid shot at making a difference. Not many draw that hand, and he folded.

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