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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28354 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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For the first time in my life, I'm starting to think we need childhood bullying. I am continually astonished by the cruelty of other people, often practiced under the pretense of standing up to bullies. It's like these people don't actually know what it's like to be on the other end. If they did, wouldn't they be more sympathetic?

So, what if we need childhood bullying to prevent adulthood bullying? Perhaps people need to learn at a young age how it feels to be a victim so they don't become the victimizer as an adult?

Of course, maybe being mistreated doesn't cause people to sympathize with others who are mistreated. But I've never seen anyone make this argument, at least prescriptively, so I figured I should, so I can see how people would argue against it.

Trying really hard to out-contrarian the folks who think that mile time would be a better filter for IQ than college admissions, huh?

There are a billion second-order arguments for and against any conceivable policy. If you're going to posit meaningful indirect effects of policy changes you're going to need to bring some kind of evidence to the table to make it interesting. Otherwise why should I take this any more seriously than a recommendation to let kids steal more (so would-be thieves understand that stealing is mean), or that giving money to poor people makes them worse off (because it makes them dependent on welfare)?

Without evidence, I'm inclined to KISS: the main effect of allowing kids to bully each other is more kids suffering under bullying. This is bad, so we shouldn't let kids bully each other.

I got some very intrigued responses, so my goal was accomplished. It hadn't occurred to me that conventional childhood bullying is still around. But as I just said in another comment: what does it look like now? I was targeted because people thought I was gay, but I realize now that that was just their way of articulating that I was autistic. Using sexuality as an excuse isn't kosher anymore, and I doubt kids are politically aware enough to think of calling each other Nazis or chuds.

This seems to tie in with my observation that if something straightforwardly helps your opponent and harms you, any claims from him about the opposite are concern trolling or motivated reasoning. That's a subcase of second order effects.

We could combine them: 1) Be skeptical of second order effects; 2) In particular, be skeptical of second order effects when the first order effect helps your opponent, but he claims that the second order effect helps you. Like Scott's post that people on the right shouldn't vote for Trump because that actually helps the left.

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