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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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The latter, unlike the former, is going into the Dark Arts realm of treating people as manipulable

But people are manipulable, and pretending otherwise is not going to help you navigate politics. If you're worried about the signal of your vote being misunderstood by other people to bad effect, it's perfectly valid to account for that.

I also think the worry is less that a yes vote would by itself naturally lead to support for reparations, but rather that it would be used by proponents as an argument to make it seems to have more support that it actually does. In which case the proponents are the ones employing Dark Arts, and you're merely depriving them of their tools. That would just be recognizing Dark Arts and taking countermeasures, i.e. Defense against the Dark Arts.

prioritising optics over ground truth

The point of voting is to signal the will of the voters, not to figure out some sort of "ground truth". A vote is always a public signal, and it's entirely fair to think about what exactly you're signalling compared to what you want to signal.