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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
On the use of anecdotes and “lived experiences” to contradict statistical data.
Say for the sake of argument that you’re arguing with a left-leaning individual (let’s call him “Ezra”) on the issue of police bias. You both agree the police has a least a little bit of bias when it deals with blacks, but you disagree on the root cause. Ezra contends this is due to structural racism, i.e. that laws are created in such a way such that blacks will always bear the brunt of their enforcement. He further contends that local police departments are often willing to hire white men with questionable backgrounds in terms of making racist remarks. This inherent racism exacerbates issues of uneven enforcement, and in the worst cases can lead to racist white police officers killing unarmed black men. While you agree that black men are arrested at disproportionate rates, you claim the reason for this is more simple. Black men get arrested for more crimes because… black men commit more crimes. You cite FBI crime statistics to back this up. In response, Ezra says that the FBI data you cited is nonsense that doesn’t match up with reality, but rather is cooked up by racist data officials putting their thumbs on the scales to justify the terrible actions of the criminal justice system on a nationwide basis. After all, Ezra knows quite a few black people himself, and none of them have committed any crimes! And while none of them have been arrested, a few of them have told him stories of run-ins with the police where they were practically treated as “guilty before proven innocent”. In short, Ezra’s lived experiences (along with those of people he knows) contradicts your data while buttressing his own arguments.
Do you think Ezra’s lived experiences are a valid rebuttal here?
Yesterday I made a post on the partisan differences in economic outlook. The three main points were that 1) the US economy is doing fairly well, 2) Republicans think the economy is doing absolutely terribly, much worse than Democrats think, and 3) that most of this perception difference is because Biden, a Democrat, currently occupies the White House. I initially thought I was going to get highly technical arguments quibbling over the exact measurement of data. Economic data is highly complex, and as such, reasonable people will always be able to disagree about precisely how to measure things like unemployment, GDP, inflation, etc. It’s not particularly hard to cherrypick a few reasonable-sound alternatives that would tilt measurements one way or the other. For instance, how much of housing costs should be calculated in the inflation of consumption prices? Rent can be seen as pretty much pure consumption, but homes that are purchased also have an investment aspect to them. As such, the current inflation calculations use “owners’ equivalent rent” to account for this. Most economists think this is overall the better way to calculate inflation on this particular measure, but again, reasonable people could disagree, and getting a few of them on record saying “the current measurements are faulty” is an easy way to throw doubt on data. While I did get a few of these types of comments (example 1 , example 2), they weren’t the majority of the responses by a long shot.
Instead I got plenty of arguments about “lived experiences” which people claimed as disproving the data I cited. These weren’t quite to the level of “Chicken costs $5 more at my local supermarket, therefore all economists are liars with fraudulent data”… but it wasn’t that far off.
Don’t believe me? Here’s 9 examples:
WhiningCoil says inflation numbers are “literally impossible to square with the lived experience” of housing costs going up, or the prices of staple foods doubling.
haroldbkny says inflation has been unprecedented in all his “life experience”, and he hasn’t seen the wages of anyone he knows growing to match it.
Walterodim says it’s “incredibly obvious” that people have “personally experienced much sharper increases in prices” than officials claim, and that officials must be “cooking the books”.
JTarrou says his personal standard of living went down, and that he’s paying “a third higher to double on most normal expenses (energy, groceries, etc.), and as such my national metrics smell of “statistical bullshit”and that “economic metrics are bullshit statistical lies”.
JTarrou further claims that economics is staffed by people who “all drank the same koolaid”, and that while anecdote is small data, it’s the only data he’s sure “isn’t horseshit”
HlynkaCG says he “has receipts” and linked to a 2 year old post where his local price of cheap meat went from $5/lb to $6.75 (a 35% increase) whereas the national meat price index at the time had only gone up by 9.5% over that period.
SlowBoy says recent economic events have been like “receiving Biden’s twelve inches”, and that the data are all gamed by lying government officials.
No_one implies people are waking up to statistical lies by linking to a Tweet of someone who went to their local grocery story where the cost of meat has jumped from $10 to $16.
freemcflurry says he makes more money than he used to, but “things just feel shitty”; the prices of chicken breast as his local grocery store doubled from $2/lb to $4/lb, and there are now masses of homeless people in his city walking around “like zombies with festering sores all over their skin.”
To be clear, a few of these above examples don’t say that their anecdotes prove economists are lying, and are instead using their personal experiences to say how economic conditions feel worse, although they were typically at least ambiguous on whether they trusted their own experiences over economic data at the national level. On the other hand, there were some who were quite unequivocal that economic data is fabricated in whole or in part since the things economists say don’t match with how the economy seems in their personal lives.
Going back to the example of bias in policing that I mentioned earlier, I’d say that the vast majority of people on this forum would say that you can’t really use “lived experiences” to contradict data. Anecdotes aren’t worthless, as they can give you insight into peoples’ perceptions, or how the consequences of data can be uneven and apply more to some locations than others. But at the end of the day, you can’t just handwave things like FBI crime statistics just because you know some people that contradict the data. As such, it feels like a rather blatant double standard to reject “lived experiences” when it comes to things like racism, only to turn around and accept them when it comes to the economy.
The cop-out argument from here is to point at the people preparing the data and say that they’re the ones at fault. The argument would go something like this: “My outgroup (the “elites”, the “leftists”, the “professional managerial class”, the “cathedral”, or whatever) are preparing most of the data. Data that disagrees with my worldview (like the current economic outlook) is wrong and cooked up by my outgroup to fraudulently lie to my face about reality. On the other hand, data that does agree with my worldview (like FBI crime statistics) is extra legitimate because my outgroup is probably still cooking the data, so the fact that it says what it does at all is crazy. If anything, the “real” data would probably be even more stark!”
This type of argument sounds a lot like the controversy around “unskewing” poll results. Back in 2012, Dean Chambers gathered a fairly substantial following on the Right by claiming polls showing Obama ahead were wrong due to liberal media bias. He posted “corrected” polls that almost monotonically showed Romney ahead. He would eventually get his comeuppance on election day when Obama won handily. A similar scenario played out in 2016 when many of the more left-leaning media establishment accused Nate Silver of “unskewing” poll results in favor of Trump. Reporters don’t typically have the statistical training to understand the intricacies of concepts like “correlated errors”, so all they saw was an election nerd trying to make headlines by scaring Democrats into thinking the election was closer than it really was. They too were eventually forced to eat their words when Trump won.
While issues of polling bias can be resolved by elections, the same can’t be said of bias in our examples of racism and the economy, at least not as cleanly. If someone wants to believe their anecdotes that disproportionate black arrests are entirely due to structural racism, they can just go on believing that for as long as they want. There’s no equivalent to an election-loss shock to force them to come to terms. The same is true of economic outlooks. Obviously this is shoddy thinking.
The better alternative is to use other economic data to make a point. If you think unemployment numbers don’t show the true extent of the problem, for instance, you can cite things like the prime age working ratio if you think people are discouraged from looking for work. Having tedious debates on the precise definitions of economic indicators is infinitely better than retreating to philosophical solipsism by claiming economic data is broadly illegitimate. Economic rates of change tend to be exponential year over year, so if large scale fraud is really happening then it’s hard to hide for very long. There would almost always be other data you can point to in order to make a case, even if it’s something as simple as using night light data to estimate economic output. Refusing to do even something like this is akin to sealing yourself in an unfalsifiable echo chamber where you have carte blanche to disregard anything that disagrees with your worldview.
First just want to say that you should really tag people with @ when you talk about them. It's not nice to mention people without letting them know.
Second, I want to talk about what I think may be part of the core issue. @Glassnoser just informed me via a comment that it's unskilled wages that seem to be going up, whereas skilled workers pay has been constant for this period of economic growth. So if the core claim is that the economy is doing better than ever because unskilled workers wages are going up to match inflation, then of course people will complain about it here. I'd venture to bet that most people here are in the skilled category.
Furthermore, if I'm not mistaken, this whole thing with unskilled wages rising faster than skilled is rather strange. I'd say it's unprecedented, but I don't know that for a fact. Generally in my life I've expected to see, and I think I've seen, skilled workers being the primary recipient of most economic growth. So for people to say that this is completely normal seems to me to be disingenuous. Maybe it's entirely fine, the economy is great, and there's no smoking gun problem. But at least this is unexpected, and therefore unsettling, and people should acknowledge that instead of just saying "what are your talking about? everything is completed normal"
Skills are valuable when they're in short supply. When everyone is getting a college degree and a white-collar job, there is no scarcity, so the pay is commensurate with the market value (remember all the lectures about why the minimum wage is a bad idea and if your job only pays you $8/hour, then that's all your labour is worth?) That applies just as much to the people who were saying about others that they are only worth $8 not $12 minimum wage which is why they'll be replaced by immigrants who will work for that lower rate.
If you can't get enough construction workers to work on the building projects for new housing, offices, manufacturing plants and so on, then wages are going to rise there. If you need someone to work in a care home taking care of the elderly, wages will rise there if you can't get enough cheap labour to fill the jobs. Maybe eventually there will be brick laying robots and ass-wiping robots, but not right now.
Right now, it's looking like it'll be easier to replace the 'skilled' (or at least some of them) with AI than to replace the 'unskilled' service and manual labour jobs. Trust the market, yes? The market sets the value, the market is nearly always right! (or so I keep getting told in these economics posts) 😀
But I think my point still stands, of whether or not we've ever seen something like this happen before, at least in our lifetimes. That skilled labor may be the ones that are getting replaced, and unskilled labor is not. It's not like people going to college and trying to earn more than unskilled labor is some kind of new phenomenon. So if people are panicking, it's seems to me because this is something that we haven't seen before, and it's unprecedented. So it's not right to just wave away the concerns with "the statistics show everything's fine, so you must be an anti-intellectual who hates statistics and believes whatever you want regardless of the numbers". Maybe the statistics that are being cited in this thread aren't capturing exactly why this situation is different.
And is that even the case that coders and other skilled labor is being replaced? I know everyone expects chat GPT to do that, but it certainly is not doing it yet, not en masse. So where is all this replacement of skilled labor coming from, driving down the cost of skilled labor?
I'm more amused that the same kind of people who were quite happy that all was right with the world and the market was working as intended, when blue-collar labour was losing out to outsourcing, because hey the economy is booming! you can buy cheap smartphones!, are now losing their minds when it's their turn for the chopping block.
Innovation, progress, the march of science, technology makes life better, dude! Nobody wrote a guarantee that a college degree was going to be the ticket to riches for ever and ever, amen. If miners and the rest of the 'unskilled'/semi-skilled were supposed to suck it up and learn to do jobs that were in demand, then the same applies even harder for the skilled/educated. After all, they're so creative and productive and wealth-producing, right? That's why they made the big bucks. Now Fortune's wheel has turned in its inexorable rotation, and suddenly they're the ones panicking?
If manual labour is now more valuable than skilled labour, then perhaps - just perhaps - the value they earned was not down to them being superior in brains and work ethic and willingness to do what it takes, but just that they had the particular knack for what was in short supply at the time. Now, for whatever reason, a different requirement is in short supply, and hence valuable, and they don't have that knack.
That's one hypothesis. But I'm reminded of Heath Ledger's Joker's speech:
It's "part of the plan" that the unskilled workers will be having a tougher time. They are less skilled after all. They worked less to get there, and therefore everyone expects them to face more difficulties. When the skilled laborers face this, it might be an indication that there's some deeper or new problem. At the very least, it's not what's expected, and therefore can cause people to seriously freak out.
That's one hypothesis. Another would be that they have the aptitude to learn many things, and the specifically trained in one skill set for many years, applying their aptitude towards what they were told would be the most lucrative. And they spent many many years and resources on doing that. And now they feel like they've been promised something in exchange for that, and they're not getting it. They're upholding their end of the bargain, and the world failed them.
I'm wondering if, in the post-AI future, the generations after us will look back at the assumption that the "skilled workers" (who may or may not be the PMC) were just plain obviously superior to the unskilled the way we look at past generations' beliefs that aristocrats just were plain obviously superior to the common folk. Being the son of a gentleman and a gentleman yourself meant you were better than the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. You just were because of your blue blood and so forth. There was a whole slew of assumptions going along with your status as a noble or a gentleman about your innate superiority to the common herd, and naturally nobody had to provide evidence that this was so because well, everyone just knows that the viscount/skilled coder is better than the commoner/plumber, don't they?
Post-AI when you don't need any skill higher than "push the button", will our descendants think we were just worshipping a social idol?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link