site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 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.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I don't remember whether it was on LessWrong or SSC (the incident in question having happened over a decade ago now) but I do remember that the first time I got slapped by a mod in a Rat-Adjacent space, it was for describing an anti-natlist user's life as a "self-correcting problem". The old Avatar Col. Quaritch/40k Meme may have also made an appearance.

It's been at least a few years at since I last beat this particular dead horse, but my position is the same now as it was then. Secular liberalism is not a philosophy that is particularly conducive to family-formation or child-rearing. Just the opposite in fact. Getting married and/or having kids means jettisoning your own personal feelings and freedoms. And one you internalize the bit about how "my life is not my own" it becomes difficult to take the rest of the secular liberal memeplex seriously.

To go off on a tangent, as much as I am a human-supremacist who goes fuck yeah everytime we get one over the aliens, photogenic or not (Avatar 2's opening sequence almost made up for the ham-fisted morality tale that followed), Quaritch is wrong.

Pandora, to put it bluntly, doesn't work as anything but an intentionally crafted artifact of an immensely superior technological civilization.

A Hive Mind of that scale simply doesn't evolve according to natural selection, and remind me what incentives prey animals have for letting predators plug in to their US ports? That is simply not something that happens in isolation. Leaving aside the fact that they have a form of immortality when they upload their minds to join their ancestors (!!!).

The Na'vi are also morphologically distinct from the overwhelming majority of Pandoran fauna, they're bipedal with 4 limbs, while the majority are hexapedal.

And why exactly are there room-temperature superconductors just hanging around everywhere and forming floating rocks? Apparently they're not found in the rest of the universe.

By far the most sensible answer is that the modern Na'vi are the Amish analogs of an advanced K2 or K3 civilization, that chose to consciously hew to a naturalistic aesthetic while keeping plenty of their creature comforts, all while designing the ecology and their AI to keep that status quo indefinitely.

Where did the rest of them go? Who knows, but the idea of the Na'vi being naturally evolved eco-hippies makes no goddamn sense. Glass the planet and take their resources, but you better go up the tech-tree fast if you have the sense to worry about a counter-attack from their distant kin.

I’d say this is the most common fan theory, or one of them. And I wouldn’t be shocked if something like this was revealed, because there are apparently some wild developments in Avatar 3/4/5. But it’s hard to say how much ‘this is an idealized fantasy of Hunter gatherer life with no real risks in a land of total abundance and with modern (and far-future) creature comforts provided by friendly superintelligent hive mind’ is a set up or just what Cameron wants for the purposes of the noble savage Native American analogy.

Regardless of Cameron's intent, the naive noble savage analogy makes no sense in context and if the author wasn't dead to me before, he's now being cooked by the exhaust of a dozen interstellar ships decelerating using lasers.

Ironically your comment proves him right. Quaritch himself may lack the scientific background to ask the question you just have, but assuming your user ID is accurate, other humans are curious enough to ask just such a question and ponder the consequences.

You've posted that ornery orrery hat again.

I have come to love that link. It's like the motte's version of rick rolling, with the added bonus that the author gets rolled too.

I feel like Reddit is just fucking with me at this point. Open saved posts right-click and select "copy link" you'd think it would go to the post you selected but apparently not. That's what I get for not double checking before hitting "comment"

There's also a fun Firefox bug where copying from the address bar before a page has fully loaded doesn't actually copy the URL. Have had a few near-misses that way, nearly sending some interesting links to the wrong people.

A hopefully working link: https://i.redd.it/1mlmfcn816f81.jpg