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 -
There's so much interesting stuff going on right now - why is every post here such a snoozefest? Is anyone else checking here less and less often because equal quality commentary seems increasingly available elsewhere?
The average level of discourse in Astral Codex Ten comment sections is intellectually more advanced when it comes to the writers' areas of competence than it is here, at the cost of being more constrained by the Overton window.
The Motte commentary is dominated by a certain type of personality and political stance: "blue tribe person who is also a mild-to-moderate social conservative, and is highly online, and has a large level of anxiety about the threat posed by wokeism". The voting isn't necessarily dominated by that kind of personality. I note that posts of mine which mostly get responses that disagree heavily with me often still get highly upvoted. I hope this means that Motteizens are just really good at upvoting for quality rather than because of agreement, but I am not sure about that.
In any case, the typical Motteizen personality and political stance tends to funnel conversation here into the same few well-worn channels.
It would be nice to get more people here who have significant disagreements with the average Motte poster, yet are willing to post here instead of running away because this is a place where it is ok to openly advocate for political positions that are significantly outside of the Overton window.
Off the top of my head, I don't know how to attract those people here, though.
no way. the comments here are a definite step-up in terms of IQ compared to astralcodexten comments. Not just in terms of technical expertise , but also the engagement and incisiveness. most of the comments there are people talking past each other, and not even fully engaged with each other or the topic at hand. People there make pithy arguments that are ignored or weakly rebutted.
More options
Context Copy link
I disagree. Scott’s comments are better for Inside Silicon Valley gossip or technical discussions about AI models, sure, but not more generally. The regulars are probably smarter there (on the whole); then again likely so are many people on the Harvard Law Review, but they also likely have far fewer interesting opinions. And his audience is probably more American and otherwise more homogenous than ours.
ACX10 is just dull at this point. SSC was headed in that direction before the switch to Substack. Scott was at his best when he was discussing Culture War stuff or at least stuff somewhat related to the culture war. When he gave that up (presumably to avoid causing any friction with the judgmental Bay-Area types he hangs out with) he gave up most of what made his writing interesting. I still check it from time to time but I don't read every article and certainly wouldn't pay for the content. The best part of the current site is the book reviews, and most of those are guest reviews.
I actually found this year's guest reviews to be worse than in the past, especially Jane Jacobs, The Educated Mind, Man's Search for Meaning. A few of the other ones were good. I haven't reduced my consumption of Scott content at all, but I find the 'dull' posts about AI, gay younger brothers, pharmacology, etc interesting in itself though, so that might be the difference.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think there is a lurking leftist middle that probably exists here, at least I am one, and I certainly don't believe in HBD as it's typically used. The difficulty is that the world is complex and it's hard to build and formulate the kind of critique necessary to capture nuance and rebut the plethora of arguments hoarded by the HBD side.
I think the tribal thing is overdone with left v right, the problem is the failure of people to think for themselves. I mean your claim that all blue is pro-immigration seems unlikely, or is evidence of some serious group-think. Immigration is a complex, and contextual issue. If half the population has one view on it, that's stupid.
I'm broadly in favour of diversity and different cultures existing as a plurality but words like multiculturalism and for that matter diversity are ruined for me as they have a monolithic group think sense about them.
I see this site as having plenty of people from the left who escaped from this kind of mindless group think.
HBD isn't mentioned all that much these days.
I think the problem is that even though there may be widespread nuance in individual thought on issues like immigration, when it comes to rubber-meets-the-road rhetoric and policy, there's a knee-jerk reversion to the unnuanced view. It doesn't matter if someone or a lot of someones in Party A think some combination of B,C,D & E is true when they will only vote for people who say and pursue E as policy because it's the option that makes the best PR-tested battle cry. This is true of both major parties, who are more scared of losing than figuring out a problem, so instead of threading needles, all the front-line warriors are using sledgehammers. And while the nuanced thinkers sit back threading their needles, they're cheering on the sledgehammers.
1990s non-religious centrist conservative, part of Jonah Goldberg's "Remnant."
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, I agree, there's a reversion to slogan type simplification thing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What do you mean by as it's typically used? The thing that annoys me the most about hbd is that I'm never sure if the person mentioning it thinks something obvious like 'genes impact outcome' or something idiotic like 'genes determine outcome'.
Well genes obviously impact outcome but it's whether there is a long term association with a particular ethnicity/culture grouping over time that I need more on. I mean I know there are lineage studies and various IQ research that does show group difference, but culture and socioeconomic factors are confounders presumably.
I know that various people will come on with this paper and that paper which tie the whole thing up, but there's a lot of links and difficult science to think about before I would start to assign attribution to various parts.
Also, like perhaps a lot of issues, it's not framed in a way that lets in much light. It's kind of, 'I've looked into it all and this is the result'. Ive also seen research being misunderstood, so extrapolating an interesting contrast experiment with a rare gene population being mixed with normal population and seeing a change in properties being extrapolated to racial mixing generally.
Finally, when it goes with what looks like basic prejudices and stereotypes one has to ask is their motivated reasoning. How hard has the person thought about complex genetics and statistics to form their view, or have they run with a view they like?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That is true. I should have specified that I mean culturally blue tribe. Most people who post here are white collar workers who live in cities and have primarily intellectual interests, they are not trades workers who live in small towns and watch NASCAR for fun.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think this is true. I think that the majority probably agrees with HBD and thinks it's the main explanation behind black underperformance. It doesn't seem like some level of overwhelming consensus though, and coming from someone in the mushy middle(HBD is a perfectly good explanation for why there are few black math olympiad champions, but the relative criminality and lack of economic success is mostly cultural, and most of the uber-dysfunctional parts of black culture stem from liberals deciding to incentivize single motherhood) I don't think there's some overwhelming consensus that the black-white achievement gap is unfixable.
More options
Context Copy link
Did they used to be here? Why did they leave?
Because the evidence for HBD and related theories is so overwhelming that mainstream left-wing ideology cannot exist in the same environment. There's no convincing refutation of HBD-related theories that I've encountered so far, and without the ability to speak power to truth by getting HBDers fired, the mainstream left can't actually argue against it in any real way. So they just don't bother - they don't have an answer for HBD, and the implications of HBD just sink so many of their policies and beliefs that there's no way to reconcile the two. There are people on the left who are trying (Freddie deBoer for instance), but they're not actually finished yet.
More options
Context Copy link
No, they never came to the subreddit much less the site.
I don't think that's true. Blue tribers did show up in the themotte subreddit, but they left eventually. This was long before the move to this site though.
You would know more than me - I showed up after the creation of it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My understanding is that the blue and red tribe refer more to cultures than to a set of ideas. Of course these cultures and certain political ideas go hand in hand, but they are not necessarily the same.
To quote the original SSC article coining these terms:
This is purely speculation and gut feeling, but I suspect most people here are part of the blue tribe minority whose politics do not line up with their tribe. HBD to me sounds more like an idea for disaffected edgy blue tribers, than for red tribers to be honest. I'm not from the US so maybe my perception is completely off, but I don't have the impression that the average grill-pilled rural Trump voter knows what HBD is. The people talking about HBD on the internet and the red tribers might both be anti-immigration, but that doesn't make them from the same tribe. A white Westerner converting to Islam on paper shares a lot of beliefs with the average Arab, but he doesn't become an Arab, even if he might be a more conservative Muslim than the average Arab. A middle-class college educated urbanite might develop edgy right wing political opinions, but that doesn't make him red tribe.
I get the same impression that being deep red tribe makes me a minority here, and that nearly everyone being a blue tribe conservative contributes to a lot of the doomerposting.
You're correct, of course, but the average blue triber doesn't either; believing "most blacks are stupid and we can't fix it" would be coded as a red tribe complaint about AADOS culture. The phrase "blacks have genetically lower IQ's" would come off as a little more blue tribe, but mostly for dialect reasons. The mainstream of both thinks that IQ is not particularly hereditary; for red tribers this is usually in the form of "a culture that values hard work and learning will generate smarter people. Look at the orientals- they were dirt poor when they came here, now they're the smartest and richest people in the country" and the blue tribe in the form of "education resources dictate outcomes" or something like that.
They may believe it doesn't vary by ethnic group, but they certainly believe it's hereditary in the sense that they expect smart parents to result in smart kids and that the opposite is true as well. Many may have conflicting views in this area, believing this on the micro-level while denying larger-scale consequences.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah. The tribes are not a particularly well-defined thing anyhow, but from what I've understood, it would be a mix of various scales like:
Blue vs Red Urban vs Rural Secular vs Religious Academic vs practical job "Anywhere" vs "Somewhere" Post-sexual-revolution mores vs. pre-sexual-revolution mores
Of course you could continue this list quite a bit (views feminism positively or negatively, dietary questions, attitudes towards military service etc.) but those would probably be the most important ones.
Insofar as the rationalist community goes, I daresay most would be firmly urban, secular, academic "anywhere" and have post-sexual-revolution mores, ie. blue tribe, whatever their views on politics are. Not everyone, of course. The whole "gray tribe" thing, as has been said repeatedly, is less a tribe and more of a way for people who often are super-duper blue tribe, so blue that even most blues blanch, to disattach themselves from whatever "blue" political views and qualities they feel uncomfortable with - perhaps aided by the very process of tribal detachment that the extremeness of their "blueness" causes.
More options
Context Copy link
Unfortunately, these days people often just use "red tribe" to mean Republican and "blue tribe" to mean Democrat, even though thre are loads of blue tribe Republicans (even a lot of the Republican leadership would feel more comfortable at a dinner party with professors in Rhode Island than at a barbecue with plumbers in Texas) and red tribe Democrats (someone like Jim Cornette is a classic example, albeit imperfect since he's an atheist).
Reality is indeed unfortunate.
Tribal splits are polarizing. Polarization is a process; the system's state changes over time, in this case with the divide between the tribes growing more and more stark as people drift toward one of the two poles. And in fact, within a year or two of that article, a considerable number of prominant republicans endorsed the democratic presidential candidate over the candidate of their own party. "Blue Tribe" did, in fact, mean "Democrat", even for purported Republicans.
Two or three times a month, people reference the part of the article where Scott states that Blue Tribe and Red Tribe aren't equivalent to Democrat and Republican. But if tribal identity grows more important to people over time, then we should expect to see the correlation between blue:Democrat and red:Republican to increase over time, not stay the same. And this is, in fact, what we've seen. The tribes and parties are more closely correlated than they were when the essay was written, and they will be more closely correlated still in the future as the culture war continues to escalate.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No, they really don't. You're going to have to provide some evidence or an argument that isn't "just trust me bro" if you don't wanna get downvoted to oblivion on here.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
They mean blue tribe in the more vague sense as in urban PMC, which most people here are.
It’s a cultural reference point. Many people here watch the same shows, have the same hobbies, the same jobs, send their kids to the same schools, live in the same places, vacation in the same places and are friends and family with the modal PMC urban progressive type of person. Their reactionary views don’t change that they’re both part of the same cultural substrate (and share the same social and economic class).
Do they? There is at least in my experience a big divide pre and post kids.
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