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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26644 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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What does the light at the end of the tunnel look like?

Look, every now and then I stop watching my footfalls and get pensive. And one of the things I've gotten pensive about the past few days is this: the Western culture war is not going to last forever, which means it's going to end. And when it does, how will we look back on this mad time?

Two of the answers are obvious:

  1. If the culture war ends in X-catastrophe, then we won't look back on it at all, because there will be no more historians.
  2. If SJ wins, it'll look back on now much the same way it looks back on the '50s right now, with maybe a few mentions of Nazis added.

But what I can't really put together is the third option, the narrative that will be told if SJ is indeed just a passing phase, either because Red/Grey defeated it or because it wins and then turns out to be unsustainable. Frankly, the Blue Tribe's been writing all the history books since before I was born, so it's hard for me to even picture it. And that troubles me; it's the scenario I think is most likely, and the one I'm to at least some extent trying to bring about, so if I don't have a good idea of what it even looks like that's kind of an HCF. "It is not enough to say that you do not like the way things are. You must say how you will change them, and to what."

So, how will the people in that scenario think of this time? What story will they tell?

(To the SJers here: feel free to answer, if you think you understand your opposition, or feel free to correct me if you think my #2 is uncharitable.)

I mean what do you actually think your side 'winning' looks like?

People stop thinking 'trans' is a thing and it's illegal to call someone by different pronouns than they were born with?

We go back to having white men be 70% of characters in all entertainment media, and another 25% are white women with zero character traits beyond 'sexy and horny for the main character'?

We all agree that actually women and minorities are genetically more stupid and incapable than white men, and stop giving them jobs that earn more than a subsistence wage?

Or just 'everyone thinks the leftists of that period in history were being kind of histrionic and weird and that the right from that period in history were less bad than everyone thought, and that's what history books say, but everything else about society is mostly the same'?

Because the latter is certainly possible, sure, but I wouldn't call it SJ's 'losing'. If everything they wanted to change about society stays changed but the future thinks that 'feminist fail compilation' videos are funny, then ok, that's an acceptable cost.

Sen. McCarthy is depicted as a villain today, but he won. 'Communist' is still an insult in 90% of American contexts, and capitalist realism is treated as a fundamental facet of reality rather than being a philosophy or ideology at all. Something like that could easily happen to the SJ/woke movement, and that's about what it would look like.

But if you think we're going to roll back the actual changes to society, most of that means taking away rights or privileges or respect or acknowledgement or etc. from people who have spent a long hard time and earning it, and trying to do that ussually involves a lot of kicking and screaming and destruction. Frankly I don't find it likely that we'll move in that direction while we're still a liberal democracy, and if we're not then there's more important changes going on to worry about.

  • -23

People stop thinking 'trans' is a thing and it's illegal to call someone by different pronouns than they were born with?

People stop thinking 'trans' is an identity and instead an unfortunate mental illness. Relatedly, mental illnesses generally are viewed as undesirable, both practically and socially.

We go back to having white men be 70% of characters in all entertainment media, and another 25% are white women with zero character traits beyond 'sexy and horny for the main character'?

I would settle with characters roughly in proportion to population, as opposed to the gross over-representation of minorities we see today. In particular, race-swapping characters and even historical figures would require justification beyond "representation matters". Media that appeals to characteristically male fantasies should be permitted to exist on its own terms without its creators being subject to harassing accusations of sexism.

We all agree that actually women and minorities are genetically more stupid and incapable than white men, and stop giving them jobs that earn more than a subsistence wage?

We agree that differences exist and that unequal outcome is not itself proof of discrimination. We explicitly reject equal outcomes as a reasonable policy goal.

As long as most media is concentrated in urban areas, and also aimed at the youth, it's also going to seem like it's overrepresenting non-white people to many people outside of those areas. Like, the reality is, to use a recent example, it makes more sense for a young kid in Queens who gets bitten by a radioactive spider to be a mixed black and Puerto Rican kid, not a nerdy white one.

Also, as noted below, there's a distinction between "media gets attention" and "all media." There are plenty of procedural shows on CBS that are still mostly white, especially when you account for guest characters and the like.

As long as most media is concentrated in urban areas, and also aimed at the youth, it's also going to seem like it's overrepresenting non-white people to many people outside of those areas.

This isn't true, though. "Aimed at the youth [in urban areas]" doesn't imply that the demographic properties of the characters reflect or have any significant similarity to the youth [in urban areas]. Of course, the argument that a character who fits Miles Morales's situation is more likely to be black than white is perfectly cromulent. But also of course, the idea that the distribution of demographics of characters in a fictional work ought to somewhat realistically reflect the real setting in which the story takes place is an artificial one that producers can freely choose to follow or not. And notably, a near-universal refrain from SJ when it comes to media has been that demographics in media somewhat realistically reflecting the real setting is neither good nor necessary; the demographics in media ought to reflect what they believe will help accomplish societal goals such as, e.g. girls and minorities being able to "see" themselves people with demographic similarities to themselves in respected positions of power so that they are more motivated to pursue such things. And given that "somewhat realistically reflecting the demographics of the real setting" as a priority has been basically abandoned and destroyed, I think it's clear the overrepresentation of minorities is a completely free choice that could be changed trivially to representation-reflecting-proportion-of-population.

Media that appeals to characteristically male fantasies should be permitted to exist on its own terms without its creators being subject to harassing accusations of sexism.

And media that appeals to female fantasies of submission. Was just listening to a podcast about Three Days of the Condor, about half of which was moaning about the hostage-to-lover plot thread. Some women find that kind of thing of exciting; can we stop shaming lurid fictional fantasies of all stripes?

If you want the latter to happen, you need women fighting for it, not men advocating for it, and claiming that women want it. Even if it's true.

You need women writing it, is the thing.

Like, there's plenty of great media about female submission that women love, it's mostly written by women and explores the internality of the women characters and represents their emotional journey in dignified and relatable way.

When men write it, the woman is ussually just a sexy lamp that falls in love with the male lead as a reward for him completing his character arc or w/e. That's not the same thing.

People stop thinking 'trans' is an identity and instead an unfortunate mental illness.

Gender dysphoria is a mental illness, the fight is over what's the best cure.

I would settle with characters roughly in proportion to population, as opposed to the gross over-representation of minorities we see today.

Unless you have a different data set or a different operational definition you want to offer, I think you're just empirically wrong about this. You may be in a filter bubble that brings you every egregious example of this it can find and nothing else, but on the numbers minorities are still underrepresented relative to gen pop in almost every entertainment arena.

unequal outcome is not itself proof of discrimination.

Equivocating between 'proof' and 'evidence' here.

Since there's no such thing as 100% probability, the meaning of 'proof' is always vague and needs to be operationally defined to be meaningful.

And it certainly is Bayesian evidence in favor of discrimination, in that it's more likely to happen in worlds with discrimination than in worlds without it (independent of all other factors!).

And it certainly is Bayesian evidence in favor of discrimination, in that it's more likely to happen in worlds with discrimination than in worlds without it (independent of all other factors!).

This is true. But it's also true that it's bayesian evidence of genetic aptitude differences. I would prefer a world where when we encountered uneqial outcome we carefully considered both possibilities. Instead we live in a world where anyone who even suggests the second is a possibility is shamed and all of our policies treat it like an impossibility

This is true. But it's also true that it's bayesian evidence of genetic aptitude differences.

Absolutely!

The problem is people who confidently proclaim it's only one or the other. Not only is that a priori unlikely, we definitely definitely don't have clean enough data to make such a claim (in either direction) at teh moment.

Instead we live in a world where anyone who even suggests the second is a possibility is shamed and all of our policies treat it like an impossibility

Well, that's the thing - what 'policies' are recommended by the HBD hypothesis?

Like (ad absurdum here), we could stop bothering to educate women and black people at all, or funnel them into home ec/trade schools, but that seems clearly discriminatory and not really how you should react to small differences in population averages where the distributions have tons of overlap.

Would the policy just be 'stop trying to push diversity at all, because any differences are probably genetic and ok'? But that's assuming all differences are genetic, which is the opposite of carefully considering both possibilities, and makes no sense in the most-likely world where both factors contribute to outcomes.

The thing is, if discrimination exists the correct policy is probably to take steps to fight it, and if genetic differences exist the correct policy is probably to just do nothing and let the market sort itself out.

So if you think that some discrimination and some genetic difference both exist, then the correct policy is probably to take steps to fight discrimination, and that's it!

(or, fight discrimination but less strongly than we would in the world with zero genetic differences. But we don't have a measure of 'how strongly to fight discrimination in a hypothetical world', we just have directional policies that fight discrimination or don't, so we can't really distinguish policy agendas between those two worlds)

Anyone pushing for something other than that seems like they are making assumptions about discrimination not existing, or the genetic differences being way stronger and more universal than we have any evidence for.

Which is where the shaming comes in.

The problem is people who confidently proclaim it's only one or the other

I hope you realize that almost all of these people are on the anti-hbd side. Even big names like Rushton and Jensen said they thought IQ gaps were only 50-80% genetic.

As far as policy goes I support doing everything based off test scores and keeping all judgements as colorblind as possible. The only place where hbd comes in at all is just not being shocked and acting like the system is failing when the low preforming group is disproportionately black.

See the rest of my previous comment after that sentence for my reply. That's what the whole thing was about.

My point was, if you are against any attempts to account for and correct for institutional discrimination, then you are in effect behaving as though you believe it doesn't exist and all outcome gaps are only caused by innate differences.

That may not be your explicitly endorsed belief about the world, but it's implicit in your policy preferences; they don't make sense in a world where that's not true.

And I do think it's mostly the hbd side which falls into that category.

I'm not opposed policies which attempt to stop institutional didcrimination. What I'm opposed to is policies that pretend to be stopping institutional duscrimination but are actually just opening the door to discrimination in the other direction.

I support removing names/ethnicities and other identifying information from applications, relying heavily on standardized test scores for college and aptitude tests for jobs etc. All of these policies reduce the opportunity for a bigoted boss or admissions officer to discriminate against a qualified applicant because of their race.

Liberals just don't like these policies because they know from experience what results they'll produce but they're still policies directed at reducing discrimination

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And it certainly is Bayesian evidence in favor of discrimination, in that it's more likely to happen in worlds with discrimination than in worlds without it (independent of all other factors!).

You're just assuming the conclusion, here.

???

Can you explain what you mean?

If X causes Y, and you observe Y, that's Bayesian evidence for X. What's your objection specifically?

I think you're just empirically wrong about this.

There are some obvious holes with that. For instance, it ignores the practice of making the villains white men while diversifying the good guys.

So different operational definition, then.

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