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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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Big Peter Thiel interview with John Gray H/T MarginalRevolution

This hits quite a few topics, but one cluster I'd pull out is science/achievement/religion/wokeness:

[JG:] Part of the resistance to your analysis of science is a kind of quasi-religious conception of the salvific possibilities of science. Science can do what religion hasn’t done, which is to actually change worldly life in a way which rids it of its deepest contradictions. And for some people, if they gave up that faith in science, they would be left with nihilism, or left with despair, or left with unbearable anxiety.

PT: Yeah, although there’s a very complicated history of science. In some ways it was a by-product of Christianity, in some ways it was in opposition to Christianity. And certainly in its healthy, ambitious, early modern forms, whether it was a substitute or a complement to Christianity, it was supposed to be a vehicle for comparable transformation. The indefinite prolongation of human life was an early modern science project in which people still believed in the 17th and 18th centuries. There was a sub-movement within the revolutionary Soviet politics in the 1920s called Cosmism, where a part of the project of the revolution had to be to physically resurrect all dead human beings, because if science didn’t do that it would be inferior to Christianity.

[...] So there is this anti-Christian or derivative from Christianity, very ambitious version of science. And of course, there is also a more defeatist version of science, where science actually tells us about limits and things you cannot do. To use a literary example, when Hamlet’s evil mother, Gertrude, says that all that lives must die, the question one must ask is, is that a law of nature? Or is this just a rationalization for the rottenness that is Denmark? And certainly the early modern conception was that you wanted to transcend this, both in a Christian or a scientific form. By late modernity, as science decayed, that sort of ambition is only on the fringes of science, not the mainstream.

...

One particular example of science’s slide from early modern ambition into late modern torpor is the climate change debate. If one took climate change seriously, there are all kinds of progressive science things one could do. You could be pushing for the construction of hundreds of new nuclear reactors. You could be pushing for nuclear fusion. But in practice, we don’t lean into that. We’re instead told that we should ride bicycles. So much of science today has this Luddite feeling.

The theme is that science used to be ambitious, especially ambitious in thinking that it would easily replace religion in all aspects, even in hope. I don't think he's claiming here that science has directly stalled out technologically, but the way the culture views it and uses it is uninspired and uninspiring. He seems to extend this decline to the science of social technology:

You know, McKinsey was a real thing in 1985 in the United States. If you hired a consultant they actually helped you improve your company, because the companies were badly run. At this point McKinsey is a total racket, it’s just all fake. The Reagan and Thatcher administrations empowered McKinsey because they allowed more companies to be acquired, more M&A activity to happen. It was a somewhat brutal but very powerful reorganization of society that was possible and in fact the right thing to do in the 1980s. At this point, McKinsey is not ever going to be anything other than a super corrupt, fake racket in 2023.

I think that toward the end, he possibly comes to some sort of root of it:

one of my colleagues says that institutions have embedded growth obligations, EGOs, in short. A healthy institution has exponential growth. A healthy, exponentially growing company, for example, creates more jobs and everybody can get promoted. Other institutions have their equivalents. And then at some point, the growth stops, and you have a choice. You can become more honest and say, well, you know, the university isn’t growing anymore. There’ll be very few faculty slots available. If you’re in a PhD program, we’re gonna make sure that 80% of the students drop out of the program within six months so they don’t waste their time. Or, the thing that I think unfortunately happens a great deal, is you just lie and the and the institutions become sociopathic. They pretend that the growth is still going on and then it’s only years and years later that people figure out that there are no jobs.

To tie it back to wokeness, wokeness is designed to distract from and cope with this structural reality. Say you have 10 graduate students in a chemistry program and there’s a job for only one of them at the end. You’re engaged in a Malthusian struggle, fistfights over beakers and Bunsen burners. Then somebody says something slightly racist or slightly inappropriate. What a relief – you can throw that one person off the overcrowded bus! That kind of phenomenon is perfectly natural, and could be avoided with more growth.

That is, I think he is saying that the problem with society and science stems (STEMs?) not from the screwed up incentive to publish ever more just to make number go up, but from the fact that people just didn't take seriously the idea that number don't go up (of faculty), which could be the fundamental driver for why there is the screwed up incentive to publish ever more just to make number go up. That this core problem drove the messed up incentive system, made the whole thing go sociopathic, generating apathy/lack of ambition (you can't have that wide-eyed of an optimistic ambition within the muck of a clearly sociopathic endeavor), and ultimately giving birth to extremely degenerate behavior like wokeness.

I think some here would say that the only reason why number don't go up (of faculty) is a problem is because society has this strange idea that everyone is completely equal in terms of potential/capability, so they think there's no reason why we couldn't have vastly higher quantities of faculty-capable people. But I'm not sure whether that's the case or if we're genuinely dealing with a weird numbers problem. Literally this morning, I saw a new video from a top chess grandmaster, talking about how the rating system is messed up post-COVID. How a ton of young kids across the world poured obscene amounts of their lives into online chess during that time, due to quarantine/addition/general rise in popularity, and they genuinely got really good at chess. But their skill isn't reflected by the traditional "over the board" rating, because they may just not have played enough games in those settings to have it adjust properly.

I do lament that the vast majority of what gets published is totally worthless, but I'm wishy-washy on whether the fundamental driver is that less capable people are getting into these positions or if it's almost purely a result of incentive structure. In the end, I think it's probably both, but let me sketch it out. This is basically an attempt to steelman the possibility that, say, the 85th percentile of folks who could have even plausibly thought about pursuing a career in academia actually has gotten to be a lot better than they were in the past. Then, since total faculty numbers are stagnant, it wasn't as easy to just look at traditional measures and pick out the highest quality folks (akin to how you can't necessarily just look at OTB chess rating nowadays), but since you couldn't just wait and let the rating system self-correct over time, because, uh, you don't have a self-correcting rating system like ELO for academics, they had to go hard in on shit like just making some number or other go up. Then, even though the quantity of reasonable-tier candidates (and their general quality) may be higher, Goodhart's law still takes over, and you end up selecting the ones that are just better at gaming your metric or stabbing each other in the back (and they focus their efforts on gaming metrics/backstabbing, so that even if they're actually more capable, their output becomes generally worse, which would explain how many crap papers are out there). Apathy, lack of ambition, and dysfunction follow.

(I still don't know whether I actually think the 85th percentile of potential faculty actually has gone up, or just people really want to believe in the absence of an actually good measure.)

I do lament that the vast majority of what gets published is totally worthless, but I'm wishy-washy on whether the fundamental driver is that less capable people are getting into these positions or if it's almost purely a result of incentive structure. In the end, I think it's probably both, but let me sketch it out. This is basically an attempt to steelman the possibility that, say, the 85th percentile of folks who could have even plausibly thought about pursuing a career in academia actually has gotten to be a lot better than they were in the past. Then, since total faculty numbers are stagnant, it wasn't as easy to just look at traditional measures and pick out the highest quality folks (akin to how you can't necessarily just look at OTB chess rating nowadays), but since you couldn't just wait and let the rating system self-correct over time, because, uh, you don't have a self-correcting rating system like ELO for academics, they had to go hard in on shit like just making some number or other go up.

I had a longer post written, but I just don't have the heart to argue about wokeness anymore. So here's an abridged version: I've been through two biotech companies at this point, so I've had exposure to maybe 60-70 young scientists who should be at the peak of their idealist phases. PhD and postdoc at some premier institutions in the USA. I've asked around, and a grand total of zero people at either company have read any serious amount of science fiction. A couple fellow PhD students did, the CSO at the second company mentioned having read Dune and a Game of Thrones in high school, I doubt any of the faculty I interacted with did. Most people don't read at all. All of this makes me sad, and lonely.

There are plenty of highly profitable activities given the existing incentive structure that do virtually nothing to move the needle scientifically or in terms of actual benefit to society - go make another monoclonal antibody to some target people haven't tried yet, or shuffle around different combinations of checkpoint blockade, or make another oncology small molecule that extends mean progression-free survival by three months. You'll probably make a boatload of money if you get a lucky pull of the slot machine lever.

So, yes. Definitely agree that we've lost the ability to dream big and be ambitious in the right ways. Don't know how to fix it when I need 7-8 figure investments to do even basic projects.

I think a big issue with modern culture is the loss of the idea that people can actually make a positive difference or that progress is possible and desirable. If you read (or watch) science fiction up through modernism, you’ll find descriptions of humans having overcome their problems, building successful colonies in space, dealing with poverty or disease or pollution or whatever other problems that they faced. They described futures that people would want to live in. And I think this kind of bleeds into the issue of whether we can solve our problems. We’ve sort of lost that imaginative muscle to various forms of cynicism and defeatism in all of our systems. Nobody seriously thinks that politics can offer real solutions to social problems. We don’t really think that we can build cities people want to live in. We don’t really think we can solve crime problems. We don’t think we can fix education or transportation or infrastructure or housing. It’s weird that nobody thinks anything about our society will be better in a generation or two.

I think a big issue with modern culture is the loss of the idea that people can actually make a positive difference or that progress is possible and desirable.

Yes, why would modern culture do duch a thing? It's almost like someone made a bunch of promises they couldn't keep, and went on to punish anyone trying a different approach.

Why do people refuse to believe you van fix crime when we have Salvador out there as example?

Or, just New York. They had crime, they largely fixed it, then abandoned the fixes..

There's a very good Tanner Greer post about this. Wang Huning identified the defining feature of the US in the 80s as techno-optimism, not liberty or democracy. But that's a quality that has been lost and inherited by the Chinese. If someone proposed building a bridge over the Pacific today, it would be China, not America.

I agree overall, although I'd argue that the progress enjoyed by the current generation of Chinese adults is highly unlikely to be replicated by their children. I expect they'll go down the same path we did unless 'Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics' and endless readings of 'Xi Jinping Thought' can save them.

My money is on pessimism setting in 20-30 years from now, and foreign capital moves to Vietnam or Africa or whatever the next manufacturing base will be.

I agree that it remains to be seen whether this can be sustained. And the US also still has a lot of visionaries like Elon Musk. But it seems like the tide is going out for them.

The "lying flat" movement in China would seem to buttress what you're saying.

Everyone making a positive difference is like saying "everyone can grow up to be president". There are only a few slots for presidents and there aren't enough for everyone, so some people will inevitably fail at becoming president by no fault of their own.

I don’t mean that the culture believes that literally anyone can make a positive difference, but that a positive difference can be made, that the future could be better, that problems could be solved. It was the last gasp of genuine future optimism where people expected that things would be better. Now, most people are cynical and expect that everything will be worse, that they’ll live poorer lives, and that their kids will not have what they grew up with.

To tie it back to wokeness, wokeness is designed to distract from and cope with this structural reality. Say you have 10 graduate students in a chemistry program and there’s a job for only one of them at the end. You’re engaged in a Malthusian struggle, fistfights over beakers and Bunsen burners. Then somebody says something slightly racist or slightly inappropriate. What a relief – you can throw that one person off the overcrowded bus! That kind of phenomenon is perfectly natural, and could be avoided with more growth.

Except it's not at all like this. Sure, maybe only one finds a chemistry job, but they all eventually find decent jobs, if the stats are any indication. College grads have half the unemployment rate compared to high school grads, and make considerably more money too , especially for STEM. This is the problem with these theories of society. They start with the theory and then everything must bend towards it or viewed through the lens of it.

I agree about consulting. Same for the financial services sector, and also the advertising industry. There are large sectors of the economy in which people are being paid large sums of money to produce mediocre results, or in which there is no way to track or quantify results, like with ad spending. It's a problem of asymmetric information. The firm knows its overcharging or overpromising, and the client doesn't.

I think there's a strong divide between undergrad and grad. Undergrads seem mostly content to socialize and party for a few years while getting the stamp that demonstrates that they were at least conscientious enough to get most of the work done on time. Grad students are often the ones thinking that they can push science forward, become long-term, impactful academics, and such. I think this theory is primarily about the latter, while your counter-consideration is mostly about the former.

If you’re in a PhD program, we’re gonna make sure that 80% of the students drop out of the program within six months so they don’t waste their time.

This is kind of why I’ve always felt “stack ranking” or regularly firing low performers, Welch style, is actually a blessing. Without it, organizations settle down after the growth phase and nobody young and smart ever gets promoted again.

One of the things that’s true in some kinds of front office finance is that the Darwinian nature of progression, not just ‘up or out’ but the fact that every recession means big layoffs and that bad MDs are fired into the mid-market or boutiques pretty quickly, means that even though the 80s to late 90s heyday of the profession is over, you can still do pretty well if you’re young, smart and ambitious.

Other professions deal with the problem in different ways. In advertising, they just openly discriminate against old people, such that by 45 you either want to be in a very senior position, own your own agency or your career is fucked. In others, like insurance, young people just never get promoted. In accounting and law, they split partner and non-partner track (whether formally or informally) such that by 30 you’re either destined for some degree of success or an endless purgatory of senior manager/associate-hood.

You know, McKinsey was a real thing in 1985 in the United States. If you hired a consultant they actually helped you improve your company, because the companies were badly run. At this point McKinsey is a total racket, it’s just all fake. The Reagan and Thatcher administrations empowered McKinsey because they allowed more companies to be acquired, more M&A activity to happen. It was a somewhat brutal but very powerful reorganization of society that was possible and in fact the right thing to do in the 1980s. At this point, McKinsey is not ever going to be anything other than a super corrupt, fake racket in 2023.

Yeah, that’s because for a long time many major corporations were run by people who actually didn’t understand a lot of marketing, accounting, finance, economics (especially game theory) 101 stuff. McKinsey, BCG and Bain served a genuine purpose in the 80s because huge sclerotic corporations were terrified of being RJR Nabiscoed (and by the people who had done the buyouts) and so brought in MBAs who had been taught by people who studied business failures and who quickly identified very easy and obvious ways of making them more efficient and profitable.

Today every major American corporation is staffed by HSW MBAs, so there is simply no more need for management consultants. It isn’t that McKinsey suddenly became worse, it’s that the ‘expertise’ that MBB had in the 80s has been diffused into American corporate life so wholly that it is no longer necessary. Today, the big consultants mainly exist for management to cover its ass over controversial and possibly bad major decisions by being able to blame them on someone else.

Today every major American corporation is staffed by HSW MBAs, so there is simply no more need for management consultants. It isn’t that McKinsey suddenly became worse, it’s that the ‘expertise’ that MBB had in the 80s has been diffused into American corporate life so wholly that it is no longer necessary.

I think the main question here is whether society has, in some sense, "perfected" management. Or at least done something like figure out the problem of management up to the 95% level of perfection or whatever. Are there truly almost no new horizons over which we can actually substantially improve management performance? I think that at least Elon Musk would disagree, saying that it's been mostly a management problem that other companies haven't been able to accomplish the technological feats he's accomplished, and I wonder if Thiel would agree. I think he's saying here that there actually is a lot of room for a more ambitious "management science", but that no one's really doing it, so the result is that everything that's left is basically a scam.

I don't know that I have much of a personal opinion on which perspective is right.

They don’t need to have perfected management, just to have perfected the aspect that can be quickly implemented by standardized process.

Wrt the advertising industry, there was an amusing but brief series with Steve Coogan on Showtime years back, called "Happiness" iirc, that depicted the downside of becoming middle-aged in advertising.

This is kind of why I’ve always felt “stack ranking” or regularly firing low performers, Welch style, is actually a blessing. Without it, organizations settle down after the growth phase and nobody young and smart ever gets promoted again.

And with it, you run out of poor performers and have to start firing good ones. There may be a constant influx of new people which makes the number of poor performers non-zero, but "non-zero" isn't "enough to satisfy the stack ranking percentage".

And with it, you run out of poor performers and have to start firing good ones.

This only happens in two failure states. The first is that you stop hiring anyone, in which case your organization is probably in pretty serious decline, and the second is that your HR is so good that you only hire the best of the best, and you hire them perfectly such that all of them are a great fit. In this case, your organization is likely to be so successful, and its expansion so rapid, that there’s enough room to promote everyone good and to hire tons more people, at which point stack ranking will make sense again.

Isn't the other failure state some version of 'your metric of rating high performers is flawed/becomes gamed' at which point you become Enron in which anybody who isn't committing fraud upon fraud upon fraud is fucked.

the second is that your HR is so good that you only hire the best of the best, and you hire them perfectly such that all of them are a great fit.

That's not necessary. If you fire the X percent lowest performers, and you hire replacements, only X percent of the replacements, on the average, will be as bad as the X percent of the original company that you just fired. But you still have to fire X percent of the whole workforce next year--not fire X percent of the replacements (a much smaller number), so you have to fire good people.

That doesn't require that HR be good at all.

To tie it back to wokeness, wokeness is designed to distract from and cope with this structural reality. Say you have 10 graduate students in a chemistry program and there’s a job for only one of them at the end. You’re engaged in a Malthusian struggle, fistfights over beakers and Bunsen burners. Then somebody says something slightly racist or slightly inappropriate. What a relief – you can throw that one person off the overcrowded bus! That kind of phenomenon is perfectly natural, and could be avoided with more growth.

There is some truth in this, but (a) there really are true believers of hardcore wokeness in academia, I've known many, and (b) even for the cynical people jumping on the bandwagon as part of a status game, it's explanatorily weak to say that they do so out of status competition; the challenge is to explain why wokeness rather than any number of alternative possible status games.

Here is an expanded explanation: wokeness appeals to people who are low in orderliness (and thus love accepting LGBTQI2S++ identities) and have strong maternal instincts towards those they perceive to be marginalised. These people are attracted to progressive spaces, like academia, teaching, journalism, or social work, especially where they can be compassionate towards diverse and "interesting" people like students. The fact that these jobs are free from "obscene profit-making" helps too. And even though many people in these areas are not true believers, they are sufficiently agreeable and partisan to try and appease the true believers, especially because not doing so can be bad for their careers.

This is something I never understand when this discussion comes up. Why think Thiel is right about science not living up to its potential? Peter Thiel knows better than the best chemists/economists/statisticians/physicists/etc what kind of world-changing discoveries they could be making but aren't? Why think this?

Peter Thiel is pretty smart, he topped a maths competition in California, made a couple of multi billion-dollar companies in the STEM sector. Who better to talk about the innovation/science process than a man who did it personally?

'If you're so smart then why aren't you rich' carries a certain weight to it. If those chemists/statisticians/physicists and especially economists were so smart, why don't they have nine-digit net worth? Likewise with Musk, he clearly knows things others don't. Regardless of whether he's right about other matters, he clearly knows how to innovate and make things.

Peter Thiel is pretty smart, he topped a maths competition in California, made a couple of multi billion-dollar companies in the STEM sector. Who better to talk about the innovation/science process than a man who did it personally?

Wait a minute. Let's keep our eye on the ball. Peter Thiel founded or helped found a number of successful companies, yes. How did this advance the frontier of our understanding of the world? What original research has Thiel done to contribute to our body of scientific knowledge?

I also don't see how his winning a maths competition is relevant. You could almost certainly take the best mathematician alive today ask them a bunch of questions about cutting edge research in, say, chemistry and they would not know the answers. Raw G is no substitute for domain specific knowledge, which as best I can tell Thiel lacks regarding the fields he critiques.

'If you're so smart then why aren't you rich' carries a certain weight to it. If those chemists/statisticians/physicists and especially economists were so smart, why don't they have nine-digit net worth? Likewise with Musk, he clearly knows things others don't. Regardless of whether he's right about other matters, he clearly knows how to innovate and make things.

Surely the obvious answer is because smart people can want to do things with their intellect other than maximize their wealth. In general, looking at history, the smartest minds have not been the richest. People like John Nash or Ronald Fisher or Srinivasa Ramanujan did not end up particularly wealthy by the standards of what were possible in their time, but I think anyone would be hard pressed to argue that richer people were smarter.

Science is totally worthless without implementation. Who cares about whether we understand the world in and of itself, what matters is real capabilities. If prayer were more useful than maths in making things happen, we would be praying rather than calculating. Thiel implements, he uses science to make things happen. Making things happen is what we care about, that's why they get the big bucks.

Not all rich people are smart but rich people who start highly successful science-based companies are reasonable sources on discussing the transformative effects of science. They've been there, they've tried transforming science into outcomes and succeeded (which is more than many scientists can say). Maybe Thiel doesn't know so much about quantum chronodynamics, though I expect he's smart enough to learn. But what he does know is what he's talking about. He's not saying 'X-rays scatter according to Thetaman's law', he's not making a technical claim but an implementation claim about cultures of organizations, human resource management, academia, innovation as a broad process.

Most very smart people aren’t rich, and most very rich people aren’t very smart, even though they’re certainly smarter than average. Great wealth is a product in many cases of charisma and luck as well as (usually) intelligence.

I think a lot of people have a misconception that science is about making big discoveries, when it's mostly incremental and the big discovery follows lots of uncredited work.

but from the fact that people just didn't take seriously the idea that number don't go up (of faculty)

But seeing as undergrad enrollment was up until recently rising(and is still historically high), it seems like there’s plenty of room for faculty numbers to go up.

I thought that Cosmism was a general trend of thought in early-1900s Russia, not just among the Bolsheviks.