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 -
Yeah I agree, and it's been one of my frustrations with ymeshkout. I think there's lots of things that are reasonable to believe / valid to discuss without having ironclad evidence one way or the other, but with him everything turns into a trial where you have to prove everything beyond reasonable doubt.
Patently false. There's absolutely nothing wrong with having confidence qualifiers to any of one's beliefs, I myself do this when I express a conclusion I'm unsure about. It's perfectly fine/commendable for someone to acknowledge that they lack ironclad evidence for their belief. The problem is making confident assertions without the ability to back them up.
This is the place for folks to "test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases" after all. We could all save a lot of time if people were more transparent about their foundations.
Oh god, you're doing it again.
Yes, I'm sorry for not stating my objection in the form of a 10 page legal document, where all possible caveats are pre-emptively addressed, but that is exactly the problem I'm gesturing at.
Nah, I'm thrilled by the most perfunctory of acknowledgements from anyone holding a position weakly. I rarely even get that much of a morsel.
Right, but now you're just flat out dodging the objection I raised.
Your objection would be valid if it was true, but I already denied that it was based in fact.
But you helpfully demonstrated it in the course of this very conversation.
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
IME:
-Weakly justified beliefs resist close examination.
-Loose thinkers dislike rigor taking all the fun out of it. Theory is fun but details are a drag.
True, but if you insist on only discussing strongly justified beliefs, you won't have much to talk about. A fair application of the standard you're bringing up end with abolishing many of the ideas that the functioning of our society rests on.
False. It has nothing to do with the thinkers, but with the ideas. Rigorously justified ideas simply become a matter of fact. The theory of relativity might be mindblowing at first, but becomes rather mundane when you're taking time-dilation into account in your calculations for a living. The ideas that are fun are the ones that still have some mystery about them.
This reminds me of nothing so much as the flat earthers in that documentary who do experiment after experiment to "prove" the earth is flat, fail every time, and still retain their belief. Seriously trying to examine and justify the belief is gauche, that was never the point. The point is to get together with your buddies, talk about how the man is getting you down, and work on some crafts projects with cool toys.
Cute, but then how many ideas we've been fighting over can be described as "strongly justified"? Is mass immigration good or bad for a country? Are differences in performance between groups down to genetics or systemic oppression? Will AI be our doom, and what steps should we take to prevent it?
Take either position you want on these, and neither one will be "strongly justified. You could argue that the proper approach to that would be to say "we just don't know", and I suppose I agree, but there still decisions to be made on these issues. Rationalists have their Bayesian schtick, but as far as I've seen it's just a mathematical expression of whatever opinion they wanted to hold anyway.
My conclusion is that there are issues that aren't going to be proven rigorously, and in these cases it's fine to have strongly held beliefs without strong justification. The best way to get at the truth in these cases is to create an environment where people with strongly held opposing beliefs are forced to interact with each other. You're not going to get a particularly accurate answer, and half the time might not even be directionally correct, but it blows "rigor" out of the water.
Most of your examples are either claims about the future (AI) or questions about values (democracy, immigration) where there is no "right" answer, at least right now. It's unusual to find questions about objective, observable facts of the near past or present like "did event X factually happen?" or "what is the objective shape of the planet?" where either position can be strongly justified.
Where people do retreat away from the bailey of agreements and factual claims to the motte of "it's fine to hold my belief!" it reflects a deep detachment from reality, to an extent that there's nothing that could bring them back. The arguments are just window dressing, they are not the point, trying to address them is just bad form.
I don't think I ever heard anyone say "I would be for mass immigration even if it was caused a massive spike in crime!", so taking people at their word, I don't think these are purely questions of about values. You might say we shouldn't take people at their word, but given how we went from "there is no immigration crisis" to "the republicans are the ones preventing us from fixing the immigration crisis", it feels like people's opinions on the issue are connected to some consequences, and aren't just an expression of their values.
That could be a different phrasing of exactly what I'm getting at. I would say that there is a right answer, but we have no way of knowing it. In these cases the best way to find it's approximation is creating a contested territory, and letting people fight it out.
I disagree. For years claims about Epstein were "detached from reality" "conspiracy theories" right up until they were proven right. It would have been wrong to rely on the "rigorous" approach here, as it would result in the issue being dropped, and hard evidence never being found. Same applies to things like election fraud, barring a dumb stroke of luck, or an outright confession (though I think even a confession could be dismissed), we are never going to get hard evidence on this question, and it's disingenuous to act like if the claim was true evidence for it should be accessible.
I'm someone in favor of open borders and would bite this bullet. It's fair to say my position is primarily (but not exclusively) based on valuing freedom of movement over a consequential analysis. It's hard to cleanly break the two however, because a significant objection I have against immigration restrictions is that they're insufficiently narrow. If I had to pick a restriction, I would always pick something like "anyone with IQ >150 is allowed in" over something like "only 10,000 Cambodians per year".
That's fair, in your case I'd say the disagreement is values based, and to be fair there's a significant values component to my opinion on the issue as well, but the public debate seems to revolve around consequences.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
“Was there significant fraud in the 2020 US election” is a different kind of question than “will AI pose a threat to humanity” or the effects of immigration or group differences.
Some people confidently assert there was significant election fraud, in stark contrast to available evidence.
Reasonable people can disagree on say nature vs. nurture (though not blank slatism), but it doesn’t seem reasonable to assert significant election fraud, given the dearth of evidence and abundance of bad evidence.
"AI will pose a threat to humanity" is different in because it's about the future, and the only way to verify it is to wait and see, so I can agree it's not the best example. Still, despite there being no evidence that it will, some of the most prominent figures of the rationalist movement confidently assert that claim, to the point they will argue for bombing countries that would defy their proposed policies.
The question of group differences or immigration is not a different type of question. In theory they can both be resolved factually, the same way the question of election fraud could. The biggest difference is that these questions don't have the destruction of evidence baked into them like elections necessarily do, as a result of the secret ballot.
While there's not enough evidence to conclusively prove election fraud, there has been enough suspicious behavior that I cannot blame anyone for coming to the conclusion that there was. The issue is a lot closer to nature vs. nurture, where both sides are floating in a sea of unknowns, than to blank slatism, where one side has been conclusively BTFO'd.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It’s fine to discuss any kind of belief. What’s problematic is having an imbalance between the strength of the belief and the strength of the evidence.
There’s a type of person who relishes gray areas and loose approaches towards grand theories. This type of person does not like systemic approaches to truth. Perhaps the classic example of this is when Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson tried to hash things out in multiple podcasts.
On a Motte podcast re: Jan 6, at some point toward the end Yassine’s counterpart said something to the effect of “you know I’m not following the exact details on that; I’m more of a big picture guy.” Same dynamic.
I don't think that's the case. Our entire society rests on very weak evidence. Is "abolish the police" a good idea? Is democracy the best way to organize society? We're no way near to rigorously answering those questions, but dicking around with them would most likely end in disaster.
I notice that your arguments rely a lot on psychologizing your opponents, and don't really contain much of a case for your approach to truth.
“Abolish the police” is a horrifically bad idea! I’m a bit flabbergasted you would propose that as an area with weak evidence.
“Democracy” empirically outperforms anything else we’ve tried at scale. Plenty of debate to be had over what “democracy” even means or if an even better system is possible.
My approach to truth is bog standard rationality(TM).
The dynamic of “loose vs. tight” thinking is issue-agnostic, by the way. On this issue, I’m psychologizing some posters who seem allergic to the lawyerly approach overall.
“Democracy outperforms” actually feels weakly proven to me. Lots of great empires and golden ages were not Democracies. A lot of Englands peak was hybrid. Augustus period of Rome wasn’t Democracy.
Singapore wasn’t a Democracy.
Peter Thiel of course believes in Monarchy.
Democracy also seems to work very poorly in low IQ countries. Even if you could make a strong argument that Democracy works best for Western European people you would still struggle with Democracy is best in sub-Saharan Africa. Saudi Arabia I feel like would be worse if Democracy between the historical religious and a likely fight over oil spoils.
It seems as though the key thing to government is having a great deal of individual agency below the government and buy in by the people.
Oh it is weakly proven without qualifiers.
Gotta limit it to the last few hundred years of history to start.
And I completely agree it’s “hard mode” that simply can’t be pulled off well in many parts of the world. (I don’t think IQ is the issue in say Russia or Iran, but culture and ideology matter.)
Bur after the USSR’s collapse, the ChiComms have the only real rival system in the running and it’s not a model that anyone is copying (unlike the Soviet model).
Western democracy/market capitalism/liberalism has worked in enough places over enough time, and defeated or outlasted several strong competitors, such that using the short hand of “it’s the best system” is something I believe is well justified by the historical record since 1776.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It wasn't tested very often, and definitely not under controlled conditions. If you think it has strong evidence, your standards are pretty low.
Historically "democracy" has been a spit in the bucket, and in pre-democratic times, it's rarity as a system of government was used as proof that it cannot work, the same way you are currently trying to claim it is clearly superior. I will also note the lack of controlled conditions. If this is your idea of rigor, you're using the word differently then I am.
Yeah, rationality(TM) isn't a great approach to truth for many issues.
Right, and you are not engaging with their arguments against the lawyerly approach, and not providing your own arguments for it.
It’s incredible to me that you assert here that we do not have sufficient evidence regarding policing or democracy to make reasonably confident assertions, at a broad level at least…
…but that there’s room to believe there was significant fraud in the 2020 election.
Whatever system of epistemology you’re using is alien to me.
“Controlled conditions” is a red herring because it’s a laughably impossible standard for say the type and level of policing and its effect on crime. The best we can do is observe natural experiments and adjust accordingly. We can also use available evidence and a bit of extrapolation to judge the proposals to defund the police to be a very bad idea for improving crime rates.
Also, I have directly engaged with several arguments against the lawyerly approach. You might think I’m wrong, but please don’t accuse me of not engaging them.
You can find it incredible if you like, but it doesn't change the fact that the arguments for these things are very wishy-washy. As for "sufficient" it depends what you mean by that. Sufficient to not uproot our entire system of government? Why yes, I agree, and that was my point from the start.
I'm not sure this is even true. At first I thought it might be, but your responses re: controlled conditions show that in practice our epistemologies are not that different, you're just applying different t standards to things you like vs. things you don't like.
I agree, it is impossible to have a rigorous justification for that belief.
And what is the best we can do when discussing fraud in elections with secret ballots?
Fair enough, but in the course of our conversation, you seem a lot more interested in psychologizing and slapping adjectives on your opponents, than in discussing the substance of their ideas.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link