site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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.

11
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

"what we care about"

I mean, that's exactly the problem with definition fights. What we care about is different. That's why there's little sense in attaching so much meaning to terminology, and why you cannot convince people by gesticulating at genes and genitals. When you say "obviously a woman is", and when I say, "well in my opinion a woman is", we use terms that have 99.9% the same coverage, because they almost cleave reality at the joints - which is why the few edge cases are so difficult. In a distribution where almost every property is correlated, it is very hard to see that actually people might be selecting on totally different properties. For instance, since I spend a lot of time online, voice is a dominant criteria for gender for me, and since I'm bi, genitals are a relatively low factor. I don't have the "whatever makes people want to found families", so genes and womb don't factor at all. But you wouldn't see this by looking at what I call "men" and "women", because it's almost entirely the same as everyone else.

edit: In fact, we could probably formalize this into a law: the more dimensions a group correlates, and the smaller the set of exceptions is, the less people will naturally come to agree about group membership of the exceptions.

I mean, that's exactly the problem with definition fights. What we care about is different

You're doing it again. I'm obviously aware. But I also said some other things like:

And, at the risk of repeating myself, a significant part of the debate on maintaining traditional and biology-based definitions is that they are simply superior to the alternative , they carve reality better at the joints and focus on what we care about (which is why there's so much trouble now in so many domains when it's abandoned)

And:

In any case, I think we've already agreed that edge cases don't defeat a category -especially if no superior alternative has been put forward

You cannot simply ignore explicit statements that show my underlying assumptions and then claim that my position is incomplete or simply failing to capture some points others care about (in the same manner you ignored elements of OP's post to better call his position circular) because it looks so without the underlying arguments. I know their position. I disagree and have provided reasons why.

I've made my position clear: it's not just what I care about, I find the alternate definitions less useful (in terms of the things we already know societies use sex-gender for like...sports and segregation - anyone can come up with "florgs" as an answer to "what is a woman" but non-private definitions obviously involve the inter-subjective) and even incoherent - and this belief is helped along by the fact that you never seem to offer this allegedly "meaningfully objective definition" that solves the problems I've raised about trans and its associated definitions like gender and woman.

You're not giving me news by saying people care about other things when they define things. I know, I don't care. I simply think it leads to problems and incoherence. I am not unaware that someone could define "life" as including the "joy of living" - nor would I consider it a productive conversation if someone ignored all of the reasons I gave for thinking this to remind me that people can come up with subjective definitions.

and when I say, "well in my opinion a woman is",

You haven't actually given us this "meaningfully objective definition", or any definition. I provided you with my definition of my terms and why I don't think some alternatives work. You mainly seem to want to knock down or critique definitions raised.

Which I admit is probably more fun but I don't see the point in playing this asymmetric game.

And I guess I'm just not very interested in the object-level debate, fair enough. To me, all the difficulty of the question arises from meta considerations, because if I sufficiently communicated why I think the assignments of load-bearing criteria were fundamentally arbitrary, the question would not be answered so much as recede in importance. I think to some extent "cleaving reality at its joints", while a strong metaphor, erases the vital detail of a high-dimensional space with many correlations, so that the axis of the joint is greatly overdetermined - such a thing simply does not arise in three-dimensional space. But I don't know how else I can try to express it either. We're not talking about which way the joint is turning but which sinews carry the most strain, which muscles the most force. Also in this metaphor the muscles are subjective to begin with. I'd say your position is "the muscles in the third and fourteenth dimension are clearly the only ones that matter centrally" and my position is "it depends on how the joint is trained."