By Scott’s request, we are trying to corral all heavily “culture war” posts into one weekly roundup post. “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 change their minds regardless of the quality of opposing arguments.
Each week, I typically start us off with a selection of links. My selection of a link does not necessarily indicate endorsement, nor does it necessarily indicate censure. Not all links are necessarily strongly “culture war” and may only be tangentially related to the culture war—I select more for how interesting a link is to me than for how incendiary it might be.
Please be mindful that these threads are for discussing the culture war—not for waging it. Discussion should be respectful and insightful. Incitements or endorsements of violence are especially taken seriously.
“Boo outgroup!” and “can you BELIEVE what Tribe X did this week??” type posts can be good fodder for discussion, but can also tend to pull us from a detached and conversational tone into the emotional and spiteful.
Thus, if you submit a piece from a writer whose primary purpose seems to be to score points against an outgroup, let me ask you do at least one of three things: acknowledge it, contextualize it, or best, steelman it.
That is, perhaps let us know clearly that it is an inflammatory piece and that you recognize it as such as you share it. Or, perhaps, give us a sense of how it fits in the picture of the broader culture wars. Best yet, you can steelman a position or ideology by arguing for it in the strongest terms. A couple of sentences will usually suffice. Your steelmen don't need to be perfect, but they should minimally pass the Ideological Turing Test.
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Be sure to also check out the weekly Friday Fun Thread. Previous culture war roundups can be seen here.
I now think the Trump presidency has days/weeks instead of weeks/months.
When one side is in power, the other side puts this great speculative pressure on it, criticizing every mustard choice and hamburger order.
So my political feed has been full of prying gossip on who's feeling what in the White House.
This is a great feat of confirmation bias if none of it is true, because it puts finishing touches on what 'we' have already half-known to be true, with more specific glimpses of the internal monologues of Spicer and petty political rivalries. And dementia.
It's funny: lots of the speculation was wrong, and none of it was wrong. The point is more the pressure and the fact that apparently someone just walked into the White House with vague permission and recorded what they saw.
A last nod to honesty from Trump, that permission was, maybe. I've always thought he liked being attacked.
> I now think the Trump presidency has days/weeks instead of weeks/months.
Are you willing to bet on that? I'll stake up to $1,000 at 2:1 odds. In other words: If you stake $50 and Trump is no longer President on February 4th 2018, I will pay you $100. If he remains President, you pay me that $50. At 2:1 odds, you can stake up to $500.
If you prefer to bet equivalent amounts of Bitcoin or Ethereum, I can do that.
I don't react well to the weird rationalist focus on gambling.
What is that supposed to mean? If you're as confident as you say you are, you should be jumping at the chance to take my money. If you don't like the odds I'm giving, make a counteroffer. But an outright refusal to bet at all? Well...
Alex Tabarrok says a bet is a tax on bullshit, and I agree with him. If you aren't willing to bet, then you don't actually believe what you say you believe.
Alternatively, an internet bet is a logistical pain in the butt and 90% of the time they break down into arguments over minutae at the end, so it's not worth it.
This too. I have political opinions which change and might be wrong, not goddamn racehorses.
A friendly public bet with magazine subscription stakes is one thing, but the gamblers start swarming whenever I make a certain type of comment.
I am deeply uncomfortable with people that assume I should be so grossly motivated by money.
It makes me feel like your entire value system is rotten. And I know you're probably a fine person, but get the dollar signs out of your eyes or at least out of my sight.
You want to say I'm full of bullshit that's fine. That's all you really mean anyway. But to say I actually don't believe what I'm saying because I won't play in your casino makes you full of shit.
And I don't have to bet on that to know it's true.
RemindMe! 1 month "Impassionata thinks Trump won't be president."
RemindMe! 1 month "Impassionata still doesn't place as much a priority on correctness as AngryParsley would like, and there's nothing AngryParsley can do about that."
Is this about how people suddenly want to involve money or about how people suddenly call out others to own up to their prognostications? How do you feel about making a predictionbook account and registering a prediction there?
Ah, ok, here's probably the main bit of problem I have with rationalist gambling.
A big bad habit of rationalism is this self-serving ego gratification. It's not enough to be right, other people have to know you were right.
I got that beaten out of me rather thoroughly, and I'm proud of that fact.
So no, I won't be creating a social media account so I can pull out a report card on my rationality, because I grew out of report cards.
Look at how /u/AngryParsley keeps on trying to pin me down (with a remindme bot). He can't let it go that I believe something he thinks is obviously wrong, and he has to, he has to make sure there's evidence.
If Trump is still President come February whatever, I'll shrug and go on with my day. But right now I can talk something out with /u/qualia_of_mercy because I like discussion and connecting with people more than I do this petty score-keeping.
All of what I said about an insulting and demeaning focus on money still applies, but maybe this comment is the core of why I find the rationalist focus on gambling nonsensical.
Put another way, qualia thinks I'm full of shit, but he's not demeaning about it and we both know the future will happen regardless.
Another way to think of it is keeping the noise level (emphasis on "as opposed to signal") down. Right now you might actually believe the end of Trump's presidency is imminent and be genuinely surprised if he's still president by March. Or you could just be making performative noise of disapproval about the current affairs that takes the form of predicting the presidency's quick demise, but when March rolls in and Trump is still president, you'll just go "well of course he is, because everything sucks". Maybe people here are just unusually annoyed by anybody making performative noise disguised as predictions than they are fixated on taking you specifically down a notch.
Another way of thinking of it is I don't see mainstream liberal thought represented here and do my part to at least provide awareness of that which the community is missing in my opinion.
Some people can't handle confidently expressed opinions, so they try to take me down. Honorably, they can downvote my noise, they can argue against me, or they can say I'm full of shit. I can engage with any of these forms of communication.
I take underhanded tactics like "Bet with me or you don't believe in what you're saying" as silencing attempts, and I view "I'm going to nag you in a month if you're wrong" as personal fixation on taking me down a notch.
Now I believe you may just be expressing a desire to see less noise, but in doing so you're expressing an opinion on what is noise and what isn't. Well, I've got a right to a signal vs. noise opinion, too! So you've got three options: downvote my noise, argue against my noise, or say/think I'm full of shit.
To be fair to this community, I got a lot more questions and opportunities to expand than I did pointed invitations to gamble; I did not have the time to attend to those opportunities as fully as they deserved. Tried to make up for it with qualia at least.
> Some people can't handle confidently expressed opinions
But this whole thing started with the local convention about how registering a prediction or accepting bets is how you show that you are confident about the opinion you're expressing. I mean yeah, obviously "hey, please do this [outgroup tribe thing]" reads as a human status attack, but when you're in the outgroup tribe village, that's how it goes.
Have I not explicitly disavowed this convention? I think that's how I started this subthread?
I get an opinion on conventions, too.
I mean, you're right if you're pointing out the blurriness of whether or not I'm in the rationalist 'tribe'. But this has been one of my villages for a great many months now.
Are you now questioning my membership in this tribe? Without any of the chieftains present???
(joking.)
But I reject utterly the idea that I've misread the human status attack. I think I've demonstrated at length that I'm not unfamiliar with the tribal practice, I just think it's superstitious nonsense.
> A big bad habit of rationalism is this self-serving ego gratification. It's not enough to be right, other people have to know you were right.
In context, this makes no sense: the norm you're seeing is that people ask other people to make their predictions concrete. That's not "other people have to know I'm right". That's "other people should be able to judge whether you're right".
> If Trump is still President come February whatever, I'll shrug and go on with my day.
Right. This is the problem. If Trump is still President come February or whatever, you should notice that you were wrong and adjust your beliefs. This is the soul and center of rationalism.
And it is so, so easy not to do. Which is why we have the norm for making concrete, publicly accountable predictions.
You should not be proud of going through life without ever changing your beliefs when they turned out to wrong, even if you accomplish this by carefully avoiding ever having beliefs which could turn out to be wrong.
Hey, random latecomer. Seems fair to me before I tear into you to tell you to read this
>That's not "other people have to know I'm right". That's "other people should be able to judge whether you're right".
The end result is groupthink. Endless paying attention to the rationalist cult and its accumulated bets. I don't trust groups that enforce such a consensus tactic. And I don't need to.
To be clear, you are trying to make me submit to a cult of belief in any person's intellect's ability to make a precise prediction at any given time on essentially random events. And I reject it utterly, and you are being irrational for making this attempt.
>If Trump is still President come February or whatever, you should notice that you were wrong and adjust your beliefs.
I mean, I will, but I won't value it with money. I'll be watching the same line I always saw and providing context for that line in this forum.
> This is the soul and center of rationalism.
I am not a rationalist and you cannot make me one. And if you're being accurate here, the "soul and center" of rationalism is a stupid egotistical machine trying to be right all the time. This is something I already knew.
I know you are trying for a system that operates better than our present one. But your rationalism will only reflect a consensus after our social mechanisms have decided you can have it.
I don't tie my intellect to the ability to make money, or to win every fight it enters, or to join a group pool of betting on what is right and what is wrong.
I tie my intellect to my understanding of when to cut off conversation and when to re-enter it. How to hear another person's feelings and intents and get out of it what I need to get out of it.
The rationalist focus on gambling is really weird and I will not participate.
> Hey, random latecomer. Seems fair to me before I tear into you to tell you to read this
I agree with pretty much every single point in that comment, except the relevant one - namely, that just because we are uncertain about things it is "foolish" to try to talk concretely about our expectations, even if that's just making concrete our uncertainty.
> The end result is groupthink. Endless paying attention to the rationalist cult and its accumulated bets. I don't trust groups that enforce such a consensus tactic. And I don't need to.
Uh. I mean, ok, but that's really not the world I think we live in. I don't see all that much attention given to "the rationalist cult and its accumulated bets". Even within the community. I don't really know what you're talking about.
> To be clear, you are trying to make me submit to a cult of belief in any person's intellect's ability to make a precise prediction at any given time on essentially random events. And I reject it utterly, and you are being irrational for making this attempt.
No.
No, I am not. I am asking you to make a concrete prediction. It doesn't have to be precise; in fact, much of the reason people like betting is that betting only requires you to establish bounds. It's specifically a tool for humans, acknowledging that we can make rough guesses even if we can't be precise. And you'll rarely be asked to make a bet on a proposition you haven't expressed an opinion on the likely outcome of.
You're being asked to translate your already expressed confidence into a lower bound on some probability. That seems like an extremely reasonable ask and your refusal to do so seems more and more absurd every time this comes up.
> And if you're being accurate here, the "soul and center" of rationalism is a stupid egotistical machine trying to be right all the time.
I know you don't care about being right, but calling "trying to be less wrong" egotistical in the same post you say that you define your intellect by the ability to "get out of [other people's feelings and intents] what [you] need to get out of it" is... a bit silly.
> I know you are trying for a system that operates better than our present one. But your rationalism will only reflect a consensus after our social mechanisms have decided you can have it.
Pretty sure what you're seeing is our social mechanisms having decided I can have it. You're the one flailing against a norm while everyone, everyone else here, across the political spectrum, supports it. Just like happens every single time you try to characterize your refusal to make concrete predictions as somehow noble instead of petty and obnoxious.
There's never going to be any totally universal norms, only local ones. The local norm about betting is about as strong a norm as we have.
> I don't tie my intellect to the ability to make money, or to win every fight it enters, or to join a group pool of betting on what is right and what is wrong.
> I tie my intellect to my understanding of when to cut off conversation and when to re-enter it. How to hear another person's feelings and intents and get out of it what I need to get out of it.
Alright. I tie my intellect to the ability to be right. Your definition is... pretty fucking weird, I gotta say.
Sounds like I got listened to.
>There's never going to be any totally universal norms, only local ones. The local norm about betting is about as strong a norm as we have.
And it's pretty easily overturned, since I only see it when I make a particular kind of post about Trump. Honestly, I think we have a severe mismatch of experience if you think when I look again I'm going to have seen a casino all along.
Your weak point is no one calls me to account by asking me to bet except when I talk about Trump's presidency. Your imagined norm is not a norm. The CW threads exist mostly free of your fantasy of general betting on events.
I removed it from my other post, but I could tell I was encountering some other kind of moderator when I had your message in my inbox.
>You're the one flailing against a norm while everyone, everyone else here, across the political spectrum, supports it. Just like happens every single time you try to characterize your refusal to make concrete predictions as somehow noble instead of petty and obnoxious.
You're being petty and obnoxious.
Any system of thought that, on encountering disagreement, has to browbeat it into gambling, is going to be inherently dysfunctional. I think it is very hard to find a reading of this conversation that doesn't both a) understand how I know all along that this gambling thing is a shitty stick, and 2) understands how writing here is a matter of participation.
I don't have to bet to participate, and you do not have the right to tell me not to write here. You have an inherent contagion: you cannot abide disagreement. So you move into subjugating that disagreement.
>Alright. I tie my intellect to the ability to be right. Your definition is... pretty fucking weird, I gotta say.
Sounds like I got listened to. Thank you for your time.
>You're the one flailing against a norm while everyone, everyone else here, across the political spectrum, supports it.
Are you honestly saying that everyone doesn't include my defiance?
> I now think the Trump presidency has days/weeks instead of weeks/months.
This seems overconfident - what scenario do you see that has Trump out of office before the end of January?
(personally, I give even odds that Trump will either be impeached or no longer president by the end of January 2019. Most likely scenario is impeachment after the mid-terms)
You might be right that changing my previous time frame is overconfident. Two points are important: it will I think be common knowledge that Trump has dementia. And people like qualia of mercy just had to update their priors.
Could you walk me through why you predict days/ weeks left?
What changes your calculation about congress or do you think he'll resign?
Honestly I don't know if he'd resign or get impeached. And maybe I shouldn't recalculate down a notch. Maybe this is just one more dot in the line I already saw.
A big chunk of tentative liberal criticism just got imported into moderate liberal certainty. "Liberal witch hunt" is going to sound pretty hollow.
I suspect you will be disappointed, as usual.
What's the takeaway from this story that any non-obsessive will remember a week from now? The Trump White House is full of incompetents and weirdos? Okay, now how is that any different from what most people thought a week ago?
I've been trying to return to this thread all day. CC /u/shadypirelli
>I suspect you will be disappointed, as usual.
I think there's a key difference in our understandings here, because there isn't for me a 'usual' sense of disappointment. Things happened in 2017 far faster than I expected. But faster isn't necessarily better. As long as Trump is out before the end of his term I think I'll be satisfied.
More time with heat under our asses gives us more time to prepare. From at least that perspective I don't want Trump out fast.
I suspect that from your perspective, Trump's impeachment will seem to have happened suddenly. And it will seem sudden, in the sense that we'll be asking ourselves what the final domino was, as the chaos of procedure unfolds in the matter of a few days.
Let's see if I can tease out what I think is important about this book.
I've talked some regarding the wave of sexual harassment accusations and the general Blue strategy that constant, unrelenting pressure is the strategy. The nature of erosion.
Most people don't care all that much. It takes a few facts entering the mainstream for them to change their minds, and it will take only those facts before most people switch from "Trump's pretty bad" to "Trump must go now."
One of those facts is or ought to be "Trump removed Mueller." One of those facts that is more relevant to this book is "Trump is not well (with dementia), and it is actual elder abuse to keep him in a painful position." This fact resonates more with some of the older people that might be more conservative and thus lean more towards tolerance of Trump.
One can imagine insistence that Trump submit to a medical examination, and his refusal leading to more conflict and more unrelenting pressure.
Trying to predict exactly when one of these Crisis Facts emerges is a stupid game. I've said elsewhere in this thread that yeah, maybe moving down a notch in units is overconfidence on my part. Maybe I should just say I've changed to somewhere between days and months instead of weeks and months.
This book moves a lot of what I would consider somewhat esoteric knowledge (given the average level of knowledge is pretty low) into a more mainstream position. It's not that there's much that's new, it's that putting that knowledge into mainstream book form is a pretty substantial log on the fire.
A killing blow doesn't happen in an instant, it's the result of many individual moments. A book like this provides a firmer foundation than a Seth Abramson twitter thread. It damages your ability (perhaps only very slightly :) ) to have an initial reaction of disbelief in accusations about Trump.
And hell, maybe it's not about the Republican votes we need to impeach, but about setting up a firm footing for the blue tribe for the entire year to come. 'Remember last year, how it was all exactly as incompetent as you thought it was?' Maybe we march into next year again with Trump still suffering from the weight of the continual erosion.
Or maybe a terrorist attack will happen and the resulting national rage will embolden Trump, sickening me to my moral core, moving us closer into a world war.
It would be foolish to pretend to know these things which are unknowable, or to build it into my ego that I was correct for $9.32 of correctness. Because thinking machines like humans are more dependent on the information they get than they are any particular brilliance.
So I watch the way information moves within society, when it gets an additional hue of authority by being on bookshelves, and knowing the intent is to tear Trump from power, I track this as progress.
Trump is vindicated practically never, and leftist twitter rumors are hysterical, but the ones which survive are generally accurate. It's not a rational mechanism, but it would be irrational to expect that from political happenings.
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