‘Culture wars’ are fought by tiny minority – UK study

Look, sir, friend, random person on the internet --

I'm likely not going to change your mind, and I'm not going to revisit this thread again after I click away, so take this just as one person to another giving some advice as if we were strangers talking to each other honestly with no consequences.

Check yourself once in a while that you don't go falling the hole of deceiving yourself that you're right, using any cobbled together argument you can find. Because you sound like you're ready to trade off people's lives using whatever traits you think are equivalent, in the name of diversity or some symbolic goal you wish to achieve.

When someone lives in a certain state and applies to university, they have the opportunity to show their worth and skills by their achievements. When Harvard seeks to broaden their search for those people to new geographies, all to the better.

When Harvard says that no matter how good you are, because you're Asian, your achievements will be weighed a little less because we have enough of them, I cannot believe that you are unable to see how that's different.

And your principles of how you judge whether there are "enough" Asians, well, sir, they could equally be used by someone to say there are "enough" black students or Hispanic students, or any minority, by someone less well-intentioned.

I would rather have the approach where no one is deciding that there's "enough" of some group based on their favored characteristic of the day.

Algorithmic advertising allows companies to take advantage of evolved human behaviors to drive sales. For my tastes, it has gotten out of control and disgusting. I'm tired of being treated like a consumer, and I'd imagine the majority of people feel that way in their bodies, even if they aren't conscious of it (my small N sample is pretty heavily in agreement). The whole process of being advertised to is exhausting. That's even before we get into the 2016 election.

It probably is the most efficient model for a social media company (as you said, that's why they all do it). I don't think that type of monopoly is healthy in a market economy, and by regulating it, you allow other, more benign models a chance to grow.

> We're successfully doing it with smoking, and making good progress on the sugar + sedentary lifestyle front as well with all sorts of niche diets and fitness regimines popping up.

Are you just shitposting or are you not aware of the substantial history of prosecuting and regulating those industries, which have been instrumental in driving those changes? I don't underestimate end users - I think if you provide proper leadership and make the right thing the easy thing, then end users will do the right thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drink_tax

https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/new-food-warning-labels-beg...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Move!

If you spend most of your time around people who have a certain type of education and economic means, who do their own research, and have the liberty to control their lives to some extent then a libertarian outlook seems obvious. Outside that bubble, it becomes real clear that a lot of these problems are systemic and too big for most individuals to comprehend, let alone solve. It sounds dramatic to apply that to Facebook, but given the impact it seems to have on society, a little flair is appropriate.

> Also, and maybe I'm just being unimaginative, but what kinds of market rules would make sense here?

Apply the CCPA nationally and give users full control of their data and how it is used for starters. If you make it easy for customers to opt their data out of targeted advertising most will - if not immediately, then eventually (as you described, fatigue). If Facebook doesn't have the data, then their ad engine isn't really much better than anyone else and other business models become more attractive.

There are a bunch of different ideas about how to go about it, but taking away the data monopolies would seem to be the easiest, most self-executing solution.

“I don't think we can roll back on the constant need for more 'breaking news'”

Let’s challenge that assumption with historical precedent.

A technological and social revolution of sorts in the 1800s. In the first world of the time, the masses became literate and had more leisure time. Combined with advances in the technology of printing and paper production, and in distribution of the physical book, it led to an explosion of interest in something called “the novel”. It was almost a madness at the time, cf. the popularity of Charles Dickens works.

But eventually the violent boiling cooled to a simmer. A continuous simmer, but just a simmer culturally. I don’t know how or why the dynamic changed, but it did settle down.

I’d guess a similar analogy could be made with “the theater”, which is even below a simmer at this point in modern culture.

What will change the dynamic? Your guess is as good as mine...

Separately from the admissions testing debate: what is your view on the "gatekeepers of white supremacy" and the assorted "I am a racist" declarations?

I'm not quite sure how to say this in a non-confrontational way, but...

the thesis of the article you quote is literally identical to the thesis of my posts -- that Marx is in fact influential on modern economics. Again, I don't want to be confrontational, but... did you read the article you're quoting? The thesis is literally the opposite of what you claim it is.

> "Few economists doubt that Marx flunked economics"

The rest of that paragraph reads as follows:

But this column argues that Marx’s representation of the power relationship between capital and labour in the firm is an essential insight for understanding and improving modern capitalism. Indeed, this insight is incorporated into standard principal–agent models of labour and credit markets.

So the article you are quoting for support states that Marxist ideas are incorporated into standard models. Not directly, of course, but there. Kinda like how Newtonian ideas are in some sense incorporated into standard model...

Let's continue.

> "Economists, looking back, have not found much to admire in Karl Marx"

And then the entire next paragraph makes literally exactly the same argument I'm making here -- that Marx is obsolete and even what he was trying to do in terms of "generalized models" is obsolete -- but that he none-the-less does effect modern economics:

These assessments are based largely on our current – and correct in my view – understanding of Marx’s labour theory of value as a pioneering, but inconsistent and outdated, attempt at a general equilibrium model of pricing and distribution. But there is another aspect of his work that has been strongly vindicated by theoretical advances in recent decades: the idea that the exercise of power is an essential aspect of the working of the capitalist economy, even in its idealised, perfectly competitive, state.

TBH, it looks like the best source you can muster for your claims is making substantively exactly the same argument I'm making.... Marx's theories are flawed but clearly continue to effect work-a-day economics to this day.