This war is fueled by words and indignation. Just stop feeding it.
The culture war is killing us [video]
111–120 of 212 posts
Re: The culture war is killing us [video]
#112I don't know if there a good way to add value and insight to this topic because even insight is going to be zero sum and partisan, but here's a shot. Sectarianism is something I've talked to acquaintences about for a few years, as I was thinking about how to make predictions on how current events were playing out, and the precdents I thought would be useful as a model to anticipate were an environment like the Troubl…
> It's still just skirmishes between very small physical groups that will probably move into terrorism and assasinations over the summer, and with tacit or direct approval and funding from within institutions to keep it going.
Over this summer (2021)? Or did you mean "summer" as in "there's a decade or three of spring where things heat up and it culminates in a violent, hot summer"?
> The fashionably Girardian view would ask, who will be the scapegoat that lets all these groups save face and gives them an out for peace, and how grisly will its end have to be? I'm pretty sure it's going to be us thoughtful types, and maybe there will be a pogrom against rationalists, because if there is one thing everyone can agree on, people who write like this can be very annoying.
The left and the right would be uniting to enact pogroms against "rationalists"?
Re: The culture war is killing us [video]
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Either my children will be rejected from universities even if they have perfect SATs and grades on the basis of their race or they will not. There is not much to misunderstand here.
Think you're focused on the wrong issue there. The most likely reason your child is unlikely to get into a good university is because good universities have consistently chosen not to increase class sizes in line with the number of qualified students apply, as a result your child is way less likely due to pure statistics to get in. That's because the schools are social institutions not academic ones.
In some contexts it is considered a bad look to tell people facing discrimination for their unchosen group membership that people of all groups face the same issue and their concerns about the issue are equally valid.
Re: The culture war is killing us [video]
#114Have many of us have become the useful idiots of the corporate media overloads? I know it's fashionable to blame Facebook for the divisiveness, but I'm old enough to recall Obama's 2004 DNC speech that got him his first national attention. Before there was Facebook, Obama was talking about divisiveness. I firmly believe anger and anxiety is constantly injected into the mainstream corporate media to increase eyeballs…
I'm not sure corporate media had much choice in the matter if they wanted to survive. Almost all are for profit companies that lost heavily when eyeballs shifted to social media. Social media companies make money off of ads, so they optimized viewership without being concerned with the consequences. In order for corporate media to stay alive and stop hemorrhaging viewers, they needed to play by the new rules. It's a…
They were going this way before the internet threatened them. Newspaper reporting (and journalism generally) was becoming increasingly emotion-based rather than fact-based.
The rise of the tabloids in the UK is a good example: highly-partisan papers that appealed to specific demographics with stories that aimed to evoke an emotional response (usually a negative emotion).
It's the same mechanic, though: competition for eyeballs. Social media became the super-competitor, but the ad-based model would have got there eventually even without the internet.
Re: The culture war is killing us [video]
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think moving away from First Past the Post voting systems is a good thing, but it is not the panacea people are hoping it will be. Just because people can vote for viable third parties does not mean that polarization will go down. It’s possible that more parties may increase divisions.
But if no party has the majority, they will be forced to form coalitions on issues to get anything done. As it is now, whatever congress does is basically up to one person, the majority leader/speaker.
Germany pretty much always has coalition governments. We have 5-6 parties in parliament regularly. We have general blocs, though alliances might shift on topics, but generally you had the somewhat-far-left party, the social democrats and the greens being allied, and the then conservative CDU/CSU (now conservative-leaning centrist) and the financially conservative, socially liberal FDP on the other side.
You'd still have coalitions, e.g. right now it's CDU + SPD (social democrats), but the (published) split is there as much as it ever was. It's changing now, as a new conservative/far-right party has emerged, and the green party gets lots of love from the media and has won some state elections (on a conservative platform, ironically), so it's hard to say where we'll go from here.
I don't think more parties necessarily break it up. During the cold war, we had a Soviet bloc and a Western bloc, even though you had individual countries in each.
Re: The culture war is killing us [video]
#116Have many of us have become the useful idiots of the corporate media overloads? I know it's fashionable to blame Facebook for the divisiveness, but I'm old enough to recall Obama's 2004 DNC speech that got him his first national attention. Before there was Facebook, Obama was talking about divisiveness. I firmly believe anger and anxiety is constantly injected into the mainstream corporate media to increase eyeballs…
People actively self-select for this type of tribalism. Be it sports or politics, it gives average people the feeling of identity and purpose. There was a brief period in the mid 20th century when centralized communication was far superior to decentralized communication, and the populous hadn't had much time to apply selective pressure toward more divisive media, but even then, you had McCarthyism, Jim Crow, pro-war/…
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Re: The culture war is killing us [video]
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
The claim seems factually accurate and supported. We wouldn't consider an expert saying "you don't understand transformer ML models" with quotes supporting that claim, as being putting down the user, no? I often read technical conversations on HN in which one user tells another they don't have an accurate understanding of some topic. Just because it's a historical or cultural matter doesn't mean it's ad hominem to st…
It's just the same when the topic is ML models. HN readers shouldn't be making pejorative comments about each other in those conversations either, and when we see it we moderate it the same way. There's no need to comment pejoratively on the other person. The post is stronger without it, and the expected value of such swipes, in terms of the impact they have on subsequent discussion, is sharply negative.
> HN readers shouldn't be making pejorative comments about each other in those conversations either, and when we see it we moderate it the same way.
Moderation appears highly selective. E.g.,
"This argument is clownish and we should be embarrassed it's on the front page."[1]
That is the top comment for that post, but I don't notice your reminder there about pejorative comments.
If I had to rankly speculate, I'd say moderation happens consistently on topics where the average HN user tends to have a low level of knowledge (unionization, civil rights history), and less consistently for topics where there is a greater probability of a critical mass of participants with domain expertise (digital security).
I also rankly speculate that you don't state this outright to prevent the tinder fire that would result from making users aware of their own lack of knowledge on the topics more likely to be moderated.
Re: The culture war is killing us [video]
#118Have many of us have become the useful idiots of the corporate media overloads? I know it's fashionable to blame Facebook for the divisiveness, but I'm old enough to recall Obama's 2004 DNC speech that got him his first national attention. Before there was Facebook, Obama was talking about divisiveness. I firmly believe anger and anxiety is constantly injected into the mainstream corporate media to increase eyeballs…
It's well known that foreign intelligence services are active on social media trying to foment divisiveness. They're not even necessarily pushing a specific political goal, just getting Americans to hate each other. The Russians appear to be the most active but other countries play the same game. So before you get drawn into an online argument, ask yourself am I dealing with an authentic person or a paid foreign trol…
Russia and China have to deal with this too (through different mechanisms), so it's not unexpected that they'd do it back.
They are also at much higher risk of fragmentation. Russia with the far east, etc. China with Xinjiang, etc.
I wouldn't expect them to stop unilaterally. It would require a treaty like SALT, which the US has shown zero appetite for - likely coz it sees fragmentation of rival states as a bigger prize than preventing political arguments at thanksgiving.
Re: The culture war is killing us [video]
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
"imagine the reaction from their advertising customers" Imagine the reaction from their viewers! The sad fact of the matter is that the media strategy you describe would be worthless if the viewers didn't lap it up and ask for more. The media's just giving most viewers what they want.
True, but there is a reason most human societies (excluding the West in the past 10 years) have had strong restrictions on the excesses of human behaviour. Just because the animal can do something, doesn't mean it should , precisely because society as a whole doesn't benefit when individuals do that. In most societies, you still can't drink to excess and drive, nor advertise cigarettes, nor sell them to minors, nor d…
> Media consumption, and in fact media production, was regulated, initially by technology (you couldn't broadcast widely before radio) and then by law (The Hays code in the US and its subsequent incarnations).
Written media origin however are very inflammatory and divisive writings. Well before corporate media.
Re: The culture war is killing us [video]
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Allow me to explain the metaphor. When two sides shoot at each other that is called a war. When one side shoots the other that is called a massacre. Hence if another side starts shooting at you and isn't willing to negotiate, massacre or war are your two choices. In "cultural war", this would correspond to one side trying to keep moving their positions forward. The either side either puts up a fight or they don't.
You've explained further proving that the original statement was wrong. Nobody is shooting at anyone.
And there's no culture war, because war involves death, bombs and stuff. Right, language, we find it useful to use concepts that don't literally apply because they might help us see similarities.
In that case, you don't need literal shooting and trenches. You can talk of wealth redistribution, where "we'll take from A and give to B" is an attack on A. It doesn't involve guns immediately (though it will if A doesn't "voluntarily" give up the goods), but it's useful as an analogy. What the commenters seem to imply is that, if A does not fight back (again, not literally with guns, but politically), they'll be massacred (again, not literally), their interests will not be considered at all.