Viliam's Shortform

Viliam

This is a special post for quick takes by Viliam. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

I noticed recently that I almost miss the Culture War debates (on internet in general, nothing specific about Less Wrong). I remember that in the past they seemed to be everywhere. But in recent months, somehow...

I don't use Twitter. I don't really understand the user interface, and I have no intention to learn it, because it is like the most toxic website ever.

Therefore most Culture War content in English came to me in the past via Reddit. But they keep making the user interface worse and worse, so a site that was almost addictive in the past, is so unpleasant to use now, that it actually conditions me to avoid it.

Slate Star Codex has no new content. Yeah, there are "slatestarcodex" and "motte" debates on Reddit, but... I already mentioned Reddit.

Almost all newspaper articles in my native language are paywalled these days. No, I am not going to pay for your clickbait.

So... I am vaguelly aware that Trump was an American president and now it is Biden (or is it still Trump, and Biden will be later? dunno), and there were (still are?) BLM protests in USA. And in my country, the largest political party recently split in two, and I don't even know the name of the new one, and I don't even care because what's the point, the next election is in 3 years. Other than this... blissful ignorance.

And I am not asking you to fix my ignorace -- neither do I try to protect it; I just don't want to invite political content to LW -- just commenting on how weird this feels. And I didn't even notice how this happened, only recently my wife asked me "so what is the latest political controversy you read about online", and it was a shock to realize that I actually have no idea.

OK, here is the question: is this just about my bubble, or is it a global consequence of COVID-19 taking away attention from corona-unrelated topics?

remember, and keep switching when I click on a link found somewhere

(Only if you're not logged in: there's a user-preferences setting to use the old UI.)

2Viliam6y

I guess in my ontology these new debates simply do not register as proper Culture Wars. I mean, the archetypal Culture Was is a conflict of values ("we should do X", "no, we should do Y") where I typically care to some degree about both, so it is a question of trade-offs; combined with different models of the world ("if we do A, B will happen", "no, C will happen"); about topics that are already discussed in some form for a few decades or centuries, and that concern many people. Or something like that; not sure I can pinpoint it. It's like, it must feel like a grand philosophical topic, not just some technical question. Compared with that, with COVID-19 we get the "it's just a flu" opinion, which for me is like anti-vaxers (whom I also don't consider a proper Culture War). To some degree it is interesting to steelman it, like to question when people die having ten serious health problems at the same time, how do we choose the official reason of death; or if we just look at total deaths, how to distinguish the second-order effects, such as more depressed people committing suicides, but also fewer traffic deaths... but at the end of the day, you either assume a worldwide conspiracy of doctors that keep healthy people needlessly attached to ventilators, or you admit it's not just a flu. (Or you could believe that the ventilators are just a hoax promoted by government.) At the moment when even Putin's regime officially admitted it is not a flu, I no longer see any reason to pay attention to this opinion. Then we have this "lockdown" vs whatever is the current euphemism for just letting people die, which at least is the proper value conflict. And maybe this is about my privilege... that when people have to decide whether they'd rather lose their jobs or lose their parents, I am not that emotionally involved, because I think there is a high chance I can keep both regardless of what the nation decides to do collectively: I can work remotely; and my family voluntarily so

2Vaniver6y

My sense is "it's just a flu" is a conflict of values; there are people for whom regular influenza is cause for alarm and perhaps changing policies (about a year ago, I had proposed to friends the thought experiment of an annual quarantine week, wondering whether it would actually reduce the steady-state level of disease or if I was confused about how that dynamical system worked), and there are people who think that cowardice is unbecoming and illness is an unavoidable part of life. That is, some think the returns to additional worry and effort are positive; others think they are negative. [...] Often people describe medications as "safer than aspirin", but this is sort of silly because aspirin is one of the more dangerous medications people commonly take, grandfathered in by being discovered early. In a normal year, influenza is responsible for over half of deaths due to infectious disease in the US; the introduction of a second flu would still be a public health tragedy, from my perspective. (Most people, I think, are operating off the case fatality rate instead of the mortality per 100k; in 2018, influenza killed about 2.5X as many people as AIDS in the US, but people are much more worried about AIDS than the flu, and for good reason.)