This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions in the Main Motte
@aaa:
Contributions for the week of November 27, 2023
Contributions for the week of December 4, 2023
Contributions for the week of December 11, 2023
Altruistic Effectivism
Contributions for the week of December 18, 2023
Contributions for the week of December 25, 2023
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:
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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:
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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.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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:
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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:
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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.
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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.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
If you’re on twitter a lot(like I am) you might have heard of this recent trend of people praising Osama Bin Laden.
It’s one of the more popular topics at twitter in the week leading up to Thanksgiving. If you searched for Bin Laden on twitter during that time, you’d have seen pages and pages of people talking about the trend.
This seems to goes beyond just talking about blowback, which is the idea that foreign intervention often ends up making you enemies. Apparently some people are unironically saying that Bin-Laden was right, or even that he was justified in carrying out 9/11. It’s good to understand blow-back, but there’s no justifying what Bin Laden did.
To the casual twitter user, this might seem like a disturbing trend. A lot of people are seemingly defending Bin Laden. But something about this phenomenon is strange to me. If so many people are unironically defending Bin Laden, then why haven’t I encountered any of them in the wild? I have encountered people in the wild talking about blowback, but so far, every post I’ve seen where someone is actually defending Bin Laden was brought to me by someone else.
If encountering an ideologue “in the wild” means that you’re encountered them first hand, then encountering them second-hand is analogous to encountering them in a zoo. If you go to an actual zoo, you can be sure that you’ll see some lions, tigers, elephants, gorillas, and any number of exotic animals. However you’d be hard pressed to find those same animals out in the wild. Even if you go to their known habitats, actually seeing one isn’t always a frequent occurrence.
When people share the posts of their ideological opponents, they tend not to share the more reasonable posts. They’re motivated to share the most outrageous ones they can find so that they make their opposition look bad. They’re also trying to drive engagement, and outrageous posts are good at driving engagement.
The first twitter post I referenced in this entry was brought to you by Libs of TikTok. Libs of TikTok is a conservative social media personality that’s dedicated to sharing the most outrageous-looking posts and actions on behalf of liberals. Usually they focus on trans issues, but over the past few months they’ve been posting about Israel–Hamas war. Libs of TikTok is a sort of ideological zoo. Just like you can go to a real zoo to see the lions and elephants, you can go to one of Libs of TikTok’s social media accounts to see the people who praise Bin Laden.This is not to say that Bin-Laden-praisers don’t really exist. They clearly do exist. A lot of people have encountered them, and you can probably go track down some of those posts right now if you really wanted. But they might not be as frequent as they seem. Libs of TikTok, and other similar accounts signal-boost the ones that do exist. They present a distorted view of the ideological landscape, and make things like Bin-Laden praising seem more common then it really is.
This an application of Alyssa Vance’s Chinese robber fallacy: There are over 1 billion Chinese people. If one out of every ten thousand of them are robbers, that would result in more than a hundred thousand Chinese robbers. That’s a lot of robbers, and if someone wanted to make you think that Chinese people were robbers, they could easily share true examples of Chinese robbers until your attention span was depleted, even if only 0.01% of them actually were robbers.
No outright fake news is needed in order to have this effect. If given a large enough world, there are almost always enough examples of a rare ideology to cherry pick in order to make it seem like a common one.
There are many other examples of zoos on the internet. Reddit_Lies on Twitter is a zoo. /r/ChoosingBeggars on Reddit is a sort of zoo. The algorithms on the typical social media site, that feed you the most high-engagement content have the effect of a zoo. Even a normal news publication is a sort of natural zoo. The news doesn’t tell you about every day normal events. It tells you about rare, exceptional events. As John B. Bogart said, "When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news."
I will admit sense-making based entirely on your personal experience isn’t perfect. Perhaps the reason I don’t encounter Bin Laden supporters in the wild is because of my personal internet habits. A lot of the discourse seems to mention TikTok, which I don’t use. Everybody is in a bubble of some sort, so relying only on your personal experiences does have it’s flaws. But it’s still better than relying on a source that’s distorted in a particular direction.
It’s perfectly fine to do your sense-making based on second-hand information, but you have to be mindful of the forces that bring that information to you. You should understand how the information might be manipulated, intentionally or even unintentionally. You should be aware of the motivations your sources have, and the ways in which they’re likely to spin information. You should understand how they can cherry pick true information in order to distort the bigger picture. If you don’t, then you may find yourself an easy target for manipulation.
I don't know to what extent there are established precedents for when a topic is worthy of a mega-thread, but this decision seems like a big deal to me with a lot to discuss, so I'm putting this thread here as a place for discussion. If nobody agrees then I guess they just won't comment.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
After thirty weeks as @Soriek's passion project, Transnational Thursday is getting added to the auto-post bot. But it hasn't been added to the bot yet, I think, so I'm posting it this week, with apologies to anyone whose plans I've mussed!
Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
ChatGPT does Advent of Code 2023
LLM are all the rage and people are worried that they will soon replace programmers (or, indeed, every possible office job) so I decided to do an experiment to see how well ChatGPT-4 does against Advent of Code 2023.
What is Advent of Code
Advent of Code (henceforth AoC) is an annual programming "event", held by Eric Wastl, that takes place during the first 25 days of december. Each day at midnight a problem unlocks, consisting of an input file and a description of the required solution (either a number or a sequence of letters and numbers) to be determined by processing the input file. To solve the problem you have to submit to the website the correct solution. Once you do part 2 of the problem unlocks, usually a harder version of the problem in part 1. You don't have to submit any code so, in theory, you could solve everything by hand, however, usually, this is intractable and writing a program to do the work for you is the only easy way to solve the problem.
There's also a leaderboard where participants are scored based on how fast they submitted a solution.
Problems start very easy on day 1 (sometimes as easy as just asking for a program that sums all numbers in the input) and progress towards more difficult ones, but they never get very hard: a CS graduate should be able to solve all problems, except maybe 1 or 2, in a couple of hours each.
Prior history
This isn't the first time ChatGPT (or LLMs) was used to participate in Advent of Code. In fact last year (2022) it was big news that users of ChatGPT were able, in multiple days, to reach the top of the global leaderboard. And this was enough of a concern that Eric explicitly banned ChatGPT users from submitting solutions before the global leaderboard was full (of course he also doesn't have any way to actually enforce this ban). Some people even expected GPT-4 to finish the whole year.
A lot of noise was made of GPT-3.5 performance in AoC last year but the actual results were quite modest and LLM enthusiasts behaved in a very unscientific way, by boasting successes but becoming very quiet when it started to fail. In fact ChatGPT struggled to get through day 3 and 5 and probably couldn't solve anything after day 5.
Why do AoC with GPT?
I think it's as close to the perfect benchmark as you can get. The problems are roughly in order of increasing difficulty so you can see where it stops being able to solve. Since almost all of the problems in any given year are solvable by a CS graduate in a couple of hours is a good benchmark for AGI. And since all of the problems are novel the solutions can't come from overfitting.
Also around release people tried GPT-4 on AoC 2022 and found that it performed better so it would be interesting to see how much of the improvement was overfitting vs actual improvement
Methodology
I don't pay for ChatGPT Plus, I only have a paid API key so I used instead a command line client, chatgpt-cli and manually ran the output programs. The prompt I used for part 1 was:
Write a python program to solve the following problem, the program should read its input from a file passed as argument on the command line:
followed by the copypasted text of the problem. I manually removed from the prompt all the story fluff that Eric wrote, which constitutes a small amount of help for ChatGPT. If the output had trivial syntax mistakes I fixed them manually.
I gave up on a solution if it didn't terminate within 15 minutes, and let ChatGPT fail 3 times before giving up. A failure constitutes either an invalid program or a program that runs to completion but returns the wrong output value.
If the program ran to completion with the wrong answer I used the following prompt:
There seems to be a bug can you add some debug output to the program so we can find what the bug is?
If the program ran into an error I would say so and copy the error message.
If the first part was solved correctly the prompt for the second part would be:
Very good, now I want you to write another python program, that still reads input from a command line argument, same input as before, and solves this additional problem:
I decided I would stop the experiment after 4 consecutive days where ChatGPT was unable to solve part 1.
ChatGPT Plus
Because I was aware of the possibility that ChatGPT Plus would be better I supplemented my experiment with two other sources. The first one is the Youtube channel of Martin Zikmund (hencefort "youtuber") who did videos on how to solve the problems in C# as well as trying to solve them using ChatGPT (with a Plus account).
The second one was the blog of a ChatGPT enthusiast "Advent of AI" (henceforth enthusiast) who tried to solve the problems using ChatGPT Plus and then also wrote a blog about it using ChatGPT Plus. Since the blog is generated by ChatGPT it's absolute shit and potentially contains hallucinations, however the github repo with the transcripts is valuable.
The enthusiast turned out to be completely useless: it resorted often to babystepping ChatGPT through to the result and he stopped on day 6 anyway.
The youtuber was much more informative, for the most part he stuck to letting ChatGPT solve the problem on its own. However he did give it, on a few occasions, some big hints, either by debugging ChatGPT's solution for it or explaining it how to solve the problem. I have noted this in the results.
Results
| part 1 | part 2 | notes | |
|---|---|---|---|
| day 1 | OK | FAIL | |
| day 2 | OK | OK | |
| day 3 | FAIL | N/A | |
| day 4 | OK | OK | Uses brute force solution for part 2 |
| day 5 | OK | FAIL | |
| day 6 | FAIL | N/A | ChatGPT Plus solves both parts |
| day 7 | FAIL | N/A | |
| day 8 | OK | FAIL | ChatGPT Plus solves part 2 if you tell it what the solution is |
| day 9 | FAIL | N/A | ChatGPT Plus solves both parts |
| day 10 | FAIL | N/A | |
| day 11 | FAIL | N/A | ChatGPT Plus could solve part 1 with a big hint |
| day 12 | FAIL | N/A |
The perofrmance of GPT-4 this year was a bit worse than GPT-3.5 last year. Last year GPT-3.5 could solve 3 days on its own (1, 2 and 4) while GPT-4 this year could only solve 2 full days (2 and 4).
ChatGPT Plus however did a bit better, solving on its own 4 days (2, 4, 6 and 9). This is probably down to its ability to see the problem input (as an attachment), rather than just the problem prompt and the example input to better sytem prompts and to just being able to do more round-trips through the code interpreter (I gave up after 3~4 errors / wrong outputs).
One shouldn't read too much on its ability to solve day 9, the problem difficulty doesn't increase monotonically and day 9 just happened to be very easy.
Conclusions
Overall my subjective impression is that not much has changed, it can't solve anything that requires something more complicated than just following instructions and its bad at following instructions unless they are very simple.
It could be that LLMs have reached their plateau. Or maybe Q* or Bard Ultra or Grok Extra will wipe the floor next year, like GPT-4 was supposed to do this year. It's hard not to feel jaded about the hype cycle.
I have a bunch of observations about the performance of ChatGPT on AoC which I will report here in no particular order.
Debugging / world models
Most humans are incapable of solving AoC problems on the first try without making mistakes so I wouldn't expect a human-level AI to be able to do it either (if it could it would be by definition super-human).
Some of my prompting strategy went into the direction of trying to get ChatGPT to debug its flawed solution. I was asking it to add debug prints to figure out where the logic of the solution went wrong.
ChatGPT never did this: its debugging skills are completely non-existent. If it encounters an error it will simply rewrite entire functions, or more often the entire program, from scratch.
This is drastically different from what programmers.
This is interesting because debugging techniques aren't really taught. By and large programming textbooks teach you to program, not how to fix errors you wrote. And yet people do pick up debugging skills, implicitly.
ChatGPT has the same access to programming textbooks that humans have and yet it does not learn to debug. I think this points to the fact that ChatGPT hasn't really learned to program, that it doesn't have a "world model", a logical understanding of what it is doing when it's programming.
The bruteforce way to get ChatGPT to learn debugging I think would be to scrape hundreds of hours of programming livestreams from twitch and feed it to the training program after doing OCR on the videos and speech-to-text on the audio. That's the only source of massive amounts of worked out debugging examples that I can think of.
Difficulty
Could it be that this year of AoC was just harder than last year's and that's why GPT-4 didn't do well? Maybe.
Difficulty is very hard to gauge objectively. There's scatter plots for leaderboard fill-up time but time-to-complete isn't necessarily equivalent difficulty and the difference between this year and last year isn't big anyway (note: the scatter plots aren't to scale unfortunately).
My own subjective impression is also that this year (so far) was not harder.
The best evidence for an increase in difficulty is day 1 part 2, which contained a small trap in which both human participants and ChatGPT fell.
I think this points to a problem with this AIs trained with enormous amounts of training data: you can't really tell how much better they are. Ideally you would just test GPT-4 on AoC 2022, but GPT-4 training set contains many copies of AoC 2022's solutions so it's not really a good benchmark anymore.
Normally you would take out a portion of the training set to use as test set but with massive training set this is impossible, nobody knows what's in them and so nobody knows how many times each individual training example is replicated in them.
I wonder if OpenAI has a secret test dataset that they don't put on the internet anywhere to avoid training set contamination.
Some people have even speculated that the problems this year were deliberately formulated to foil ChatGPT, but Eric actually denied that this is the case.
Overfitting
GPT 4 is 10x larger than GPT 3.5 and it does much better on a bunch of standard tests, for example the bar exam.
Why did it not do much better on AoC? If it isn't difficulty it could be overfitting. It has simply memorized the answers to a bunch of standardized tests.
Is this the case? My experience with AoC day 7 points towards this. The problem asks to write a custom string ordering function, the strings in questions represent hands of cards (A25JQ is ace, 2, 5 jack and queen) and the order it asks for is similar to Poker scoring. However it is not Poker.
This is a really simple day and I expected ChatGPT would be able to solve it without problems, since you just have to follow instructions. And yet it couldn't it was inesorably pulled towards writing a solution for Poker rather than for this problem.
My guess is that this is an example of overfitting in action. It's seen too many examples of poker in its training set to be able to solve this quasi-poker thing.
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:
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Shaming.
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Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
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Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
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Recruiting for a cause.
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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:
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Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
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Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
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Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
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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.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Hey so, the NYC rats are hosting an impromptu art night and we'd love to have you over. Please no politics in the formal session. There's a p2p socializing session afterwards (but keep it civilized even then). Not coming! Submit a piece for consideration. The best piece will be mentioned.
Share and discuss your original works of art: songs, images, poetry, music, short film, stories or remakes of existing works*, the existing works themselves, ideas for how to improve existing works or make new ones..! Clever AI submissions allowed and encouraged. Everyone should be able to get a decent amount of sharing time (up to 10 minutes).
Feel free to stick to discussing works or to be a passive observer. There'll be pizza.
- This can be as simple as I really liked the tune of this song, but I've written better lyrics for it. Or this piece doesn't have lyrics, but it clearly could... Feel free to bring instruments.
We'll then have our usual post-meetup socializing!
WHERE: The Solarium 20 John Street, New York, NY 10038
- FOURTH FLOOR WHEN: 12/14 at 7:00 PM Hosted by [redacted] See you soon!
This is the thirtieth weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum lives in or might be interested in. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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:
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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:
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Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
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Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
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Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
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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.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.