Highlights
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CFTC asking for public comments about allowing Kalshi to phagocytize PredictIt’s niche
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$25k tournament by Richard Hanania on Manifold Markets.
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pastcasting.com allows users to forecast on already resolved questions with unknown resolutions which hopefully results in faster feedback loops and faster learning
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Hedgehog Markets now have automatic market-maker-based markets
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Jonas Moss looks at updating just on the passage of time
I'd prefer comments or questions here on account of themotte.org site being pretty young. Long live The Motte!
I vaguely remember an article from a blog with a name like "statistical social econ" or "analytical social sciences" or something simiar, where it says actually the US's healthcare expenditure is in line with the discretionary spending of its citizens. My vague memory of it is that basically, healthcare, at a certain point, becomes a "want" and not a "need". Though US does spend more per capita on healthcare vs other developed countries, it also spends a lot more than those countries in general - or so that's what I remember.
Does anyone know what I'm talking about and can share the link? I wanted to find it but google hasn't proved as useful so I'm turning to all the smarties on TheMotte.
Thank you in advance!
We don't have the bot, so let me step in: this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics, 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.
Good morning.
We are always talking about how the news cycle has grabbed the attention of the people and is constantly making us focus on things that do not matter or have little relevance to our actual lived lives, forcing us to be forever locked within the overton window while whoever is in power does whatever they want. So far all of us have missed the next step that comes after that realization, which is, what are those important things that the news is not mentioning that is relevant to our lives? Today, we shall look at a few such examples:
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The politization of science - remember when there used to be scientific controversies, some of which would get into the public sphere where there would be intense discussions about the same until the issue was finally resolved. Me neither. However, in the past at least within the academy itself, the scientists used to seemingly have more freedom in regards to the subset of topics they could get behind. It was a period of the science determining the truth rather than the social truth determining the results of science. Today, we find ourselves in upside down world, where the moment the science finds anything controversial in its results, or anything that does not match current social norms, it is shut down or completely forgotten. This isn't a new phenomenon, simply one that continues to grow in strength, until science no longer exists separate from politics. Nobody is any longer allowed to question a medical procedure, or doubt a doctor, or ask any questions about data relating to ethnicity. All of it goes under the rug whenever something wrong happens. Cultural blackpills are no longer permitted even within hard science departments.
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Memes and Propaganda acceleration - A meme can be pushed onto the public and spread to millions of people within hours. Today the most expensive department of a company is the advertising section. Millions of bots exist on every single social media site, and if you are starting up as a social media personality, it is recommended that you learn to build bots for your channel to spread further. Today people are being directed towards more ideas and narratives to control their beliefs than ever before. In the past centuries the Church or the state controlled the minds of the people and told them what was right or wrong, today it is whatever echo chamber they end up falling into, resulting in people who do not even share common values with the neighbor right next door. Today you have a strong opinion of things that you have not experienced yourself a single time in life nor have any risk of ever experiencing or any reason to care about. What's worse you are being told that is actually a good thing. You are caring about everybody else's problems before your own, isn't that great!
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The death of integrity - Everybody is out to win. Everybody is out to be the right person the moment they are interacting with anyone outside. Why shouldn't they be, this is what the system that caters to their every idea has taught them. This is what their echo chambers have taught them. You are right, they are wrong. If they are able to prove you wrong, they are assholes who did it the wrong way, and anyways you have a right to your opinion. The only time people need to interact with anybody else now is when they have an agenda, so now people only ever interact with anybody else when they have an agenda. There is no you they are talking to, you are just another notebook or audiobook for them to store their opinion and hope to have it repeated somewhere else. Nobody cares about standards anymore, there is no right or wrong, only the desired end goal to be reached and then if anything breaks apart along the way then "look at what you made me do!".
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Reality disconnect - Should you worry about not having any savings? Well nobody else around me is worried lmao. Should you care about higher education. Why, it doesn't even pay any real money. Should you try to hold a real job. No, the people are too mean and they hold the wrong opinions.
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Illegal actions of the state- All states commit atrocities or immoral acts. We always find out a century later with the present always promising that we are totally clean now guys. Any time there is a controversy in the world, the news cycle drowns it in all the noise, telling you what you should be caring about instead, until you no longer have any clue what was seriously wrong in the first place. Most people don't even know where the newest war broke out or when their own state wrongfully broke a contract or hurt people for questionable reasons. These are things that the state will do everything in its power to memory hole.
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Existential threats - Climate change will likely kill far more people than what the news lets on. The energy crisis turned out to be far worse than the news ever let on. The population collapse will almost certainly be far worse than the news lets on as the news keeps assuming an increase in fertility in between for no reason whatsoever. The news does not completely hide these things, because the common man is obviously not completely blind, but they will do all they can to hide the exact details, to hide any real insurmountable risk for the people, and when the blow hits, everyone will act surprised as to where it came from. Remember, in the case of climate change at least, there were reports about it since the start of the 20th century if not earlier. We simply have no capacity to get our heads around existential risks, and the news has no interest in reporting on real existential risk as people giving up or realizing they are completely fucked is not good for business.
You see the problem?
You aren't supposed to be determining the course of your life based on what the neighbor or friend a country away thinks. Your education is still going to give you a better job than no education. Holding a job has never been about being surrounded by people who love you. That's why you work 8 hours so you can do what you want with the other waking 8 and actually enjoy yourself with the money you make once you are away from work! People have become completely disconnected from how the societal system works at even the most basic level.
People now have zero conception of how the social contract works or why it was kept the way it was. Thinking the entirety of the social contract was about controlling people by the richest men and women. That was certainly a part of it but not 100%!! There was a whole bit in there about being able to live functional lives!
Conclusion - In a manner of speaking, outside of the overton window we are certainly in one of the decaying society phases where the people have lost complete connection with why we were living the lives we were in the first place and the understanding that the world runs on the basis of material input which is limited in supply. People have zero concept of the social contract and forgot one of the bigger chapters in the social contract was about how to utilize our resources and get the most out of the average individual in exchange for providing them the maximum resources possible without breaking or stagnating the system.
The overton window simply exists to keep whoever has free time on their hands still focused on issues that do not actually matter 9 times out of 10 so that they are never able to beat the system.
Nor will you ever be able to doubt the system. The system is perfect, and when its not perfect its your neighbors fault for choosing the wrong option. The state is the final answer. Always has been. Always will be.
Leave the overton window and realize the only winning condition is what you do at the individual level for 90% of the human population and then to do things for your community or your city once you reach the remaining 10%.
Not sure whether I'm allowed to post top-level discussion threads now that we're on the new site (yay new site!) but I'm giving it a whirl since this isn't CW. I want to share a very interesting essay about sorcery in hunter-gatherer societies. An excerpt to whet your appetite:
Sorcery beliefs can exist as a key component of interpersonal or intergroup conflict. Of the Azande farmers of north central Africa, anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard notes that, “Death is due to witchcraft and must be avenged. All other practices connected with witchcraft are epitomized in the action of vengeance.” For the Yanomami forager-horticulturalists of the Amazon, Napoleon Chagnon says that, “New wars usually develop when charges of sorcery are leveled against the members of a different group.”
Accusations of sorcery can be both a cause of, and response to, conflict. Stewart and Strathern note that, in many cases, “While the witch or sorcerer is seen as the source of evil or wrong doing, it is the accusers who can be seen as playing the aggressive role.” They add that, “Rumor and gossip form the substratum from which accusations of sorcery or witchcraft may be made.” While the sorcerer is ostensibly a figure of great power, the accusation itself can contain far more hostile magic, as it may impel the group to engage in violent sanctioning of the putative magician. In The Scapegoat (1986), anthropologist René Girard writes that, “Magical thought seeks “a significant cause on the level of social relations,” in other words a human being, a victim, a scapegoat.” Girard adds that, “Those who are suffering are not interested in natural causes. Only magic makes “corrective intervention" possible, and everyone eagerly seeks a magician who can put things right.”
Accusations of improper sorcery can be used tactically by individuals to punish those they’re in conflict with, or to benefit themselves. Knauft notes that, “The opinion of spirits during all-night séances has been especially influential for finding and interpreting “evidence” of sorcery. Though spirit mediums should be neutral parties, the outcome of the sorcery inquest may benefit the spirit medium who conducts them.” Knauft tells the story of a spirit medium named Swamin, who redirected sorcery suspicions away from an accused woman named Sialim, and months later took her as his wife. Swamin had previously identified Sialim’s own mother, Mokoyl, as the alleged sorcerer responsible for killing his first wife, and he executed Mokoyl himself.
Among the Gebusi, individuals from families who fail to follow socially prescribed marriage exchanges were often accused of sorcery. Knauft writes that, “In this sense sorcery homicide is ultimately about male control of marriageable women. However, these statistically significant factors are neither publicly nor privately recognized by Gebusi as a cause of homicide against sorcery suspects, even by the closest kin of those killed.” Anthropologists Neil Whitehead and Robin Wright also note the strategic element of sorcery allegations in the Amazon, writing that, “sorcery accusations may represent forms of discourse about tensions in intervillage and interethnic relations, and may be structured by the idiom of kinship (consanguinity and affinity) and village hierarchy.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same! I saw Goody Such-and-Such with the devil...
Mottizens sometimes use terms with obscure origins that can be confusing to newcomers. This is an attempt to provide a brief explanation of what these terms mean and where they came from to help anyone new to the community.
50 Stalins: A style of commentary which pretends to criticize something while actually praising it, e.g. “critiquing” Stalinist Russia by suggesting that it is not Stalinist enough and it should have even more Stalins. The term was coined by Scott Alexander in Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-sized Nutshell (2013).
Chinese Robber Fallacy: A dishonest argument that uses a generic problem to attack a specific person or group, even when the other groups have the problem just as much, e.g. complaining about the problem of Chinese robbers without providing evidence that Chinese people are more likely to be robbers than other groups. It was first described by blogger Alyssa Vance in 2015.
CultureWarRoundup / CWR: A splinter community of the Motte that lives at the subreddit /r/CultureWarRoundup, founded primarily by users who felt that the Motte's moderation policies were too strict. It has very little moderation.
Effective Altruism / EA : A philosophical and social movement that aims to use evidence and reason to do the most good possible. It has a lot of overlap with the rationalist community and LessWrong and experienced much of its early growth on LessWrong.
Human Biodiversity / HBD: A viewpoint that holds that there are socially relevant differences between groups of people that are genetic in origin. Most controversially, HBD advocates generally maintain that the observed differences between the average intelligence of people of different races originate in genetics.
Ideological Turing Test / ITT: An exercise where you try to pretend to hold an opposing ideology convincingly enough that outside observers can't reliably distinguish you from a true believer. It was first described by economist Bryan Caplan in 2011.
LessWrong: A discussion forum founded by AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky in 2009. The forum focuses on cognitive biases, rationality, artificial intelligence, and other topics. It is the primary nexus for the so-called “rationalist community.” LessWrong could be considered an ancestor forum to the Motte, since Scott Alexander blogged there before founding Slate Star Codex and this community originated in the subreddit for Slate Star Codex.
Lizardman's Constant: The share of the population (around 4%) who gives absurd responses in opinion polls (such as saying that lizardmen run the world); perhaps a combination of trolls, people who don't understand the question, people who just want to agree with the pollster, and people who are completely apathetic to the poll. It was coined by Scott Alexander in Lizardman's Constant is 4% (2013).
Motte and Bailey fallacy: A dishonest form of argument where one conflates two positions, one easy to defend but with limited implications (the motte) and another hard to defend but with far-reaching implications (the bailey). The fallacy was named after a kind of castle. It was coined by the philosopher Nicholas Shakel in 2005 and popularized by Scott Alexander via Social Justice and Words, Words, Words (2014) and All in All, Another Brick in the Motte (2014). The motte-and-bailey fallacy is the namesake of the Motte; in this community, we would like people to only hold positions that they can defend.
Neoreaction / NRx: A right-wing political philosophy whose signature viewpoint is that monarchy is a better form of government than democracy. Its most famous advocate is the blogger Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug. The neoreactionary movement first grew on LessWrong, although they were always a very small faction there.
Prior: A term from Bayesian Statistics that essentially means one's belief about something before they take new evidence into account. To say that one's prior is X is essentially to say that one's belief is X. To say that one has "adjusted their priors" is essentially to say that one has changed one's mind to some degree about the topic at hand based on the evidence presented; in theory this is done by applying Bayes' theorem.
Quokka: A kind of Australian macropod. They have no natural predators and are therefore not particularly fearful. Some people, beginning with a 2020 Twitter thread by “Zero HP Lovecraft”, who believe rationalists are too trusting or naive compare rationalists to Quokkas.
Rationalist: An online community of people originally formed around the blog Overcoming Bias, founded in 2006 by economist Robin Hanson and AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky; the discussion forum LessWrong, founded in 2009 by Yudkowsky; and the blog Slate Star Codex, founded in 2013 by Scott Alexander. The rationalist community is generally focused on cognitive bias and reason. Because the Motte originated in the subreddit for Slate Star Codex, it could be considered part of a rationalist “diaspora.”
rDrama: A humorous forum about Internet drama. Originally the subreddit /r/drama, the community now lives at rdrama.net. The Motte forked the code they use to run their site when we moved from Reddit to this website in 2022 because it was a proven example of a Reddit community successfully moving offsite and had many of the features we wanted.
Red Tribe / Blue Tribe / Gray Tribe: Terms used to describe different cultural groups in America. The terms were coined by Scott Alexander in I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup (2014). They are sometimes used interchangeably with the concepts of Republicans (Red Tribe) and Democrats (Blue Tribe), but in their original conception, Red Tribe (or Blue Tribe) meant something more precisely stated as “the sorts of people likely to be Republicans (or Democrats), regardless of their actual political views.” For example, a vegan Harvard graduate who lives in Manhattan and loves musical theater is part of the Blue Tribe even if he is actually politically conservative. The Gray Tribe is a sub-tribe of the Blue Tribe characterized by things like working in STEM fields and often having libertarian-ish politics.
Scissor Statement: A highly controversial statement that reliably provokes arguments. Coined by Scott Alexander in Sort By Controversial (2018), a work of fiction in which scissor statements are generated by a machine learning system trained on Reddit comments.
Slate Star Codex / SSC / Astral Codex Ten / Scott Alexander: Scott Alexander is a psychiatrist who lives in the Bay
Area. He blogged from 2013-2020 at Slate Star Codex and since 2021 at Astral Codex Ten. The Motte was created as a subreddit in 2019 as the home for a weekly "culture war roundup" thread that was hosted on the subreddit for SSC until then. The culture war roundup threads were removed from /r/slatestarcodex at Scott Alexander’s request. Scott Alexander’s writings are a major influence on the norms of this community. His blog and the community around it are generally considered part of the rationalist community. Scott Alexander was a popular writer at LessWrong before founding SSC and the community around SSC has a lot of overlap with LessWrong.
SneerClub: A community of people critical of the rationalist community, including the Motte, that lives at the subreddit /r/SneerClub.
Steelman: The strongest possible form of an opposing argument; the opposite of a strawman.
TheSchism: A splinter community of the Motte founded in 2020 that lives at the subreddit /r/TheSchism.
Weakman: A weak argument that someone has actually made (so it’s not a strawman). A poor form of argument is to choose the weakest argument that someone has actually made in favor of a position and argue against that while ignoring stronger arguments for that position.
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).
The move from Reddit to a dedicated forum is a huge opportunity to mix things up. We should take advantage. Never let a crisis go to waste, etc.
One thing I would suggest (if technical limitations allow) would be the addition of a two-tiered voting system, somewhat like what LessWrong has implemented, where users can vote both on the quality of a post, and separately on whether or not they agree with it. I think this could have really positive effects for the kind of community and discussion the Motte was created to promote. The Motte's raison d'etre is to promote discussion and debate with people you disagree with. Separating voting on quality from voting on agreement would promote that goal in a couple different ways. Fundamentally, there is a tension between upvoting a post you think is well-done, and downvoting that same post because you disagree with its content. I think the Motte wants to be a place that encourages outsider or minority views, and separating the "quality" vote from the "agreement" vote would help promote this. From what I have noticed in this community, despite our commitments to encouraging debate and discussion with people you disagree with, posts coming from a more liberal/left-wing/social justice/woke viewpoint tend to get downvoted, even when their quality is equivalent or superior to other posts.
I'll also quote from the reasons given on the above LessWrong post about this feature, because I think the reasons given are good ones.:
I personally feel much more comfortable upvoting good comments that I disagree with or whose truth value I am highly uncertain about, because I don’t feel that my vote will be mistaken as setting the social reality of what is true.
I also feel very comfortable strong-agreeing with things while not up/downvoting on them, so as to indicate which side of an argument seems true to me without my voting being read as “this person gets to keep accruing more and more social status for just repeating a common position at length”.
Similarly to the first bullet, I think that many writers have interesting and valuable ideas but whose truth-value I am quite unsure about or even disagree with. This split allows voters to repeatedly signal that a given writer's comments are of high value, without building a false-consensus that LessWrong has high confidence that the ideas are true. (For example, many people have incompatible but valuable ideas about how AGI development will go, and I want authors to get lots of karma and visibility for excellent contributions without this ambiguity.)
There are many comments I think are bad but am averse to downvoting, because I feel that it is ambiguous whether the person is being downvoted because everyone thinks their take is unfashionable or whether it's because the person is wasting the commons with their behavior (e.g. belittling, starting bravery debates, not doing basic reading comprehension, etc). With this split I feel more comfortable downvoting bad comments without worrying that everyone else who states the position will worry if they'll also be downvoted.
I have seen some comments that previously would have been "downvoted to hell" are now on positive karma, and are instead "disagreed to hell". I won't point them out to avoid focusing on individuals, but this seems like an obvious improvement in communication ability.
Would this be a doable change? And would it be a good one? I am strongly in favor, but open to reasons why I'm wrong.
As the academic system is slowly imploding, my career followed suit and I recently found myself licking my wounds in a cushy industry job (read: adult daycare) and dreaming of startups. This was one of my brainstorms, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out a way that it could ever be profitable, so I’m releasing it into the wild.
You’ve probably heard of the hygiene hypothesis; in a nutshell, our immune systems ‘evolved’ to deal with lives that were, immunologically speaking, nasty, brutish and short. Consequently, the dial on the thermostat got turned up a bit too high for our fully [immunologically] automated gay space communism with pesky luxuries like vaccines, soap and plumbing. The incidences of immune conditions like asthma, allergies, MS, Crohn’s, T1D have gone up three to four fold in the last 70 odd years in developed nations which is too rapid for dysgenics as an explanation. Some interesting pieces of evidence hinting at a deeper truth;
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Adult immigrants from developing nations to the first world are by and large unaffected, but their children do have increases. This suggests an environmental rather than genetic etiology, and furthermore, that the environmental influences have to happen while the immune system is developing (though the evidence for this latter point is not particularly strong in my opinion). 1 2 3 4 5
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Abiotic mice (no bacteria or fungi in their gut, skin, esophagus, etc) have very defective immune systems. Whole compartments of the immune system fail to develop properly, suggesting that interplay between pathogens, benign commensals and the immune system is required.
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A number of studies have shown that even within developed nations, individuals raised on farms or exposed to animals at very young ages have lower incidences of atopy and autoimmunity.
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Your immune system develops in ‘waves’ and is ‘educated’ throughout your development (and almost certainly beyond!). Furthermore, there is substantial variation in our immune systems due to infectious history/environment. (Note that some competing papers took similar approaches with significantly different conclusions). These all point towards significant environmental influences* on these complex immunological diseases.
You’ve probably also heard of Alex Jones claiming that the US government is turning the frogs gay. With this audience, you probably also know that, uh, ‘turning the frogs gay’ isn’t a very honest description, but it is a real problem. Indeed, the process for dumping a new chemical into the environment is labyrinthine, but it probably isn’t particularly effective at screening substances that might influence the immune system. They seem largely focused on chemicals that mimic hormones (see: declining sperm counts and the aforementioned gay frogs).
The crux of this post: Why isn’t more effort expended towards identifying environmental factors, preferably added in the last 70 odd years in the developed world, that modify the immune system?
The hypothesis: Increased exposure to certain chemicals in our environment (food, makeup, air pollution, water contamination), when intersecting with susceptible genotypes, has led to an increase in allergy and autoimmune disease in the developed world.
So, to test it, you’d want to screen large numbers of chemicals in some kind of high-throughput immune assays. Good news: The dataset exists, and you can download it yourself! Bad news: It’s crap! Half-good-half-bad news: Nobody (as far as I know) talks about it or uses it for anything.
About 10 years ago the EPA decided to modernize environmental toxicology and generate The Dataset to end all datasets. They spent (wasted?) tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars building the data architecture, contracting an army of adult daycare inmates like myself to carry out the assays all to generate a half-dozen low-impact publications nobody has ever read (don’t trust their publications page, it’s padded with anyone who uses the data for any purpose) and this monstrous dataset. Here’s a 728 page pdf some poor soul generated to describe the in vitro assays.
I fiddled around with the data about a year ago at this point, and generated this list of compounds if anyone is interested. I mostly focused on assays relevant to T cells (due to personal biases - B cells are Boring, T cells are Terrific) that came up with a Ka < 10uM, although keep in mind that the majority of these things will be false positives*. Tldr; pesticides are really, really bad and you shouldn’t eat them; they light up every assay like a roman candle. Triclosan was an interesting hit as it’s been (weakly) shown to influence autoimmunity in some mouse models as well as an association with allergy development. Here it came up as a potentiator of lck activity, which is one of the major stimulatory proteins in T cells.
So…who cares? I suppose one might imagine mining some of these molecules as precursors to new drugs after the medicinal chemists have their way with them, although that kind of ‘pharma 1.0’ thinking never really appealed to me. Then again, everyone tells me to just try to make something work, and then your second company can be your vanity project/moonshot. Alternatively, I’ve got to assume that such a large database is amenable to machine learning, maybe along the lines of this paper? I think the largest problem is that the majority of the data here is without a doubt crap. Less relevant to the startup perspective is what the EPA actually wants to do, which is regulate some of these compounds. This would probably be prosocial, but then, if you wanted me to do prosocial stuff you should have given me my academic lab, ja?
*Note that, as complex traits, there are obviously genetic influences on the development of atopy and autoimmunity. The intersection of susceptible genetics and environment leads to disease.
**Cons: - Tons of false positives as many of these compounds won’t be bioavailable or aren’t present in quantities large enough to be relevant
Dataset sucks and others have claimed it to be unreliable
Unclear that people suddenly started being exposed to these things in the last 70 years
Assays poorly optimized and either cell-free (very prone to false positives) or done artificial overexpression systems
I'm not a regular poster on /r/TheMotte. I've done a bit of work getting this website up and running and I plan to stick around and try to help a little more, but I don't know that I will contribute much to the discussion. I just wanted to say that I appreciate that there exists a place where people can discuss the sorts of things that get you banned everywhere else, while setting aside their partisan, political, religious motivations (for the most part) and demanding effort and evidence. That's valuable to me, even if I'm not participating. It's important that someone, somewhere, can do that.
So I appreciate everything you guys do. Thanks for being here.
You know it's really me because who else would care about RSS. Although Reddit was originally built with explicit RSS support the nested nature of the weekly culture war thread required a slight bit of jury-rigging to show only top-level comments. So the RSS URL for the last thread looked like this: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/wulqxp.rss?depth=1
I tried adding the culture war thread from here into Feedly but it doesn't seem to recognize the format, and instead prompts me to use a paywalled feature to build custom RSS feeds. Can the rdrama code base support RSS?
An essay I wrote a while back arguing that dialectical naturalism offers a solid footing for ethics. Since it's pretty core to my moral philosophy, I figured what better to toss to the hounds. Enjoy!
I was looking at the new movies and albums coming out and realized how "diversity" in America just seems to mean "add more black people and women" If I asked you to name 10 black or white celebs, I'm sure you'd have no problem naming people both old or new.
However, if I asked you to name asian celebs? hispanic celebs? Arab celebs? Would it be as easy? what about politicians, people of power? I bet you could name more black people of power than people of another colored minority.
Black organizations, like BLM, also do little for other races and its most vocal supporters also do little to help other races or even show the same sensitivity they demand for themselves. BLM expects universal support but have heard little from the BLM people about Chilean children kidnappings, Native American denial of benefits, or even Ukraine
There's so much hype and concern about black people being represented but there's nothing being said about other races being represented and it's a shame because until that happens no one can say they're about equality and representation.
Reasons why TERFs are wrong about moving off Reddit
Transmisic TERFs are moving off Reddit, and that's a good thing, but they're making hylarous statements about its administration. In this essay, my esteemed colleague Dr Penelope Oaken will explain why their claims are TOTALLY WRONG AND INSANE
As the fediverse allows only posts up to 10Kchars I'll split her thesis in two parts.
if you know any transmisic cockroach, feel free to tag it
Select of their "reasons" and some refutations of them.
In this writeup I will mark some items with an obelus (†) for reasons which will become clear.
1 The mostly male reddit userbase overreports female subs, users and posts creating unsustainable amounts of work for female subreddit mods
This is mostly true; The "manosphere" / MRA & misogyny, hatred, harassment, and violence-promoting audiences on Reddit are responsible for the vast majority of abusive & false reporting - their culture / audience has been harnessed, since GamerGate, to abuse minorities & exploit any vector to silence free speech.
HOWEVER
Reddit has responded extremely well to actioning these false and abusive reports, as well as instances of clear "mass report" dogpiles.
There's now a "Ignore Reports" function that allows moderators to ignore more reports on an item - to prevent having to remove them from queue over and over, and a function to report Abuse of the Report Button.
2 Reddit admins don’t respond to serious and repeated reports of harassment and abuse of female users, mods, and subs.
Three weeks ago, Reddit admins published a RedditSecurity roadmap acknowledging that they're identifying and focusing on hatred aimed at feminine people - https://old.reddit.com/r/redditsecurity/comments/tyiymt/prevalence_of_hate_directed_at_women/ - and we crossposted it to AHS and stickied it. It was also crossposted to /r/TwoXChromosomes and other places on Reddit.
So this claim is false.
3 Reddit bans lesbians and lesbian subs for their same sex attraction and paints them as transphobic but not men who fetishize lesbians via porn, who are allowed to be cis only.
The "Reddit bans lesbians and lesbian subs" is spin rhetoric - Reddit doesn't ban lesbians, reddit doesn't ban lesbian subreddits, and reddit protects lesbians and lesbians subreddits from being attacked or harassed with hatred under Sitewide Rule 1.
This "Reddit bans lesbians and lesbian subs" claim is a lie carried forward from the banning of /r/GenderCritical's ecosystem of subreddits which existed to do several things, chief among them promote hatred of transgender people, especially transgender women.
At AHS, they've repeatedly documented how those subreddits were used overwhelmingly to platform hate speech, including violent rhetoric, targeting transgender people and especially transgender women. They've documented how those subreddits were often populated with tracked misogynists, anti-Semites, White Identity Extremists, and other Racially Motivated Violent Extremists and Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremists.
We don't have access to the level of data that would be needed to prove the hypothesis that these subreddits were astroturfed with huge amounts of sockpuppets, but we strongly suspect that should the question of "Why did these accounts get suspended / these subreddits shuttered" ever get litigated over in a court of law, Reddit is probably going to point out that a large amount of these accounts were inauthentic and that the subreddit operators were manipulating engagement and public perception. We can say that because a number of scientific studies have been done to identify whether the "positions" espoused in GC "communities" are replicated in the general public without the introduction of self-selection bias, and it's been found that GC "positions" are not reflected in the general public - and other studies have found that i.e. the GC "community" and positions and PR campaigns on Twitter are highly inauthentic and driven by media manipulation and a significant amount inauthentic, inorganic behaviour.
/r/GenderCritical marketed itself as "the largest women's forum on the Internet", but evidence points in every other direction.
They allow violent female mutilating sexual content (documented partially in r\/BanFemaleHateSubs)
This claim is false. Reddit's Sitewide Rule 1 prohibits threats of violence. One suspects that because the qualifier sexual is tacked on here, that the content being described is consensual BDSM content. However even sexual content on Reddit is not allowed, by Sitewide Rule 1, to threaten or intimidate.
r\/BanFemaleHateSubs does a good job of organising a community to focus on subreddits that are undertaking hatred of women, and getting that activity reported to Reddit under SWR1. They would likely do better by adopting a set of policies that exclude amplifying and engaging erotica content except where such content is clearly threatening violence or hatred and/or is clearly non-consenting, and would likely do better by recruiting leaders who were not core operators of /r/GenderCritical ecosystem subreddits, including /r/LGBDropTheT -
i.e. they would do better if the public and Reddit admins could believe that they are not core to an ongoing effort to platform bad faith claims of victimhood to disguise attacks on the rights, dignities, and liberties of others.
Because Sitewide Rule 1 explicitly states "While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect those who promote attacks of hate or who try to hide their hate in bad faith claims of discrimination." - i.e., Reddit admins listen to people, not to Karpman Drama Triangles.
Most of the subs for women are squatted on by men, fetishists, Men's Rights Activists, or TRA Extremists including necessary info like /r/Abortion, /r/Feminism
Translation: Many subreddits with obvious names of specific women's issues are operated by user accounts not under the control of FDS's clique, and in much the same way that certain white identity extremists, "dirtbag leftists", and sociopathic manipulator groups tried (and failed) to extort control of those communities away from the people operating them, FDS (which we can clearly see is just GenderCritical rebranded) is once again publicly _Going Their Own Way".
hmmm. That sounds familiar.
Oh well
Onward
Powermods
† +1
"Powermods" is a shibboleth that sprang from /r/friendly_society - a "backroom" collaboration subreddit between the leaders of /r/the_donald, /r/cringeanarchy, /r/metacanada, and other hate groups -- including virulently racist, sexist, and violent RMVEs and IMVEs -- with the express purpose of harassing moderators who enforced the Sitewide Rules (Content Policy is what it was called at the time) and who opposed racism and other forms of hatred - to harass them off the site. [Background of /r/Friendly_Society here: https://old.reddit.com/r/TopMindsOfReddit/comments/f9l717/reddit_today_announced_that_it_would_be_removing/fisqsxj/). It's emerged as "five moderators control 500 subreddits" (where the five moderators in question allegedly "controlling" huge swathes of Reddit were a CSS artist, a crisis counsellor, an automoderator regex tech specialist, a community engagement public face moderator, and an anti-harassment bouncer mod) before settling on "Powermods".
"Ironically" the real powermods are the people who were involved in /r/friendly_society and who are still undertaking an at-scale effort to Make Reddit Die.
The amount of exposure to depraved content the subreddit mods dealt with is traumatizing.
Absolutely true. However, this is true everywhere on the Internet except in private or invite-only spaces such as invite-only Discords, Slacks, private Twitter accounts / groups, private subreddits, etc.
This is especially true of any group or individual who is feminine.
This problem is not a Reddit-specific problem; It is a problem which Reddit has committed to addressing (See 2 above)
Additionally, there's entire networks of invite-only private subreddits on Reddit which host robust and mature communities, predicated on various qualifications. There's zero reason why FDS couldn't operate their own private communities / invite-only communities on Reddit ... unless their presence on Reddit is to recruit and be the public face of a media manipulation / PR campaign.
Men are coordinating offsite to report brigade and spam female oriented subreddits with bannable content (even tiny ones) – resulting in the banning of many female oriented communities for no reason.
† +1
While it's absolutely true that there are groups which co-ordinate offsite of Reddit to report brigade and to spam target communities with objectionable content --------
A: Reddit has means built into its infrastructure to mitigate abusive report brigades (as has been mentioned before) and
B: The « Communities being "spammed" with objectionable content to "get them banned" » lie originated with white identity extremist media manipulator groups operating on Reddit with the goal of instigating stochastic harassment of any good faith groups that sought to advocate for moderation and anti-hatred sitewide rules.
Reddit admins do not, and never have, shuttered any communities because they were raided or interfered with by "brigades" posting objectionable material.
Reddit admins close subreddits as a last resort, and only after the admins follow a process to prompt community operators to moderate their communities to a minimum standard of the Sitewide Rules and the User Agreement and applicable laws.
Reddit admins close subreddits practically only when the operators of the subreddit flatly refuse to follow the Sitewide Rules, the User Agreement, or applicable law.
At this point, any individual or group repeating the « Communities being "spammed" with objectionable content to "get them banned" » lie, is simply signalling to their audience that they are part and parcel of the mafia that's been trying to Make Reddit Die over the past six years.
Reddit Admins continue to allow the manosphere to have a presence on their website, resulting in real world abuse, rape, and acts of terrorism.
We have to agree that Reddit admins can and should do more to scrape gender-based ideologically motivated violent extremism and extremists off the service. We have to agree that these gender-based IMVEs have been connected to documented incidents of violence. We also have to observe that Reddit may be under subpoena and/or other law enforcement requirements to not interfere with ongoing investigations, and that in such cases, the appropriate venue for redress of these complaints is to unite to oust the misogynistic and bigoted politicians controlling or blockading the legitimate ends of government, and get government working once more to effectuate actual justice.
Quality posters have been harrassed into deleting their content off the subreddit and have no copyright protection.
Every person that submits their own content to Reddit retains their copyright, and their copyright protections. They license the use of the content to Reddit for specific conditions as laid out in the User Agreement.
And the way to keep people from being harassed into deleting their posts and comments from a given subreddit is to recruit MANY moderators who understand and recognise harassment and take moderation actions to counter and prevent that harassment.
Or, for example, having a private, invite-only subreddit.
FDS subreddit as one of the last female-only subs
It is not.
has been targeted by admins with unfairly applied rules
† +1
It has not been; The admins have required FDS to enforce the Sitewide Rules and comport with the Moderation Guidelines, which is required of all community operators.
with the intent to eventually ban the sub,
This is now at least the third rhetorical talking point in their "reasons" which is directly lifted from the "Make Reddit Die" (†) crowd -
In conclusion:
Their "reasons" for "abandoning Reddit" are directly shown to be -- at best -- outright misrepresentations and at worst are direct manipulation campaigns and lies propagated by a group of media manipulators who are pushing a very public campaign to try to Make Reddit Die, and this is very clearly the second time that GenderCritical op has "quit Reddit" in a public stink.
I really want the anti-misogyny social justice effort on Reddit which counters and prevents harassment of women, to have better leaders and trustees than a group which clearly has been performatively filling the space in order to recruit for a mass-media-manipulation operation and couch attacks on the rights, dignity, and liberties of others in attempts to hide their hate in obvious bad faith claims of discrimination. We all should want this effort to be led and worked on by people with a clear good faith goal to counter and prevent hatred, harassment, and violence aimed at women.
FDS is clearly not that group. So I can only say "Thank Goddess" that they're stepping away.
I hope this clears things out
Have you found a problem in the site? Do you want to make a suggestion on improvement? Do you just want to say "hi everyone"? Post it here!
If you'd like to help with development, check out the Github and the dev Discord. We have a practically infinite list of small things that need to be fixed or changed.
Share your CSS, discuss themes/styles/the site's default look/whatever.
I just picked random elements and edited them until it worked, because I couldn't take this GNOMEd infinite whitespace new reddit look even for 30 minutes. My CSS is garbage, relies on a 1080p desktop browser, is probably full of code that does nothing or doesn't need to be as specific, might actually break one or two site functions, etc. but at least it doesn't violate my eyes anymore.
There is a list of defined colors (like --primary-dark1) that comes from the theme, but I don't see how to change them manually except one by one using more CSS. I use the default ("TheMotte") one.
Keep in mind, de gustibus non est disputandum. I'm mostly posting this so others can iterate faster and make proper good-looking themes. If you want to have slim text without the cringe inconsistent layout/color changes and are in a hurry, reading the comments and deleting the sections you don't want should most likely work.
/*unbold buttons*/
.btn {
font-weight: 400 !important;
}
/*hide "is a reply to comment by" link on every single subcomment*/
div > .ml-2 {
display: none !important;
}
/*reorder upvote buttons / userinfo / contents*/
.comment-anchor {
display: flex;
flex-direction: row;
flex-wrap: wrap;
gap: 0px 8px;
padding: 1px;
}
.comment-anchor div:nth-child(1) {
order: 1;
}
.comment-anchor div:nth-child(2) {
order: 3;
flex: 1 100%;
}
.comment-anchor div:nth-child(3) {
order: 2;
}
/*colors*/
body > .container {
background-color: #C0C0C8 !important;
}
#thread, #userpage {
background-color: #C0C0C8;
}
.comment-section {
background-color: #F0F0F8;
}
/*add borders, make slim*/
.comment {
margin-top: 0.1rem !important;
border: 1px solid var(--primary-dark1);
margin-bottom: 1px;
}
.comment .comment-collapse-desktop {
padding-right: 8px !important;
border-left: 1px solid var(--primary-dark1) !important;
}
/*small gap between comments for readability*/
.comment-section > .comment {
margin-bottom: 5px;
}
/*smaller font, spacing, limit post width*/
p {
font-size: 12px;
margin-top: 0.4rem;
margin-bottom: 0.4rem;
max-width: 900px;
}
/*misc whitespace removal*/
body > .container {
max-width: 1850px;
}
.comment-collapse-icon {
margin-left: -2px;
}
.upvote-button, .downvote-button {
padding-left: 1px !important;
padding-right: 1px !important;
}
.user-info {
margin-bottom: 0 !important;
}
.comment .comment-body .comment-text {
margin-bottom: 0.1rem;
padding-right: 1px !important;
padding-top: 1px !important;
}
blockquote {
padding-top: 0;
padding-bottom: 0;
padding-left: 0.3rem;
}
blockquote > p {
padding-top: 0;
padding-bottom: 0;
margin-top: 0;
margin-bottom: 0;
}
.comment-body > .comment-anchor {
padding: 1px;
}
.comment-actions {
padding: 1px;
margin: -3px;
}
When I use new.reddit I feel like content is being hidden from me on purpose.
It is not quite as bad here. But compare the previous site with here when I collapse threads
Someone wrote some CSS for the Astral Codex Ten when it first launched to make it not suck so much. Can anyone do something so that
-
if there is content I get to see it on my screen?
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make following threads easier than counting the number of bars on the left hand side while remembering to distinguish bars-from-threading from bars-from-blockquoting?
Right now, only about 30 comments show in the megathread without users clicking "show more" button. This unfortunately has the effect of burying a lot of cultural war discussion, aside from the top few posts, at a time when we're trying to encourage more users to jump over to this site with more comment. For reference, the topic has about 180 comments right now, so by default, 5/6ths of the comments are hidden.
A suggestion: to avoid especially acrimonious discussion and SSC-posting being our only hallmarks as an independent community, let’s discuss things we can generally come together on.
In a Culture Peace thread, I’d expect to see:
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An explanation of part of one’s own culture/group identity/tribally specific hobby one feels is misunderstood, without denigrating those who misunderstand
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Events or news stories which genuinely sow harmony instead of discord
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Suggestions for additional Culture Peace actions we can do on The Motte, elsewhere online, and in real life
Top level posts should include:
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a short description of what you're going for
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a link to the CSS (on gist.github.com or another pastebin that doesn't randomly delete old pastes)
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and an image link to a screenshot.
Like this:
I'm trying to sort of imitate the visual style of old Reddit: no icons, limited width, not much margin space.
https://gist.github.com/FeepingCreature/907b05dd498435cb5a193ebbb5f39846
https://i.imgur.com/R2oBUt5_d.webp?maxwidth=9999&fidelity=high
I liked to post in the Friday fun threads what video games I've been playing recently. Sometimes I recommend the games, and sometimes I ask for recommendations.
I've always enjoyed talking about video games. But themotte has made me picky over the years. Its not just talk that I want. It is thinking, understanding, and discussion of video games that interest me. Video games are mostly a mental activity for me, and so diving into a mental discussion about them often enhances my enjoyment.
I didn't post in the Friday fun thread about what I've been playing, so I'll post now. And I'd like to know what others are playing.
The post I would have written:
This week I've been hooked on factorio (again). I've done many playthroughs of this game. A few vanilla playthroughs (some multiplayer and some not). A krastorio 1 mod playthrough. A few different attempts at the bob's, angels, and seablock mods (never could get into them, too much work, and not enough reward). A krastorio II and space exploration playthrough.
This week though I have been playing with just the space exploration mod. There has been some hints in blogposts that factorio might have an expansion, and that the expansion might be related to the space exploration mod. I thought I'd try and wait for that expansion. But my patience has failed me.
Playing space exploration without the krastorio II mod has been surprisingly way more different than I would have expected. The major difference in my mind is that krastorio II makes the starting world gameplay last too long, and gives too many advantages. I never thought this would be a real problem, but I've never managed to truly beat a space exploration game before. And I realized part of the problem is that krastorio II ties you to the homeworld too strongly. While space exploration on its own forces you off planet just for the sake of some quality of life improvements. For example, you have to go to space in order to get the logistics network chests. The tech is not unlockable based on ground items alone. I don't remember if krastorio II mod combination forced me to go to space, but I do remember that the belt inserters made so many logists aspects so much simpler that the need for drone based logistics didn't seem as pressing. There were also special ground based fabricator buildings for Krastorio II that were larger and much faster (matching the space based ones). But with just the space exploration mod I'm realizing there is an intentional difference. Either you can choose land based production to get productivity bonuses. (and usually the first steps in refinement for special resources). Or you can choose space based production for speed bonuses.
I think anyone who's been watching this switchover has noted it hasn't been the smoothest. I'm still kinda decompressing from that and I figured I'd write up why, just so you could all marvel at the ridiculous chain of catastrophes.
So.
We get the site up. People register their accounts. People start almost immediately reporting 429 errors when registering.
429 Too Many Requests is an error that means a user has done too much stuff lately, commonly known as "rate limiting". A lot of the site is rate limited, but it should be rate limited well above what an actual human will do. For example, the account creation is rate-limited at 10 per day per person; if you need more than ten accounts every day then uh maybe you're not behaving quite like we want.
Of course, people weren't making ten accounts per person; rate limiting was broken.
We looked into the rate limiting code. Rdrama runs on a service called Cloudflare, which relays connections and does a bunch of fancy caching and performance optimization and also doesn't provide service if you're farming kiwis. An annoying thing about this kind of a service is that it makes it a little trickier to figure out "who" someone is; Cloudflare includes that information on requests, but it's not in the normal place. The rate limiting code was using the Cloudflare-specific IP info. Problem: We're not on Cloudflare. So that info was just wrong. I took out the Cloudflare-specific stuff and the problem did not get fixed in any way.
Well, Cloudflare does all this fancy optimization (it's called "reverse proxying", please don't ask why), but actually, so do we. The Motte runs on the same server setup as The Vault, and The Vault is specifically designed to be extremely cacheable. We've got our own little similar frontend server doing something identical, and all connections, including Motte connections, go through it. This means we needed to get the IP from our own reverse proxy, using a different technique, which we did, and which also entirely failed to fix the issue.
At this point I tried to disable the rate limiter entirely. The rate limiter refused to disable. We'll get back to this one.
The reason, I guessed, the reverse-proxy IP didn't work is that our reverse proxy is actually behind another reverse proxy. It's reverse proxies all the way down. You may not like it, but this is what peak web development looks like. Anyway, we were getting one layer further up, but we needed to be another layer further up. The hosting service I use does in fact have a switch for enabling this; it's called Proxy Protocol. I turned Proxy Protocol on and the entire site instantly went down. So I flipped it back and the site came back up. Then I did this a few more times just to be sure it wasn't a coincidence. It wasn't.
It turns out that the reverse proxy run by me requires some very specific configuration settings to be compatible with the Proxy Protocol setting. The problem is that I'm running this proxy in sort of a weird way. Most people using this server architecture have, like, an entire devops team. I don't! It's just me. And I don't really know what I'm doing. So cue half an hour of occasional outages as I try something new. It is worth noting that some of the changes I made also broke the site, but I was suspicious that the two changes had to be made together to work at all, so sometimes I'd break the site, then I'd break the site in another way, then I'd sit there for a minute hoping it worked, and it wouldn't, and then I'd revert both changes.
Finally I figured out the magic incantation! The site worked, we got IPs, the rate limiting was functional. The 429 error was forever vanquished! I looked at the site, and checked the perf charts, and noted that we were capping the CPU on the absolute-bottom-barrel server I'd chosen, so I figured, hey, I tried moving servers before as part of a test, this should be fine, let's just fork over an extra $12/mo and boost the server a bunch, and I did this, and the site broke entirely.
I spent another thirty minutes trying to fix it; if anyone noticed the site being entirely down for a while, well, that was me trying to untangle what was wrong. I tried connecting directly to the site from its own computer; it didn't work. I spent twenty minutes analyzing this and eventually realized I was just doing it wrong. Worked fine once I did it wrong. I eventually decided this was a routing issue and had a deep suspicion.
See, Proxy Protocol was set using a switch on the hosting provider's GUI. But that's sketchy as hell - why is it a manual switch? I went back and checked and sure enough it had gotten turned off. So I turned it back on.
Site back up and running.
As near as I can tell, there is a switch on the GUI. But this switch is also overridden by some settings in my configuration. Importantly, it's overridden irregularly; sometimes you'll do something, and it'll say "oh shucks, gotta go check that switch!" Because I hadn't realized this, it went and checked it and dutifully turned it off again.
I think I've fixed that now.
So, what was the deal with rate limiting not turning off?
If you use Kubernetes to run a process, and you tell it you want the latest version of a Docker image, it will download that latest version every time you restart the process.
If you tell it you want a specific labeled version, then it won't. It'll just use whatever it has, even if the label has changed.
So if you changed from "latest" to "dev" and "main" . . . then things just don't update when you think they will, and this change happens silently unless you're aware of what Kubernetes is about to do.
I think I've fixed that now too.
I bet this new server makes things faster, doesn't it?
Nope.
Turned out the CPU usage wasn't even coming from The Motte. It was an Archive Warrior I was running on that just to soak up some extra bandwidth. Apparently it's just stupidly CPU-hungry?
I think I've fixed that also.
And that was my day, more or less.
How's your day going?
(Extra thanks to the various people who were helping out on Discord, incidentally, especially Snakes who fixed a whole bunch of not-quite-as-critical-but-still-pretty-dang-important stuff while I was fighting with the servers.)
(Edit: I forgot to mention that I also spent a few hours trying to unclog an HVAC drain line so it wouldn't flood the house. That doesn't even feel like the same day anymore.)