My opinion is that at some point it becomes kind of silly to keep using terms coined in blog posts that are almost a decade old now and which have never gained widespread usage elsewhere without ever explaining what they mean or where they came from. At this point you have to expect that many of the people here were not aware of Slate Star Codex or LessWrong circa 2013. Part of my hope is that providing explanations and links to the LW/SSC origins of this community it will encourage newcomers to read more of the "foundational texts" and assimilate better rather than causing a culture shift over time away from the things that made this community great.

I agree with the problem of enabling trolls but this is a tradeoff and honestly I'm confident in our ability to identify someone namedropping shibboleths while trolling.

Although it didn't occur to me when I posted this that it would likely be one of the most visible posts on the subreddit for a while. I'm open to taking it down temporarily (or permanently if that seems to be the community consensus) or moving it to a less visible place.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

DinoInNameOnly Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed 1yr ago

Zorba explained it here: https://www.themotte.org/post/2/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/778?context=8#context

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Thoughts on internet addiction

DinoInNameOnly Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

One thing that has worked quite well for me is this service called FocusMate. How it works is you get paired with someone on the service for a video call that lasts 25 or 50 minutes. You share at the beginning what you're working on and want to accomplish by the end of the session. Then you turn off your mic and do it for the rest of the session. At the end you check in with them and share how much you were actually able to do. It sounds dumb but it works better than anything else does to get me to stop surfing Reddit/YouTube/Wikipedia and actually get something done.

It sounds like your concern is not only about work but lesiure time too. FocusMate can be used for many leisure activities too. For example, if you want to read a book, you can say you want to read X pages in the session.

If you find that you don't know what you actually want to do with your leisure time when you have to structure it like that, that might be part of your problem.

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Bugs, Suggestions, Small Comments, And Site News

DinoInNameOnly Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed 1yr ago

It would be nice if pinned posts and comments were easier to distinguish visually from others. On Reddit pinned posts are green and that helps a lot; right now we only have the little pin icon next to the post and it's easy to miss.

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Bugs, Suggestions, Small Comments, And Site News

DinoInNameOnly Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed 1yr ago

Has anyone brought up the banner image yet? It just looks some weird stock photograph unrelated the Motte and makes the site feel incomplete. I would rather not have it at all.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

DinoInNameOnly Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed 1yr ago

I wouldn’t watch any of these media franchises even if they were good and nonwoke. But even though their casting decisions don’t matter at all per se, they aren’t happening in a vacuum. The media considers it racist minority erasure if a white actor is cast for a nonwhite character. But if a nonwhite actor is cast for a white role and you complain about it, you’re a horrible racist too. This is a racist double standard. We are being conditioned to accept a racist double standard. I refuse to accept that, even for something that doesn’t matter per se. Because a society that embraces racist double standards in ways that don’t really matter will embrace them in ways that do matter, too.

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The Motte Glossary

DinoInNameOnly Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed 1yr ago

Actually A Quality Contribution. It was an option when reporting comments if you wanted to highlight a comment to the mods as particularly good.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

DinoInNameOnly Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed 1yr ago

But manipulating impoverished people seeking a better future and treating them as nothing more than chattel to score political points and ‘own the libs’ absolutely turns my stomach.

Manipulating impoverished people seeking a better future and treating them as chattel to score political points is what the 'libs' have been doing for decades. That's how we got into this mess.

I don't want anyone to be mad, I want them to stop being 'altruistic' with other people's resources.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

DinoInNameOnly Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

Sometimes I wonder if maybe nothing in the culture has really changed at all and it just feels different to me because I'm older now and paying attention to politics more than I used to. Then I'm confronted with strong evidence that no, it's not all in my head, something important really has changed in recent years.

The most recent such thing: Cyberchase. Cyberchase is a children's show that airs on PBS Kids that premiered in 2002. I have fond memories of it and it was probably the only PBS show that I was still willing to watch as a child even after I figured out how TV remotes worked and discovered Nickelodeon.

Cyberchase is focused on exposing children to mathematical concepts in a way that is entertaining enough to hold their attention and presented at a level they can grasp. The way each episode works is that the villain, Hacker, tries to hack the Motherboard (the AI that controls the computers that run "Cyberspace", i.e. the Internet) in some way every episode and three kids, Matt, Jackie, and Inez (ages 9-11) have to thwart him. Along the way, they learn about some mathematical concept that helps them stop Hacker.

My favorite episode is Season 2 episode 10, "Raising the Bar," which is about bar graphs. It has stuck in my memory all this time because it blew my child mind when I saw it the first time, and also because I think its lesson is one of the most important for everyone to know. Hacker impersonates an exterminator and releases bugs in a cyberspace library instead of killing them. The children suspect this when they discover an unusual number of bugs in one section of the library, and they create a bar graph to show the library administrator. But Hacker presents his own bar graph that suggests the bug problem is minimal in every section, which calms the administrator. The kids are stumped until they realize that Hacker had changed the scale on the Y-Axis and deliberately left off the labels in order to make all the bars look small. They point this out to the library administrator, finally convince her, and save the day. To this day, I still think of this Cyberchase episode when I see a misleading data visualization.

One thing I love about Cyberchase is its faith in young children's ability to grasp complex concepts if they're presented well. It airs on PBS Kids, which has a target audience of children ages 2-8 but sometimes addresses concepts that are not taught to average students until high school. The list of topics goes beyond more basic concepts like multiplication and fractions and includes algebra, growth by doubling (i.e. exponential growth), data prediction, probability, symmetry, and 3D geometry. In its most ambitious episodes, the show targeted at 8-year-olds introduces game theory by having the kids find a solution for Nim, and introduces mathematical proofs by having them prove that it's not possible to make a triangle out of any three rods.

In a children's programming landscape dominated by shows that only prioritize entertainment and in a country whose school system often stunts and demoralizes its most curious and motivated students, Cyberchase is a gem. It introduces complex concepts to children at a level they can understand, and it does so while remaining genuinely entertaining and funny. Probably it has sparked a curiosity in many children that their basic arithmetic lessons couldn't, and helped them to grasp complex concepts more quickly when they encountered them years later in school. Probably it has played a role in encouraging more people to enter STEM fields and help us build the future. I know it did for me. In short, it's a great kids show, in my opinion one of the best ever.

...Well, it was, anyway. The focus of Cyberchase has shifted since its inception in 2002. All of the episodes I've listed so far have been from the show's first 5 seasons, which aired from 2002-2007 and were the ones most focused on math lessons. In seasons 6-8 (2007-10), many of the episodes focused on uses of math in real-world contexts like sports and weather, still a very worthy topic IMO but less rigorous than the concept-heavy topics in the earlier seasons. After season 8 ended in 2010, the series when on a three year hiatus and returned with a new director (J. Meeka Stuart replaced Brandon Lloyd) for season 9 in 2013. This is where the focus of the series really shifted. In the first episode, "An Urchin Matter," the kids save a kelp-bed ecosystem by releasing the sea otters that Hacker has captured because the sea otters are a keystone species that keeps the ecosystem balanced by eating sea urchins. In the second episode, they build a bunch of solar panels to light a skate park after Hacker's minions sabotage the power plant. In the third, they need to clear a giant trash heap that threatens to break through a certain cybersite's dome.

I'm sure you've noticed the pattern. The goal of the new Cyberchase, under the direction of Stuart, is no longer primarily to teach kids math. Its goal is to teach kids to be environmentalists. You can look at all the episode titles on the list and see that from season 9 onward every episode is about environmentalism.

There's still some math content. The solar panel episode, for example, has several moments where the kids multiply two numbers together to decide how many solar panels they need. Here's the first such moment, and the second. But in the first scene, one of the characters just says the answer, and in the second, one of them literally uses a calculator. There's no explanation of how to multiply numbers together, and no deeper exploration of the topic. One could argue that the focus of this episode is multiplication, but it sure feels like a shoehorned-in afterthought to me. Compare that scene to this one from Season 1 episode 19 that actually explains how to multiply.

I watched other episodes of season 9 while researching this post and everything I saw is like this. They use some kind of math concept somewhere but don't really explain, and they quickly move on to get back to the environmentalism. It feels like the sort of thing you would do if you wanted to make a show about environmentalism but you were hired to make a show about math.

Later episodes seem to have gotten even lighter on the math. I watched all of season 11 episode 5 and there weren't even any moments like that, it was all about the kids building a wind mill.

A lot of the focus of new Cyberchase seems like relatively uncontroversial stuff about how recycling is good or invasive species are bad, and some of it is scientifically educational. Remarkably, I couldn't find any references to climate change or global warming. I don't agree with all of the messages, in particular I think its treatment of solar and wind energy is biased. But setting all that aside, my argument is not that environmentalism is bad or that kids shows about environmentalism are bad. My argument is that environmentalism is not what Cyberchase was supposed to be about. I would feel the same way if it was turned in a show dedicated to pushing a message I 100% agreed with. There's no denying that when the show restarted in 2013, it was a different show what it was in 2010. Probably it will still encourage some kids to enter STEM fields, especially biology and environmental science. But what it won't do is teach them math concepts in a way that will help them actually succeed in those fields, especially the math-heavier ones like physics. It also probably won't be as effective at creating intellectual curiosity in kids like me, who was fascinated with logic puzzles like Nim, but wouldn't have been as interested in a story about building a wind mill.

Some might say that after 8 years of teaching math, Cyberchase was out of math topics and needed to pivot to something else. I completely disagree. It might have exhausted the purest math topics, but there's loads of math-adjacent topics it has never touched on. They could have had age-appropriate episodes about programming, logic gates, electricity, opinion surveys, genetics (despite the show's recent focus on biology, it never touches on genetics), space, optics, magnets, the law of supply and demand, airplanes, and so many more things. The new show is focused almost entirely on environmental science and a little biology and ignores physics, chemistry, computer science, astronomy, economics, and statistics. You might say that doing all of those things would be too much and it had to pick one subject, but the show seems to have exhausted all of the topics in environmental science a while ago and become repetitive. There are three different episodes about building gardens, for example (s10e3, s12e4, s13e10), and three about trash (s9e3, s12e1, s13e7). Also, I don't think repeating math topics would have been that bad. Approaching the same topic from a slightly different angle might help some kids grasp it better than they did the first time. This doesn't really apply to the message "trash is bad," which everyone can pretty much get the first time.

I guess that’s all I have to say. Cyberchase was amazing and now it’s just okay, and I’m sad.

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Bugs, Suggestions, Small Comments, And Site News

DinoInNameOnly Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed 1yr ago

Can comment scores please be hidden for the first 24 hours like they were on Reddit? I think having scores visible immediately can change how people react to a comment (in particular, it can encourage dogpiling or 'ratio-ing' someone who has expressed an unpopular viewpoint) and I'm really worried that this has the potential to shift the tone and composition of this community over time.

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Bugs, Suggestions, Small Comments, And Site News

DinoInNameOnly Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed 1yr ago

Is there any technical constraint making us stick to 10k characters for comments like on Reddit? I think the way we use this community means that long comments are really common and are actually the sort of thing we want to encourage. I think 15k or 20k might be better if it's just a config change. Especially since I don't think we have the functionality to lock the top-level comment so people can only reply to the full comment the way we used to.

(I just ran up against the 10k limit for a comment I posted in the CWR and had to trim it.)

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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

DinoInNameOnly Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed 1yr ago

There's tons of protest music now, just like there's tons of all other kinds of music now. There's so much music being made now that it's not possible to keep track of it all. The question isn't "why isn't anyone making protest music?" it's "why isn't protest music very popular?" My take is that in such a hyper-competitive environment, nothing reaches the level of popularity required for the average Magusoflight to be aware of it except the most hyper-optimized pop music.

A few examples:

"I Will Not Be Leaving Quietly" by Five Times August
"Welcome to the Revolution" by Hi-Rez and Jimmy Levy
"F Biden 2" by Burden
"Am I The Only One" by Aaron Lewis

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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

DinoInNameOnly Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed 1yr ago

Average Twitch viewership increased by around 80% from 1.4M to 2.5M between February 2020 and April 2020. It never really went back down. In September 2022, it's still around 2.5M. I think a lot of people dramatically shifted their day-to-day habits during the lockdowns and never went back.

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Bugs, Suggestions, Small Comments, And Site News

DinoInNameOnly Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed 1yr ago

I think maybe they meant to add a count of how many children a comment has, like it does on Reddit

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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

DinoInNameOnly Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed 1yr ago

Do you have kids? I think that's the thing that can cause more friction. For example, what do you do if your ten year old girl comes home from school and says she's a boy now? Not talking about politics isn't really an option anymore.

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Bugs, Suggestions, Small Comments, And Site News

DinoInNameOnly Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed 1yr ago

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[META] Out Of The Frying Pan, Into A Different Frying Pan

DinoInNameOnly Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed 1yr ago

I’d be more comfortable contributing money if I was confident it would be spent responsibly. Some kind of regular financial report or other kind of transparency would go a long way towards that.

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[META] Out Of The Frying Pan, Into A Different Frying Pan

DinoInNameOnly Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed 1yr ago

I think it would be good to also mention that we have a long backlog of development tasks and we welcome volunteer developers who support our mission.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

DinoInNameOnly Wow, imagine if this situation was reversed 1yr ago

Any attempt to project the current political-cultural divide further back than maybe like 1950 at the very earliest always seems like a tortured version of Whig history to me. The idea that the Protestant Reformation was somehow the same movement as the modern movement that supports same-sex marriage and gender theory as core values is so absurd that I'm not even sure how to respond.