TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
No bio...
User ID: 616
What makes great literary figures? Is it their fancy glasses? Maybe writing five million words? Is it their alcoholism and penchant for sarcasm? The jury is still out.
What we do know is that from the stoa and Aristotle's Lyceum in Athens all the way to the Inklings which produced Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and other great works, famous writers that shake the foundational values of their time need a group. They need a coordination mechanism to push them to become more ambitious, skilled, and disciplined.
We have many aspiring writers here. Many brilliant, clear thinking, skeptical minds who love to discuss relevant topics of the times, and try to work out ways to improve our ideas. People who hope to refine our understandings and abstractions, to ultimately help guide us out of the spiritual crisis of modernity.
After reading @urquan's recent post about the pointlessness of the Motte, my thoughts immediately jumped to defend this place, this bastion for witches who are ruthlessly curious, and tragically fall through the cracks of polite society. However, I realized that he had a point. We could be doing more as a community, we could aim higher.
What is the point of the Motte? We have accumulated a staggering amount of human capital here - I'm convinced we have many brilliant contributors, and probably far more lurkers who, with the right push, could become a massive positive force in the fight to understand the human condition. Are we here simply for infotainment, as some have suggested? Or can we coordinate to make a difference in the world?
I'd argue the latter. To that end, I'm putting out a call for a writing group formed of Mottizens. Ideally we get four to five members who are ambitious, and who want to write serious non-fiction essays similar to posts in the Culture War thread. If you have a blog outside of the Motte where you post that's great, or if you just want to increase the quality of post and discussion on this site, that's great too.
Due to the nature of this forum, the group requires strict anonymity. We'll have to rely on an honor code at first, but there must be no doxxing or sharing of identities outside of the meetings. The plan right now would be to coordinate through discord, and have one meeting per month, for 1.5 to 2 hours. This meeting will take place over voice chat, and you will be required to submit one piece every month. We will critique the submissions and give each other guidance on how to improve our writing.
If you're interested, please reply to this post, or PM me. If I get a large amount of interest, I will be selecting for prior reputation and contributions to the Motte, as that's one of the only markers available to me of someone's talent and/or discretion. If you desperately want to join but haven't contributed much, send me a sample of your writing.
In an ideal scenario if we get far too many folks interested, I'd be happy to help others coordinate similar groups. That's a good problem to have.
I'd like once more to emphasize the opportunity we have here at the Motte. It's rare to find so many intelligent and clear thinking people in one place. If you think the modern world is deeply flawed, and care about truth and good solutions to the problems our world faces, I urge you to take action and contribute something to the collective human race's efforts to correct our course.
Regardless of what you decide, it's an honor to be a part of this collection of miscreants as always. Remember that enough smart people coordinated together to solve problems can change the world. It may be the only way the world changes.
Stay strange, stay skeptical, and remember to seek light over heat.
In an Infinite Loops podcast episode with Venkatesh Rao, Art of the Gig, the discussion revolves around the importance of courage and taking risks in order to find meaning in life and business.
They talk about the gig economy, and argue that one of the most important things for meaning in life and business is having the courage and nerve to take risks.
Rao explains how many people start out with naive optimism, then get punched in the face by life and don't know how to regain agency. Agency and using it creates meaning, according to him. He casually dismisses the meaning crisis as a failure of nerve and a lack of courage on the part of young adults. I could probably write a whole piece on extended adolescence.
On the other hand, he does acknowledge that many people are so overburdened by life's traumas that they may not even reach the naive optimism stage. Even if they do, some people get lucky and are never challenged, whereas others get screwed and are thrown out of the economic system. This division looms especially large in the developing world.
These conditions lead to a bifurcated system where, as Rao calls it, the "tragically lucky" go through life with naive optimism, but near the end of their life have a crisis because they never learned to deal with challenges or change themselves to have more agency. This archetype would be the guy who comes from a rich family and "fails upward," just collecting titles and promotions without thinking deeply or having to engage with the darker side of the world. The tragedy here is that they never have a chance to truly grow or develop as people, because they never have a real opportunity.
On the other hand, those who deal with adversity when young, or those who don't have strong models in their life who display courage and a sense of agency, either can't have a positive viewpoint on their lives due to trauma, or enter the workforce/college/wherever, fail badly, then feel cheated and can't work up the nerve to take another risk.
These two life experiences are so distinct that they're almost perfectly mismatched for people to understand each other. I don't think it neatly aligns with different political groups, but I'm sure many are likely to make that comparison.
So the question becomes - how do we set up a society in which people can routinely take small risks or deal with small amounts of adversity, and learn to become more agentic in steps as they grow?
Unfortunately, our modern society seems designed to do the opposite of this training for courage. Children are increasingly coddled, their parents' minds befuddled with safetyism and the precautionary principle. In the Western world especially, people are presented with one track in life. Typically, this track starts with schooling, which goes directly into a career, dovetailing neatly into retirement the moment you turn [insert cultural age of retirement here].
People have a narrative where they either stay on the track their whole lives and are successful, or they fall off at some point and are failures. Risk-taking becomes incredibly difficult because the perceived risk of getting off the beaten path becomes much larger. The standard PMC careerist feels that if they take even small risks, they risk throwing their life into disarray. Learned helplessness and non-courageous behaviors become instilled, in my view, due to early-stage trauma, which makes this process even more weighted against risk.
With these priors, we come to an interesting problem. On the one hand, we need to help kids have less trauma and not learn as many passive or non-agentic behaviors. Reducing trauma is often a stated goal of many safetyist maximizers and those who hold a torch for the precautionary principle.
However, we've also got to figure out how to challenge kids. It seems that the artificial hoops we have them jump through in grade school, then the workforce and/or college, don't have an even enough distribution. A lot of this probably has to do with the narrative associated with school and the one-track life I discussed above.
I'm in favor of having high school include some sort of working apprenticeship, and I'd even support time being split 50/50 with half of the time having kids be in a working environment, the other half in the classroom. This inclusion of work would solve a lot of the problems with hyperactive kids that can't learn in a classroom environment. It would also make more well rounded adults, as they'd have a taste of the 'real world' while still being in a relatively safe environment. The big issue would be getting businesses on board and making sure there aren't any legal issues - parents would be a nightmare here I'm sure.
We could also create a sort of bank of school years, or at least make it more culturally acceptable to go back to school. Have kids graduate at 16 and enter the workforce, with two years of schooling 'banked' in case they fail out. Maybe make it mandatory before 30 so there isn't a sharp social distinction. The extra two years could focus on business skills or help students that can't carve out a place in the economy find their niche.
I've tried to be as charitable as possible in this piece, and I'd ask commenters do the same. I firmly believe that one of the reasons this topic stays muddled is the constant refrains around fragility and people being 'snowflakes' or whatever the term de jour happens to be. I don't see how harsh language and derision will help solve this problem, it seems far more based on structural issues in our schooling or overall narratives, rather than a personal failing of individuals. I'm open to disagreement here as a separate point, of course.
It’s been pointed out recently that the topics discussed in the Culture War thread have gotten a bit repetitive. While I do think the Motte has a good spread on intellectual discussion, I’m always pushing for a wider range (dare I say diversity?) of viewpoints and topics in the CW thread.
I was a lurker for years, and I know that the barrier between having a thought and writing a top level comment in the CW thread can loom large indeed. Luckily I’m fresh out of inspiration, and would love to hear thoughts from folks about effortposts they want to write but haven’t gotten around to.
This of course applies to regulars who post frequently as well - share any and all topics you wish were discussed in the CW thread!
For all those who are new since the site move, or simply missed it the first time around, I wanted to point out a charming piece of Motte history, a process which made me pay attention to this ragtag community and eventually join. The Doge process, while controversial at the time with many nay-sayers, has aged quite well I'd argue. Well enough to have us survive through a full site move, at the least.
I'll just be copying @ZorbaTHut's post from this reddit link. Everything below is his writing. Please enjoy.
We did this crazy thing to pick some new mods. Tl;dr: right now, we're thinking it was extremely successful. Strongly recommended for anyone running their own community.
Please welcome (in the order that they happened to accept invitations) /u/ymeskhout
, and /u/Gen_McMuster
as new moderators! I think many of you have already seen them step into the weird arena that is this community, with roughly the expected amount of success ("a lot, but some weird gotchas") and I'm hoping they stick around for a while.
Note that we may be recruiting up to three more mods, but they didn't answer the original message, so I'll pester them again in a day or two; don't be surprised if a few more people show up. (My goal here is to end up overstaffed for once.)
The Doge Process
Because I know some people will be very interested in the details . . . (non-doge stuff below this, scroll down if you don't care about the mod process)
Here's the message I sent out to the second-round people (which I think was the best-written and still included the weird meta-picking content).
Greetings, nominee! You have been recruited by /r/TheMotte to elect new moderators to maintain and improve the community!
You may or may not have seen our most recent meta post. The short version is that we are planning to recruit new moderators and trying to find a good way to do it. Our current plan is a series of nomination rounds, where people in each round nominate the people in the next round, ending with a group of potential new moderators.
Existing Mods
Round 1
Round 2 <-- YOU ARE HERE
Round 3
New Mods
And you have been chosen to help!
The eventual goal is to recruit mods who will be good at implementing TheMotte's foundation, which I will reproduce here:
The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs. It is to be a place for people to examine the beliefs of others as well as their own beliefs; it is to be a place where strange or abnormal opinions and ideas can be generated and discussed fairly, with consideration and insight instead of kneejerk responses.
Your goal is to nominate people who will be good at nominating the aforementioned new mods.
I can't force you to choose people based on this, but I'd ask you to keep it in mind, regardless of whether you (or your nominees) agree with it. That said, you're welcome to use whatever reasoning you like for your choice.
Send nominations to me as a private message (such as a response to this message). Please nominate between two and four people. If you can't think of that many, feel free to nominate fewer. If you really want to nominate more, you're welcome to give it a shot; include your best justification for why you need to nominate more and I'll handle it in whatever way I consider reasonable.
Loose deadline is in 72 hours from when this message was sent.
Some notes:
You're not required to help with this! If you're uninterested in participating, in either this round, upcoming nomination rounds, and/or the potential mod position itself, let me know and I won't bother you again. If you merely think you're not suitable for it, please give it your best anyway.
Nominees must have posted on /r/TheMotte, not currently be banned from it, and be somewhat active on Reddit. You aren't allowed to nominate yourself. You are allowed to nominate people from previous or even current rounds. Being active in this round does not guarantee inclusion in future rounds; every round is separate. Similarly, if you've done this before, that's OK! You got nominated again. Welcome back.
"Good at choosing mods" and "good at being a mod" are probably different skillsets, correlated but not directly linked.
Note that there are a fixed number of slots available for the next round and it's significantly less than the number of nominations available. Nominations will be evaluated in order of popularity, so if you know someone is nominating your #1 pick, you should also nominate them to push them up the choice order. More votes for someone is a useful signal.
As soon as I've finished sending these, I'll add everyone in this round to a Reddit chat group so you can discuss as you see fit. You're not required to use it and you can leave at any time. If you're a jerk in it, I'll kick you; this does not remove your ability to nominate people, but if you're too much of a jerk, you might end up banned from /r/TheMotte. Please don't do that. If you rejected the invite, but have now changed your mind, let me know and I'll re-invite you.
The results of this aren't binding and I have reserve full right to tweak nominations as I see fit, up to and including cancelling the entire thing, but I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't think it was promising.
So:
Have at it!
For each round, I was targeting 20 people, and asked people to send in 2 to 4 nominees (except for the very first mod-only round; because we have so few mods, I asked people for between 4 and 10 nominees.) My plan was to order nominees strictly by vote count and accepted every vote-count group that didn't put us over the 20-person target, then fill any remaining slots with a random sample of whichever people were left over. In each case, we had about ten people with two votes or more, and about twenty people with exactly one vote, so practically speaking this meant each nomination was roughly an additive-stacking 50% chance to show up in the next round.
Each round we had about four people who didn't respond or participate in any way. Annoyingly, exactly one person bothered to send me a message asking to be withdrawn, the rest just ignored it. C'mon, people. This did lead to one weird quirk, which is that someone didn't respond in the first round but also weren't using Reddit at the time; they got nominated for the second round, and I decided to give them an "extra" space, totaling 21 people in that round, just in case they came back to Reddit.
They did come back to Reddit! They also didn't participate at all. Welp.
I left us room to override the public's decision, and I ran each round past the mods before starting it. There were a few times we were dubious about a choice, but we never actually used the override power; also I'm pretty sure none of the people we were uncertain about actually ended up participating.
Here's anonymized info on how many people got nominated for which set of rounds:
Rounds 1, 2, and 3: 6
Rounds 1 and 2: 4
Rounds 1 and 3: 2
Rounds 2 and 3: 3
Round 1 only: 8
Round 2 only: 9
Round 3 only: 9
I tried to make a Sankey diagram out of this and couldn't come up with something that looked good. YMMV.
I had a bunch of worst-case scenarios in mind, for example:
Nobody bothers to reply
People just troll the chat
A few people collude to stack votes so they can get their favored candidate chosen
It turns into a simple popularity contest, no real information is gained
Absolutely none of these happened. Chat was fantastic and several people asked me if this could be made a long-term thing. Unfortunately, Reddit's chat interface is absolutely terrible for large groups; also, none of us have the bandwidth to manage a Discord server. Luckily there's an existing unofficial-but-affiliated Discord server and if you'd like to talk to similar-minded people in realtime, you should go there, it's a good group of people. (Note: This is affiliated with this subreddit but not managed by us, nor does it share our exact ruleset; read the rules and get a feel for the community before dropping controversial knowledge bombs or you're going to get banned super-fast and the admin will get annoyed at me and I will then get annoyed at you. Also I ran this paragraph past the admin before posting it so he knows you're coming. He awaits.)
With a little bit of prompting, the last round turned into a bunch of people proposing candidates, looking them over, and discussing them; some people were nominated who were in the chat and they wrote up little summaries of why they think they would be a good or a bad choice. It was all pretty great.
The tl;dr is that if you have a community that is anything like this one, I strongly recommend using this system, or one derived from it, for mod recruitment. I think we ended up with a set of people which are better choices than we would have come up with on our own. It took a lot of time on my behalf but I think it's worthwhile.
You are welcome to steal parts of the note I posted above; if you've got any questions, feel free to ask!
The Experimental Bare Link Repository
Hey, you know the Experimental Bare Link Repository? The one that's been experimental for like eight months now?
Yeah, sorry. Kinda dropped the ball on that one. It is no longer the Experimental Bare Link Repository and is now just the Bare Link Repository.
Locking Your Own Posts
We've had a few people make really long multipart posts and grumble that people are responding to the first half and not the second half, which then bumps the second half down in New sorting and is overall just a big pain. We've got a fix! A really hacky fix!
Write your entire post series in Notepad or some other offsite medium. Make sure that they're long; comment limit is 10000 characters, if your comments are less than half that length you should probably not be making it a multipost series.
Post it rapidly in response to yourself like you would normally.
For each post except the last one, go back and edit it to include the trigger phrase automod_multipart_lockme.
This will cause AutoModerator to lock the post.
You can then edit it to remove that phrase and it'll stay locked. This means that you cannot unlock your post on your own, so make sure you do this after you've posted your entire series. Also, don't lock the last one or people can't respond to you. Also, this gets reported to the mods, so don't abuse it or we'll either boot you or just lock you out of the feature; this is specifically for organization of multipart megaposts.
I wish there was a better way to do this, but we'll see how this works.
I'll add it to the thread starter in a few weeks in the hopes that someone tries it out before then (uh, if I haven't, someone remind me.)
That's All, Folks
Standard meta thread stuff: say hi and ask how we're doing! Chat with the new mods! Order beer! Don't get Coronavirus! If you do, talk to a researcher to figure out how it managed to transmit itself across the Internet!