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The current state of online politics discourse seems pretty dire to me. Here are forums I'm aware of:
TheMotte - often a bit too "assume that social conservatism is correct" and wordily show-offy for my taste, but it's a good forum, you can speak your mind without being banned.
X.com - engagement bait grifters, engagement bait grifters, engagement bait grifters... and the occasional rare actual worthwhile discussion.
/r/moderatepolitics - good, very surprisingly good for average Reddit censorship norms, but a bit slow.
/r/politicaldiscussion - used to be decent like 5 years ago but now has been overrun by typical Reddit TDS ("Drumpf will end all elections", etc...)
4chan /pol/ - basically useless, 95% literally mentally ill people, trolls, and maybe bots. Might as well engage with flat Earthers about astrophysics as engage with these people about politics.
Astral Codex Ten comments - can be interesting sometimes, but isn't mainly politics focused and the politics discussion seems to be be dominated by the same few people.
rDrama.net - is usually directionally right about politics, in my view, by the simple expedient of assuming that anyone who is very demonstratively committed to a given political ideology is likely worthy of ridicule, but of course not a forum for discussing policy in any depth, most of the time, and also unsurprisingly given the origin of the site, is as focused on trolling as on political analysis, lol.
/r/politics - TDS central, orange man bad 24/7.
/r/centrist - seems ok, but pretty TDS leaning.
/r/stupidpol, /r/redscarepod, etc... Dirtbag left, good for criticizing the establishment but also they tend to be Hamas apologists etc... basically mostly people who are still at the I hate America so anyone who fights America must be awesome stage.
debatepolitics.com - people yelling at each other, very slight step up from 4chan /pol/.
Like, there have to be some good forums I've missed, right? Billions of people are online, including hundreds of millions of Anglophones (I largely have no idea what the state of non-Anglophone political discussion is like). Is it really possible that only like 0.00001% of them are capable of having relatively moderate and rational (not that I've always been) political discussion?
I've been searching for good politics discussion forums for years. You'd think there would be more. What the fuck is going on?
Humans broadly don't want to hear political opinions that differ greatly from theirs. It's just not in our nature.
Themotte is genuinely the best I've seen by a long shot, even though it has tons of flaws.
Humans don't even want political opinions that differ greatly from ours to exist. In a democracy those opinions might spread to the median voter and then be imposed on us against our will, and even in an oligarchy or autocracy there's always the chance that they will persuade the leaders or inspire a revolt against the leaders and then be imposed on us against our will. The use of language to navigate intratribal factionalism is probably older than homo sapiens. It's really hard to treat a question dispassionately as an intellectual issue, rather than as a signifier of loyalties, when everything we think and feel screams that there might be too much at stake.
Consider LessWrong, possibly the most concentrated population of
high-functioning autistsintelligent high-decoupling people on the internet, people deliberately trying to learn how to better discuss issues rationally in an unbiased fashion, the sort of "hey, I see what the problem is" people that normies joke about: their main conclusion about politics was that anybody who wanted to apply their intellect to any other issue should talk about politics as little as possible in the process.If you want to apply your intellect to politics, though, where do you go? Well, here I am, I guess? I wish the place was more popular among thoughtful left-wing participants, and maybe there's some way to improve that, but in the meantime I'd rather be somewhere that often repels people with opposing views than somewhere that often expels them.
I think a more subtle issue (though I hesitate to call it a problem) here is that we also select for a particular subset of right-wing participants. Obviously anyone who's a Witch on one issue or another has reason to come to a place like this they won't be expelled from, but also there's a bit of strain between @Goodguy's claims of "assume that social conservatism is correct" and "wordily show-offy". At least 5 years ago, the modal Motte survey respondant was "ambivalent about religion, seeing it as a weak force for good", but that's reflective of a very peculiarly modern type of "conservative". At least in the US (also a modal Motte user characteristic in that survey), the modal social conservative is instead one of the 40% of Americans who would agree that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so". I know there are a number of faithful theists here, but in all the random discussions I've seen of anthropology and human genetics and so on I've never seen anyone jump in with the "no, it wasn't a parable, the first humans were created from clay 6kya" rebuttal that's a plurality belief among Americans. I'm not really interested in rehashing (from my perspective) that debate, but I hope that people are here who would be on the other side and are simply avoiding bringing it up for similar reasons, because that's still a huge and politically important mass of people, whom we can't avoid talking about, and whom I'd therefore like to occasionally be talking to.
The wording on that is kind of ambiguous. One could perfectly well read it as, “God brought about civilised man (through his control of natural processes) about 10,000 years ago when the first civilisations started appearing” and I would agree despite definitely not being a creationist.
Not really. That would be option 1.
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Wouldn't their alternative option of "Humans have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process" have been a better fit for your position?
What is the meaningful distinction between "this simulation was set up according to deterministic laws and then allowed to run for a trillion years to generate the current state" versus "this simulation instantiated the current state by simulating a trillion years of deterministic evolution in two seconds"?
If your reasoning accepts that we are not living in the base reality, as both Materialism and Theism appear to do, then a lot of the old arguments seem to lose their meaning. If one observes how these arguments evolved, this should not be surprising: both the theists and the atheists very clearly expected and even demanded a clockwork universe. Both were wrong.
In general? Hard to say; possibly none. But I'd also think both would fit pretty well into the "developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process" category, especially if the answer is "none". If there's no distinction between a Creator spending millions of years of time on hominids versus a Creator spending millions of years of simulation-time on hominids, and if the former would clearly qualify for that poll response, then Q.E.D.
In a philosophy where there is a duality between brains which obey material laws and immortal souls which are above them, though, wouldn't the simulation case be weird? The hundreds of thousands of people who just started existing mid-adulthood have a full life's worth of memories of things that never happened? If you're facing away from your kid when you start existing, you feel love for someone you've never really met?
Regardless, although I love a Simulationist thought experiment as much as the next nerd, but the "in their present form" answerers are probably not picturing a Great Programmer here, and when you get into specifics then there are meaningful distinctions. The deterministic-laws-running case led to a state where, by 8000BC, large human subpopulations were on every continent; the in-their-present-form case, to about half of people who answered that, the story of a single pair of humans molded from the dust of the ground in the Garden of Eden is literally true.
I admit I'm surprised that fraction isn't higher. 20% of Americans are people who, despite thinking that there's a bunch of non-literal stuff in the Bible (presumably more than just the stories explicitly defined as parables), don't think the non-literal parts might include the bit about humanity being 6000ish years old?
The converse situation is even weirder, though. 6% of Americans don't identify as Christians and yet think the Christian Bible is "the actual word of God, to be taken literally"? Are they old-fashioned (mythical?) Satanists who believe in God but don't worship him? Are they Gnostics who think the Biblical God is real but is actually not the Supreme Being? I'm not aware of a ton of other options here. Maybe I just expect too much consistency from polling results in general.
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