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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   999 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 10, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How long have you been around rationalist-adjacent spaces?

I found Scott in 2013 or 2014, possibly via LJ. I remember discussing "Universal Love Said the Cactus Person" with a friend IRL who brought it up and he previously had never mentioned reading SSC. Somewhere in there I found /r/SSC because in 2016 I saw a notice for a meetup taking place 5 minutes away from my house and didn't go because I found many people active in /r/SSC off-putting. I stopped paying close attention to Scott after the 2017 Kolmogorov entry. I remember /r/theMotte being created and then /r/SneerClub with the latter being distilled perfection of what I didn't like about so many /r/SSC posters to start with plus reddit overall. I guess that's about where I stopped paying close attention because it was only much later that I became aware of this site starting separately to escape reddit, the TW/schism hullaballo, and some other subsequent happenings.

Because I have a strong memory that works in strange ways, it's a bizarre feeling to recognize a few user names from ancient /r/SSC days (Zorba, Hlynka, gattsuru, etc.), or look into /r/SSC now and see a few users I dislike still plugging away, and realize I've been paying attention (or at least mildly aware) of their written output for a decade.

Probably since 2013-2014 or so, because I remember discussing the baby-eating aliens with the guy that left the company later.

Read SSC back in the late 2010s. Not sure how I got there. Then I think I found the Motte when Scott posted his Culture-War-Postmortem. That would be it, pretty much.

FWIW, I never paid attention to the SSC comment section. A comment section! That woulf have sounded unserious to me.

I think 2013 is a fair shout in my case, that was probably when I was in high school and accidentally stumbled onto LW or SSC. Can't recall which one came first, but the other must have followed shortly thereafter.

I imagine my initial encounter with The Motte would have been after 2015, since I don't seem to recall engaging in the Culture War threads on the SSC subreddit. I'm confident that I was a regular participant by 2017 when I was a few years into med school.

The greatest melancholy I feel is when I see the upvote or comment counts in the old CWR threads: you can tell we had a lot more people around. To this day, I'm not sure if the migration off of Reddit was entirely warranted, or if we could have managed to avoid the gaze of the Reddit Admins till the political climate changed. While the Motte is definitely in a healthy state, and the fears that we'd collapse to an unsustainably low population didn't materialize, Reddit did make it easier. We had plenty of people stumble across us following a link, or by checking someone's profile.

Are you suggesting a RETVRN?

I am unsure of whether or not that's warranted.

I think the reasons for Zorba planning an exodus were based in clear merit. We did attract the wrong kind of attention. It was better to leave on our own terms than scramble after the subreddit ended up quarantined.

I wouldn't be averse to us re-activating the sub, but I think that's an option best used in extremis. We're here, we're functional. The moderation tools are so much better. The Reddit experience, in general, is so much worse.

If we end up in a state where we don't have the active user base to justify our existence, that's about the only situation where I think dusting off /r/TheMotte truly becomes the obviously correct procedure.

The political situation was never bad enough to warrant an exodus, the admins were most upset about discussion of the trans thing which was comparatively minor.

I do think we should return. It was good for discoverability. At the same time I am of course grateful to Zorba and the others who created this place.

the admins were most upset about discussion of the trans thing which was comparatively minor.

There go 80% of my AAQCs...

That’s because it’s the easiest topic to grandstand on because it gets almost no opposition. Even our few trans posters have had very heterodox opinions on the subject, and everyone else (again, including the liberals and leftists) tends to be opposed to the standard libleft position on the subject.

Since 2011 or so. Someone linked a LW post in (IIRC) a thread on the xkcd forums I was reading, and I rabbit-holed.

I wouldn't be surprised if we have some people on here who were on the original extropians mailing list though.

About 11 years, after following a link to SSC from some other blog, though I wasn't aware of the culture war thread until the move to /r/theMotte.

Since 2019 January, I found Scot via econlib which I found when I was trying to see if there even was a thing as a Marxist economist, Scott was the only smart anti sjw dude I found and got myself in these spaces.

17 years. Summer and fall of 2008, I was searching for explanations of quantum mechanics because the textbook and everyone else's explanations were so goddamn confused, incomplete, and self-contradictory. Found Big-Yud's Quantum Physics sequence, which felt like the first time finding someone who had sane, coherent opinions on the matter. From there an easy step to the rest of the sequences, LW, and SSC.

~6-7 years. At some point /r/themotte was linked on /r/drama and I found it that way. God, I miss seriousposting on Drama.

My oldest LessWrong comment is from 2010. Some people (or was it just one?) on the TV Tropes forum kept linking to The Sequences to make points during discussions. This was around the time when Scott Alexander rose to prominence as Yvain, with classics such as "Beware Trivial Inconveniences", "The Least Convenient Possible World", "A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies", and "Eight Short Studies On Excuses". I followed him when he closed his Live Journal in favor of opening Slate Star Codex, and the rest is history.

  • Naruto fanfiction (circa 2010) → Harry Potter fanfiction → TVTropes fanfiction-recommendation pages → HPMOR (circa 2014) → Big Yud's Facebook page → Slate Star Codex

  • HPMOR → /r/rational → /r/themotte

Or something like that.

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