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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3103 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.

I think came across SSC when somebody mentioned it somewhere in a podcast in 2019. I was pretty hooked on the list of most reads blogs at the time and kept reading the new blogs from Scott for a bit and slowly made my way to the SSC subreddit en then to the Motte, it's been years since I actually frequently read the blog itself by now. I know a fair bit about rationalism through osmosis by reading a bit of SSC and lurking on the Motte for years, but I've never identified with the movement. To be honest, I never found any rationalist except Scott himself to be an interesting read. I checked out stuff like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Lesswrong, Gwern, etc. a couple of times when it was mentioned on SSC but I never understood the appeal.

The first post I read was "The Toxoplasma of Rage", probably in 2015. I'm almost certain I came across when it was linked in a comment in the subreddit /r/TumblrInAction. I attended my first SSC meetup four years later.

My first and last serious relationship > The Red Pill > the freshly published Untitled, plus Radicalizing the Romanceless > the rest of Slate Star Codex > HPMOR, The Motte, some Tumblrs. Nowadays I find Kiwi Farms more to my liking, though.

Around 2018, someone linked me to a few SlateStarCodex essays (IIRC In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization and I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup). Pure bliss. I spent days binging Scott essays. I'd finally found someone who thought in the same idiom I did, after a whole life feeling like a space alien.

Post a few years lurking /r/SSC and /r/TheMotte, here I am. This is despite me disagreeing with Rats on most things on the object level.

Discovered HPMOR and subsequently Lesswrong During the summer after my 1L year, so this would have been 2012.

It was timely, I was struggling with where I was going to aim my career and life goals and having an epistemic crisis (I had no idea how to figure out what I wanted to do, because I felt unable to accurately judge the information I was given). I absolutely credit the Sequences and the other figures in there for helping me figure out my life enough to get where I am now, quite comfortable with my current position. And it eventually helped introduce me to the people who are ACTUALLY part of my (Red-tinged grey) tribe, and I feel accepted there.

I was rat-adjacent for a while, now at best I'm adjacent to the rat-adjacent b/c there's a current in the ratsphere that is kind of toxic to anyone who isn't neurodivergent in a very specific way. Most humans are just not going to be able to adopt their way of thinking, and exposure to it can have very negative effects in their life.

The Effective Altruists got out of hand for a while there and some of them blew up in ways that I considered foreseeable. Let's not speak of the Zizians.

So I'm happy to remain on the periphery because the skills they teach are extremely valuable, their insights are useful, but many of them seem completely lost when it comes to applying those to effect positive change in the real world, and they often actively oppose those who are effecting (mostly) positive change.

My first comments at LessWrong were around the end of 2012, early 2013, though I'd been lurking and reading through the Sequences for most of a year before that. I don't think I commented at SSC proper until late spring 2014. Probably entered the tumblr ratsphere in early 2016, though I was never the most active there.

I was aware of moreright, but I never commented over there and I don't think I'd have counted as a lurker.

I think my first exposure to the ratsphere was someone linking the Sword of Good back when it was on Yudkowsky's own site, intending it as a send-up of both Ayn Rand and Terry Goodkind, and kinda being impressed. Clicking around got me to the then-early-Sequences, which hit me a lot more. I'd been through the standard philosophy and sociology courses, and they'd seemed like they were in the process of vanishing up their own tail ends. For all of his more esoteric claims, Yudkowsky could put together a much more compelling argument for why it mattered, and how that relevance could be applied. And Yvain-nee-Scott was a good rejoinder to some of the broader claims.

((albeit not as much as the replication crisis would be to both of them over the next couple years))

Posting on LW turned to posting on SSC-the-site turned to posting on theMotte.

The earliest I clearly remember it is reading SSC on my breaks when I was teaching English in Korea in 2013. I was 24 years old then, and it was kind of my first exposure to serious current thought outside the left-liberal bubble. In those days I had a legit Tumblrina girlfriend; I felt like some of the things she believed were crazy, but I had no real idea of what else it was possible to believe. I think that's more or less how I started digging into the culture war.

Something I somewhat lament is that I've never gotten into top-level posting, even though I've wanted to; I think I have quite low argumentativeness. (There's probably a better name for this quality.) When I read something online that I disagree with, I just go, "Ah, interesting;" I don't have that urge to push back, correct, or give alternate perspectives. I think this is mostly just my personality, but also from engaging with bad-faith interlocutors when I was a teenager and concluding that Internet arguments are pointless. However, I also sometimes think that my failure to post is actually an indication that I don't pay much attention to or think much about the world around me.

But anyway, yeah, I've checked the Motte probably every day since it was created, with only very occasional interludes when I'm on a plane or something; and I was on the culture war subreddits way back when as well.

I think I have quite low argumentativeness. (There's probably a better name for this quality.)

High agreeableness?

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 would 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.

I initially thought the move was a mistake, but it was a sizable quality-of-life improvement to not have to worry about the sub being banned every time I saw a particularly spicy comment.

This is by far the best functioning Reddit clone I've seen

Calling it a clone is even wrong, as it's better than Reddit lol

A lot of that isn't just Zorba being sensible and incorporating a lot of feedback, but also Reddit actively backsliding.

I usually use both TheMotte and Reddit on my phone. They banned all the custom apps, or pay walled them. I use a modded Reddit apk, but the experience is just abysmal.

I use a modded Reddit apk, but the experience is just abysmal.

I recommend just using your mobile Web browser, with the "New Reddit" interface toggled off in your account settings.

It's only a matter of time until new Reddit becomes mandatory.

It's better than nothing, but mobile first design does have some advantages. I miss BaconReader and Apollo, Reddit should have bought those out and repurposed them, and not made their own bespoke abomination.

And the year-long Floyd-specific admin-motivated rule against promotion of violence. And everything that hit politicalcompassmemes. And the other cases where it was never clear exactly what motivated admins to intervene, it just happened.

And while I'm not impressed by the Joos-posting, I'll notice that the alternative at reddit was a poster getting AEO'd for merely looking like he was triple-parenthesising.

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.

If you don't care about the issue, feel free to not care about it, but your insistence that others shouldn't care about it either is bizarre. Throughout my time on here the discussion went from me always feeling like I'm on the back foot, to feeling like I've some chinks in the pro-trans side armor, to the current state where I can kind of understand how one might call it "almost no opposition" (it's not true, but I can understand). I'd imagine that chronicling the rise and fall of the trans movement might be worth it as a matter of historical social commentary, if nothing else, but for you the issue is not only "minor", it "was played out by the end of the last Bush administration". No matter the state we're currently in, we apparently always have been pre-ordained to be in it.

That's all beside the point anyway. The whole point of this place is to have civil conversations even when they aren't allowed on mainstream forums, and you're telling me I should just shrug off a gag order on my hobby horse, and accept it as not a big deal.

Admins constricting the Overton window are one thing, but the real value here is that you can speak without being shoved into a box by the other commenters the moment you open your mouth:

  • Question the consensus on trans issues? You’re a cuckservative bigot, maybe even a Russian shill.
  • Criticize Hamas or Palestine? Hasbara.
  • Say a conservative policy is good? You must want to kill all liberals.

I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. If there’s another space where people don’t instantly go for your throat the moment they spot "outgroup", I’d love to know. The Motte lets me post long comments that people actually read and respond to. Here, charity is the norm. On Reddit, it’s a punishable offense from all sides. Twitter is just a cesspool. Substack is dividing the community even more.

The whole time the subreddit was up, it is categorically true that places like /r/politicalcompassmemes, /r/4chan and /r/redscarepod had much more objectionable (to the admins) content than we had. The admins were most concerned about slurs and they have always been a bannable offense here when used against someone else.

The mods even confirmed directly that there was no ban coming immediately down the pipeline, it was purely theoretically pre-emptive in case things got worse, and in fact they didn’t, first because of the general anti-woke backlash and then because of Trump’s reelection.

Throughout my time on here the discussion went from me always feeling like I'm on the back foot, to feeling like I've some chinks in the pro-trans side armor, to the current state where I can kind of understand how one might call it "almost no opposition" (it's not true, but I can understand).

There were times when there were more pro-trans voices here, sure, but most people are clearly of the same opinion now as they were then (“it’s not real but it’s reasonable to be individually nice to trans people in your life”).

More comments

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.

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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