In Paul Fussell’s book on class (I think), he says that people are really worried about differentiating themselves from the class immediately below them, but largely ignorant of the customs and sometimes even existence of the classes above them. When I found SSC, and then The Motte, and stuff like TLP, I was astonished to find a tier of the internet I had had no idea even existed. The quality of discourse here is . . . usually . . . of the kind that “high brow” (by internet standards) websites THINK they are having, but when you see the best stuff here you realize that those clowns are just flattering themselves. My question is, who is rightly saying the same thing about us? Of what intellectual internet class am I ignorant now? Or does onlineness impose some kind of ceiling on things, and the real galaxy brains are at the equivalent of Davos somewhere?
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In terms of generalists intelligently discussing general topics, I think there's a visible quality gap between the discourse here and the ACX commentary section, and, since in my three or so attempts to comment on the blog many years ago I never got anyone to respond to me whereas baiting some people into engagement on the Motte is trivial, that gap has probably been around for a while. I'm not aware of anything significantly above that on the internet for general discourse, but if you simply want raw displays of computational power and well-trained neural nets no matter the topic, it is hard to compete with Math Overflow comment sections (or, if you find the leveraging of domain knowledge to be "cheating", the same demographic could be found in a more immature stage over at AoPS back in the days; no idea how it looks nowadays).
I've always been pretty unimpressed with the blog commentariat. Getting engaged with there, as far as I can tell, is mostly a function of posting quickly enough because Scott often engages with comments for a few hours after posts which draw more interests to comments he touches and being a known entity there. Whatever quality that causes people here to care what aella has to say seems greatly amplified there and perhaps that is contributing to my, relative to this place, low opinion of them.
the old blog had good comments, substack comments seem to be a notch down
The current blog still has some good comments. I think a couple of Scott's "Highlights From the Comments ..." collection posts have recently highlighted higher quality than the latest AAQC threads on the Motte. As an additional plus, the range of topics covered is more versatile than the Motte, which is mostly just CW politics.
However, there are more low-effort posters that makes signal-to-noise ratio worse, especially in Open Threads, and Substack comment UI is actively hostile.
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