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Where are the people smarter than us hanging out?

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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TM - The Motte

You are probably not selecting the smartest people on generalist online forums. You are selecting people who have online discussions, to begin with, then you further stratify those people into more groups based on discussion quality, and so on. You are also somewhat biased towards the discourse norms that are the most pleasant to you. Not to mention community vision, TM wants to talk, Sneerclub wants to sneer, not the same objective.

Mottes Strengths
  • The Motte in my experience does seem to be the strongest generalist contender of all online forums I have come across. Not in terms of sheer intelligence; but discourse norms, clarity of thought/argument, good faith, generality, and breadth of topics.

  • Discourse norms. Deserves repetition.

Mottes Weaknesses
  • Depth is the most apparent weakness of TM, I do sometimes have my Gell Mann Amnesia broken when I read about something I know a fair bit about.

  • Another weakness of TM is that I think a lot of people here are your typical "nerds", some of the things you see being said are only things that someone who never stepped foot outside of a classroom or lives in an extremely affluent bubble would say. Intelligent people with a working-class or non-academic background are obviously underrepresented. This is a weakness because if you are going to discuss the CW, you will end up discussing the real world and most of the people in it, it would serve you well knowing how THEY think.

  • Strong American tunnel vision as well on part of some of the posters (a lot of things don't make sense if you are only aware of the American talking points; see Urban planning, political correctness/ wokeism, the political spectrum, and its dimensions).

  • It is kind of ironic that for a community of programmers, TM settled for a fork of rDrama. This might be a passion issue but raises some questions nonetheless. TM isn't hackernews but TM isn't /r/redscarepod either. This point is probably not worth thinking much about, I am sure the alternatives/tradeoffs were considered. Ultimately it's an optics thing.

  • Skews older. Culture is moving too fast to not have enough smart young people taking part in the CULTURE war discussions. I am surprised at the number of people who don't use social media in this blog or have no idea of the current memespace developments even though social media is the defining feature of our times culture. Yes, I am aware that the discourse norms are discriminating against them heavily.

Passion Issue

One of my smartest friends (restricting anecdotes to peers because I know of their habits, can't really tell you if my Math Professor uses Reddit) is doing a Ph.D. in CS at a top university in Canada and had 8 relatively well-cited publications by the time he was done with his master's. He does not discuss any abstract topics, let alone highly contentious CW ones at a high level, his opinions are normie opinions at best. Likewise for all the other "smart" people I know.

I am yet to meet anyone who holds opinions that are as well-defended and coherent as those you would find on the motte. So there is a strong confounder of "people who actually put in the effort to think and form opinions on a certain set of topics, and then write about them to strangers online!" that you need to be aware of when making that judgment. That tendency might correlate with intelligence, but I wouldn't posit that correlation is strong. Intelligence is more of a precondition than a corollary.

So be sure you know exactly WHAT you are looking for.

It is kind of ironic that for a community of programmers, TM settled for a fork of rDrama. This might be a passion issue but raises some questions nonetheless. TM isn't hackernews but TM isn't /r/redscarepod either. This point is probably not worth thinking much about, I am sure the alternatives/tradeoffs were considered. Ultimately it's an optics thing.

I was around the development group more when the choice was made to settle on rDrama. There are indeed a lot of other forum systems out there, some of which are using more sophisticated technology. But if you really dig into them, virtually all of them are one-person projects that have never had any significant contributions from anyone other than the original creator, have never been proven on a high-traffic site, particularly with mega-threads like we do and probably at least a few active attackers, and have basically no thought put into proper moderator tools or anti-spam. At least a few of them are also actively hostile to anything non-woke - see the Lemmy slur filter scandal.

rDrama may not be the best designed system out there, but it's at least okay, is open-source in the form that actually serves production traffic, is reasonably well-supported, has some decent mod tools that were straightforward to expand, and has been cooperative with us.

my god the lemmy thing was pathetic. Hadn't seen it before.

"We have made our policy clear on this topic, and we are not going to change it. So there is no point arguing about it, fuck off nazibigot!"

"we have changed our policy on this topic, the slur filter is now entirely optional"

Yup. Even though they did eventually make it directly configurable by the forum admins after all, would you really want to be downstream of a team that says things like that? Who knows what they're gonna do next?