This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of August 25, 2025
Contributions for the week of September 1, 2025
Contributions for the week of September 8, 2025
Okay, Chuck. Another Fine Mess You've Gotten Us Into.
- "Way back in the 90s, there was a popular freakout about video games making young men into killers."
Contributions for the week of September 15, 2025
@kky:
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Game theory problems only emerge at scale. Smaller communities don't suffer from them nearly as much for this reason. I believe in the capability of exceptional individuals, humanity has advanced thanks to great people/'giants', the mediocre masses add very little value.
I also happen to have reverse engineered some of these dynamics, and probably better than 99% of researchers, for I have solutions that I don't see anyone else talk about directly. Granted, Jordan Peterson wrote a book warning about excessive order, but I don't think he realizes that he's mathematically correct in warning against that. And do you know that the definition we use for "rational agent" is one which always seeks its own advantage? If our ideal for how one ought to think is completely void of good taste (like that definition is), then we will run into problems which didn't exist in the past because good taste used to protect against it.
How do you get somebody to do 1000$ worth of labour, without paying them, and without coercion? It seems impossible mathematically, and yet, my grandma has sometimes done this, just because she enjoys helping people. By making people more intelligent, but less human, less things become possible. General intelligence might conflict with instincts, as learning logical thinking is all about suppressing your natural biases, instincts, emotions, etc.
Accurate world models aren't bad per se, but they're not sufficient. Being completely objective also puts you at a high risk of becoming a nihilist.
Of course our coordination is getting worse. We're also becoming more lonely despite being "more connected" than ever. The reasons are more obvious the less educated one is.
That's probably the only reason this community in particular can maintain some level of integrity in its core mission, in fact.
On the other hand, the internet means EVERYTHING social happens 'at scale' now.
Yeah. And the only big coordination 'win' that we've achieved lately is Bitcoin and cryptocurrency allowing trustless, decentralized transaction of currency.
And we've even turned THAT achievement into a casino full of rugpulls and fraud.
The internet does not have to mean that, which is why the old internet did not mean that. As with the disappearance of borders, nationalism, "gatekeeping", male-only spaces, churches, etc. the problem is the modern mindset that everything should be interconnected. If you model the world as a big graph, and calculate the connectivity of said graph and call it X, then you will realize that different values of X leads to different mechanics, and that large values of X create problems that smaller values of X do not. The idea that more information is better, is actually wrong, and intellectual circles have yet to realize this. All of this is probably downstream of the facts that information can be sold, and that more information makes automation easier.
The simple solution is both separating things, and considering things as seperated. The first is achieved by decentralization (and you've already realized this yourself), and the latter is achived by getting rid of pathological associative thinking (if somebody calls you an evil nazi because you support borders, they're making the association borders -> nationalism -> nazi germany -> evil). Mental maturity is broadly speaking the complete opposite. For instance, if your comment makes me angry, then this is an issue with myself rather than with you.
People who fight evil will create mental associative knots, and call it "Them", "(((them)))", "sin", "nazism", "communism", etc. and ruthlessly attack everything within greater and greater distances. For instance, somebody might attack anime because "anime -> school-girl characters -> pedophilia -> child abuse -> evil".
The idea that guns kills people, and that Google should be punished for indexing illegal websites, are both failures of proper separation, structually and psychologically. This cognitive error is thus responsible for censorship, people being forced to take sides in issues that they aren't interested in, and things like corruption (for corruption is when two entites which cannot benefit themselves engage in an agreement to benefit eachother, thus bypassing a defensive structural design).
An alternative method still possible today is embedding secrecy and separation inside a connected, judgemental structure. This requires encryption between structures such that the shared structure they exist within cannot read the message (Encryption stops the flow of information in some directions, so it separates). So like how an app can have E2E encrypted messages that even the app cannot access, you could make a website that your host of choice cannot access. This will go away if encryption is made illegal, or if one is forced to give the keys to the authorities.
You cannot 'win' unless you own the outer layer. If you have full access over your computer, then you can stop an app inside it from spying on you. If the government have full access over your computer, then it doesn't matter how secure the apps you use are, they can simply look at the screen or read the keyboard.
You also cannot have your cake an eat it too. If you have privacy, then criminals will have it as well. It must apply to both the very best people and the very worst. It's completely binary, you either have 100% privacy or 0% privacy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link