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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I can think of multiple hypotheses for why this would be the case, and I'm not entirely sure how to disentangle which are true and how much each contributes to this.
1: Center-right ideas are objectively true/better and therefore intelligent reflective people who listen to both sides and carefully consider them end up becoming center-right. Everyone immersed in the free expression of ideas eventually becomes center-right (or previously was already center-right) unless they are too stubborn to change their minds, so the only leftists remaining after enough time are mentally flawed in some way and that's why they leave. It's just selection effects: the people who want intelligent reasoned discussion are the same people who come to the correct conclusions on most topics. The only reason I'm suspicious of this idea is because it flatters my ego so much that I would probably believe it if it weren't true. Nevertheless I think this is at least part of the cause.
2: Leftist ideas are correlated with intolerance of wrongthink/ickiness for reasons orthogonal to correctness. For instance, certain people feel empathy for unfortunate seeming people more more innately, strongly, and viscerally than others. When they see a homeless stranger they feel the same way on the inside that you would if you saw your sibling in the same situation. When someone says "we should put mentally ill people in asylums" they feel the same anger that you would feel if someone literally broke into your parents home and tried to take them away to lock up. These people are more likely to be pathologically kind and fall for emotional rhetoric (thus becoming leftists) and more likely to become unhappy and disturbed in a place filled with wrongthink. Some of these people might be quite intelligent on an intellectual level and be capable of grasping complex ideas, and thus be initially drawn to this space, but doing so on certain topics hurts them psychologically. You take an otherwise intelligence person and put them in an emotionally charged and deeply unpleasant setting and they will leverage their intelligence to prioritize fixing the problem that is hurting them rather than seeking truth. I definitely think part of this is true (which is also why you see more leftist women, who are more emotionally driven on average), but am not sure what the magnitude is.
3: Everyone is more comfortable with group-think. It's pleasant to agree with people and have other people echo your ideas and write long essays dunking on stupid people, and say things that you already believed but more eloquently and with a couple of additional clever analogies that you hadn't thought of before. And for someone on the right there basically aren't any good places like that. There are a very small number of right-wing spaces, most of them are filled with racists and misogynists with dumb ideas. I find it very annoying to have people saying the right thing for the wrong reason (I recently saw a Facebook post arguing that ICE was good and necessary because illegal immigrants commit 63% of murders in the U.S.). So this is where we can go. But for a leftist there are dozens and dozens of places filled with people who agree with them. Who wants to hang out in a place with 50-50 people who agree with you when you can go somewhere with 90% people who agree with you? It's more pleasant and fun and comforting. Or worse, if the Motte used to be 70-30 right-left then leftists here were outnumbered and getting argued against constantly. Now, someone committed to the ideas of logic and free discussion might overcome those odds and want to stay here anyway (and some do and I'm quite grateful for that), but it's an additional barrier to entry. Someone with 10/10 rational points is going to feel right at home here regardless of whether they're left or right. But the people with 6/10 rational points on the right are also going to want to stay here and have their egos flattered, while someone with 6/10 rational points on the left is going to be made uncomfortable and go try to find an intelligent-ish leftist space. Even with no underlying correlation between rationalism and left-right, the space leaning right could induce a correlation in the people who stay here.
It might be the case that all three of them are true and contributing. I'm fairly certain that 1 and 3 are both true. I'm not sure about 2 (there are a lot of emotional right-wing people who get really mad about political issues in a visceral way). Regardless, I'm not sure how important each one is to causing this, but the "solution", if any, is likely to differ heavily depending on that balance.
"Most" is doing a lot of work here. The audience of theMotte is only human, and as such perfectly capable of dealing with cognitive dissonance in unproductive manners. From the top of my head, I remember several discussions on "leftist" topics like vegetarianism, anti-car ideas, electric cars, solar power, urbanism, ect. that not only didn't result in "correct conclusions" (whatever that means in any context), discussion (and voting) wasn't very "intelligent" or "reasoned".
I think you could discuss those matters objectively and rationally. I think on a topic of... I don't know, "the culture of meat consumption in the west, and the necessity of factory farming to sustain it" you could come to a objectively and rationally "correct conclusion" after considering the ethics, economics, health impacts and negative externalities.
But I also think you couldn't do that here.
More options
Context Copy link
A willingness to debate requires a degree of disagreeableness. The same brain chemicals that make a man more eager to get into an argument also tend to make him more right-wing.
There's a notion on the right that leftism is a biological phenomenon, and I do think there's abit of truth to that idea.
More options
Context Copy link
Engaging with very right wing ideas such as HBD is socially embarassing. The ick is a natural response to that.
If person X has many accounts and one of them happens to be on the motte then a subset of people would judge them. "What kind of person has a stormfront, 4chan, incels.is etc account." This is the main reason for lack of leftists.
Now the common argument is just don't tell your peers you have an account but unfortunately psychology doesn't work like that, people want to be liked for all they are and dislike keeping secrets.
So they must decide if they must bear the psychological burden of keeping a secret to keep browsing the motte.
This isn't really concious but I assume that is what practically happens.
This process bleeds leftist dry from a platform and without them the discourse becomes too one sided and of lower quality. So even more people leave till you end with a mostly center right website.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link