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Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 12, 2023

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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What subreddits do you think have the most intelligent commenters? It's hard to explain, but some subreddits just give me a vibe that their commenters are more intelligent, with stuff like word choice and how they structure their comments. I'm not talking about their actual beliefs being insightful or correct, there are a lot of very smart people who believe very dumb things and some subreddits pretty much select for that, and I'm not just talking about essay writing ability either. AskHistorians top level commenters, often being actual historians, are very intelligent. I think this site has a lot of intelligent people but it also has more than a few people who aren't that bright. /r/slatestarcodex is very intelligent. /r/neoconNWO doesn't have many people writing long comments, their discussion thread is mostly people joking around with some serious commentary on politics, but they always come off as very intelligent to me. /r/neoliberal used to be like /r/neoconNWO, but as they've vastly grown the past few years they've become basically identical to an average politics subreddit. /r/sneerclub whenever I browse it makes me incredibly frustrated with how close minded and biased they are, but they also clearly are very intelligent and are the same type of people as this site or /r/slatestarcodex, just that they have absolute confidence in the prior that leftism is correct. Occasional comments in /r/programmerhumour seem to come from people who are very intelligent and absolutely know what they're talking about, but the majority aren't anything special.

This is in contrast to subs like /r/purplepilldebate, which go on lengthy debates about sex and gender and dating in a similar vein to many discussions on this site, but they don't have the same vibes of intelligence. As far as I know pretty much every incel subreddit is now banned, but when they weren't the commenters always came off as very dumb to me.

I like /r/stupidpol, even though the commenters there tend to be pretty far gone on the Covid doomerism train (even today, three years after March 2020).

My understanding is that one specific /r/stupidpol powerjanny basically went hardcore zerocovidist and brought the rest of the sub to the same line through usual moderation stuff (strategic bans and thread removals etc.)

Yes, but that person is gone now and the new mod team is more sensible.