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[Meta] The gish gallops need to end
There’s a post below discussing Governor Shapiro and his state booth, Reflecting Pool liner need, and USAID funding death estimates. I think there’s a temptation here to look at all the upvotes (24, solidly above average), the length of the piece, etc and call this a good post. It isn’t. This is just the conservative equivalent of one of those gish gallop posts with dozens of news links pointing out every bad thing Trump has done, with the veneer of thoughtful debate. For those not familiar, Wikipedia here but all you really need to know is that the idea is asymmetry: drop a lot of stuff all at once that can’t possibly be responded to comprehensively. The live debate equivalent is perhaps Spreading? To the credit of the poster, the arguments aren’t necessarily weak per se, but the end impact is like a firehose, and that’s what I take issue with.
Functionally, I think these posts are bad for the community. There is no through thread at all that I can see beyond cute one sentence transitions like “it’s not a question with millions of lives on the line” which is the type of transition I’d be super impressed to see in a high school essay for its fluidity, but am super disappointed to see in a place like this.
Not only is there no common thread between three full length posts slapped together beyond perhaps a trivial thematic “my team is right and yours is full of liars”, there is not even a concluding paragraph that attempts to tie them together.
Why is that bad? The length is not healthy for discussion and debate; the whole point of a thread setup is for somewhat distinct topics to be somewhat distinct. Set up and packaged like this, it incentivizes a “war of worldviews” which might be fine if the point of the post is to discuss worldviews, but it isn’t - the post is all object level or one step up on the topic ladder. So I feel like this goes against the spirit of the site.
If you have three different topics with something substantive to say, you should post three different comments.
I don't know if the post you cite is really the best example of this site's Length Problem, but I'm glad you brought up the Length Problem more generally.
When I started reading /r/slatestarcodex's culture war thread, posts were long for a reason. Posts were frequently written to cover current events. Authors generally understood that their audience might not have the full history and context of the event at their fingertips, so the better posts would frequently provide information to the reader about what was happening, what events lead to the current situation, who the players were, and why the topic was important enough to bring up. That framework helped expose me to a lot of world events, history, and concepts that I otherwise would not have seen at the time. It created a lot of long posts, but the length was a byproduct of an attempt to maximize understanding.
More and more, post length here feels performative. There's not a lot of context; most posters seem to assume that every reader is exactly as plugged in as they are. The broader history is gone. Sure, we know from the post that Jaan van der Grindl went and Said a Thing On Twitter Again, but who the hell is Jaan van der Grindl? Is he somebody in a position of power? Does he have some unique influence over the broader population? Hell if I know. If I click on the link, I'll find out that he's railing about immigrants or birth rate. Awesome. Now I have to figure out if this is something van der Grindl says regularly or if it's out of character for him. Did something happen recently to make this relevant? Hell if I know. Now I get to read bad machine translations of Dutch news articles to try and find out. Maybe I'll get lucky and learn that there are protests in Europe again. What makes these different? Protesting is constant over there. The sense that the modal poster is trying to maximize understanding is gone.
Beyond that, the discussion space has largely collapsed. You'll see topics about Catholicism, declining birth rates, AI, immigration, and... that's broadly it. Somebody is going to reflexively say to "be the change that you want to see in the world", but believe me, I've tried. There's not much engagement outside of a handful of well worn paths.
As a result, I've broadly retreated into the other threads on the board, where people actually talk about things that might be new and interesting. For example, did you know there's a highly coveted waiting list for luxury beans? I sure as hell didn't. It's a window into a culture that's completely alien to mine. There's probably all kinds of room for a culture war post about that. Right now I'm trying to write a post about how Fender is in the middle of a lawsuit that's threatening to upend the entire midlife crisis industry, but I don't know if I'll bother to finish it. If I provide all the necessary context, I fear nobody will particularly care, because they're all busy talking about how AI will fix the European fertility crisis by making all the immigrants Catholic, or something.
Hell if I know what to do about it, though. It seems like it's what the regulars want.
One thing I noticed browsing the mega AAQC round-up is how many old AAQCs were an exercise in synthesizing comments above. The big effort posts and link filled explainers are there, but many are a few paragraphs to frame a picture. As if they were a cherry on top award for providing wisdom not yet stated within the context of a comment chain.
I do not think that is an overly helpful observation, but it could be evidence of a community that valued understanding more. One idea is
bussingto move the weekly threads into the CW thread as a pinned top-level comment for the day of the week. Bean culture war posts might sprout with more exposure.I humbly request @fribble chooses one type of weekly thread for the Rancho Gordo saga so that I can more effectively monitor the bean situation.
May I suggest the Wednesday Wellness thread?
Beans, beans they're good for the heart
the more you eat, the more you fart
the more you fart the better you feel
so eat your beans with every meal
That’s a variant I’ve never heard. I grew up with
Beans, beans, the magic fruit
The more you eat, the more you toot
The more you toot, the better you feel
So let’s eat beans with every meal.
Looking back on the rhyme as an adult, I suspect foul influence from the UK.
That's the more common variant, for sure (EDIT: but I know it as "...the musical fruit"). But it doesn't lay out the cardiovascular benefits, so it doesn't point to any weekly thread in particular.
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