As far as I know, it's been a while since our last meta thread, so let's have a space for the administration of praise and the airing of grievances. Hopefully we can keep the conversation distant enough from first order culture war issues to justify this being a separate thread from the main CW thread.
I've been here on and off over the years since about 2016. To my mind, the two most exciting times to be a part of this community were the period around the first Trump election, and then again in 2022 around the time of the site migration. I don't think it's a coincidence that these time periods coincided with major new social and political issues entering the public consciousness (or at least, entering the consciousness of this community): in 2016, the culture war as we know it was still very fresh and nascent, with battle lines still being drawn and positions still being clarified, and in 2022, DALL-E and ChatGPT introduced machine learning to those of us who had not been feverishly following the LessWrong comments section since the 00s.
Unsurprisingly, discussion is good when there's something new and shiny to discuss. But eventually, you start to run out of things to talk about. People have been complaining about this problem with regards to the "classic" culture war issues for at least a good 3 or 4 years now. In the time period from 2014-2018, there was still a sense that it was all brand new: people were being forced to think about questions and perspectives that they had never thought about before, they were still figuring out how to make sense of their own positions and the positions of others. But now it's all well-trodden ground. You can only rehash the same foundational questions about race and free speech so many times before people on both sides start to think "yes, I've seen it all before, I know how this ends".
Even with AI, despite it still being a very rapidly evolving field, I've been feeling less motivated to participate in AI discussions lately, largely because it feels like such a straightforwardly empirical question. The classic culture war questions are the sorts of evergreen philosophical questions that you could, in principle, go back and forth on endlessly. You can walk away and come back in 10 years and the same questions will still be sitting there. But with AI, it ultimately all boils down to "well we'll just have to wait and see" in the end. Either there will be a singularity and/or the extinction of humanity, or there will not be. Sitting here and talking about it won't change much. We kinda just have to wait to see what happens.
Perhaps these forces have played a role in causing the forum to become less theoretical and abstract over time, leading to the rise of what I like to call "nuts and bolts" type posts: local politics at the city/state level, the minutiae of urban and suburban life, court cases and legal briefings. I don't remember these types of posts being so common in the early years of the forum (probably because, again, the culture war was brand new and people wanted to discuss the hottest culture war questions). I'm glad that at least some people are invested in doing the actual necessary work that makes the world function. But these types of posts generally bore me to tears, so I skip over them. I'm sure many people skip over the dumb shit I like to post about too, so, I understand that it goes both ways and there are no hard feelings. At least I'm still trying to be the change I want to see and I try to balance out the discussion with more philosophical posts.
Something I do lament is the evaporative cooling of interesting characters over time, not only due to bans but also due to natural attrition. At this point in the community's lifespan, it's unlikely that we're going to get another Hlynka, or another TracingWoodgrains. One starts to get the impression that the window for new foundational community narratives has passed.
All complaining aside, I still derive an incredible amount of value from this forum, as evidenced by my return to daily participation, and I would hate to ever see it go. It doesn't remind me of the Old Internet, but it does remind me of the Middle Internet: that time period from roughly 2012-2018 when there was a flourishing of strange ideas and it genuinely seemed like many bold new things were possible. (Maybe it reminds some other people of Usenet, I don't know; that was before my time.) I sincerely hope that this forum can remain roughly stable in its current state for as long as possible.
Anyway, what do you think? What do you think about how TheMotte has evolved over the years, what do you like about it now, what do you want to see changed, etc.
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Notes -
I agree the AI discussion is boring, because the things being discussed are simply speculations about an empirical and technical question which will be answered for all to see in the coming years.
However I do think there is some potential of a genuine culture war along luddite versus technologist lines, or whatever you want to call the two camps. To be sure, this is a more general question concerning the impact of technology on our lives both individually and societally, but I think the recent developments around AI are bringing this to the fore and it isn't a simple empirical question, but a philosophical and ethical one, i.e. what do we want technology to do and how is the technology currently being built affecting our lives and our culture? This is in principle completely orthogonal to whether you are an AI skeptic or a think AGI is around the door.
It's also something which has the potential to cause some genuine discussion in this place, since I think our members run the full gamut from "modernity was a mistake" to "I can't wait for my transhumanist utopia".
I'm a semi-demi-Luddite.
Five days a week: soul destroying grind :-(
Five days a month: meaning and purpose :-)
Not sure that I believe me, because Tucker Carlson: Easy Money Is Destroying American Society is the inspiration. Even if people are in broad agreement, there is much to discuss about the actual amount of work, and what kind of work, and how the system would function.
One of my uncle’s is a court translator for my hometown who once told he thought he had the best job in the world because, “You’re not paid for what you do, you’re paid for what you might have to do.” If there are days where no translator is needed, he just sits in his office and can do anything he likes until he goes home. Some days may be a full case load, others may have only 15 minutes of work. It’s so comfortable for him that he’s undecided if he even wants to retire, because he can’t be doing less than he already is now.
I’m no different than anyone else in one respect and that’s I prefer the path of least resistance that allows me to etch out a comfortable life. There’s no shame in doing that, but I’m also someone who does the grind on a fairly regular basis and gets irritated for carrying half the department I have to work with every single day.
Jobs where you're at your post for hours on end but only busy for a fraction of the time seem to be ideal for creative types too. I could swear I've heard multiple stories of authors who got their start while manning a hotel front desk during the night shift.
In a lot of ways positions like that are a dream job for me. I’ve just never felt the same character impulses liberals often claim ordinary people have, like finding creative expression and meaning and fulfillment in their work. Maybe a subset of the population feels this, but I enjoy indolence and passive consumption and contemplation in my own narrowly defined interests; which is too often orthogonal to the maintenance and upkeep of civilization.
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