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 -
Followup. I am not completely satisfied with the way this post was treated in the CW thread. I literally stated the topic question at the end
But one person gave any evidence they read that far; most people could not stop posting might-makes-right, often denying that that's what they're saying, epicycling about how they still get to be moralizers about the Holocaust in light of that (apparently sometimes a state does a bad act. but that doesn't make the state bad! if it exists, it exists and that's good. and states can't be judged like men). Many people insisted you absolutely cannot use legitimacy in a normative sense under any circumstances (kind of like in newspeak, there is some kind of distributed emergent effort to take away the linguistic foundation for criticizing states and their laws).
Yes those posts are their right, they are perfectly dignified posts to make, I don't want to say anything uncharitable etc, but that aside I think a certain form of abstract discussion can't be suitably had in the CW thread, because I believe this drowns out any attempt to get that started.
And, that makes sense! It's a thread that is mostly people posting about the news cycle, what did happen this week in Palestine, what will happen, according to their predictions, in the next year, and the only time morality rears its head is if a big party is backing your variant! Perfectly pragmatic. That's what it's for, politics. But that's different than political philosophy.
So ideally maybe we could get a new thread.
We sometimes allow people to start new posts outside the regular threads, but generally not just because they want to talk about one particular thing or set the parameters of the discussion. You can start a discussion; people will respond to it as they will. You may or may not be satisfied with how they respond.
I see no value in a "Philosophy thread" where it's pretty obvious you want to post on a culture war topic but then complain if people don't engage with it on a "philosophical" level.
Yep, I wrote:
...
It's not that they don't engage with it on a philosophical level, it's that they don't engage with it. The post they responded to was not the post I wrote. The discussion I started, and the discussion that had, are two distinct discussions. That's their right, to have their discussion! But I think it would be cool if we could have the other discussion too, and right now we can't, and that sucks.
I agree that the Motte has long since lost most of its high decouplers, and that this is a shame. That said, it is easier for everyone to decouple when the topic is historical or fantastical or obscure and thus has minimal emotional charge. If you want to discuss the legitimacy of states, somewhere like Cambodia would be a better bet.
I agree. Honestly, I've never read Israel posts on this forum, so I didn't know it was such a mindkiller here. To me Trump would be a more obvious mindkiller, or the gender wars, or transing. I see Israel in the context of history, and as such I fundamentally don't see it as unique, either uniquely evil or uniquely good. This means I don't actually care about it that much either way, and honestly I'm more interested in discussing the legitimacy of Western states, but that mindkills people because they live in them. But apparently Israel is actually a massive mindkiller here, so I guess I will avoid in the future.
Part of me wants to say, they should decouple more, but that's empirically futile. Another part just wants a high decoupling isolation thread, but Amadan's not buying it and I don't know if anyone would use it anyway. So I guess the only thing left would be to write a post about a Scott Alexander-esque fictional country, as much as I dread that writing style (it feels like it is babying me, trying to hide the real world from me. Ideas should be attached to things imo).
One of the things I was impressed by about the LW community was that they'd got pretty good at finding techniques to prevent the usual pitfalls of internet arguments. Taboo your terms, politics is the mindkiller, etc. etc. Sometimes it could get compulsive or silly, and it doesn't jive with everyone, but it did broadly help them have better discussions IMO.
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We can't just announce a "high decoupling thread" even if we wanted to. What are you going to do when you start your new thread about Israel's legitimacy (I absolutely do not believe you have never read Israel threads on the forum before or that you just landed on Israel as your example by chance) and people refuse to decouple?
I did it because it was the topic of saltminer's thread. He believed in all of these conspiracies, I thought my thread would be a more balanced assessment of Israel based on a higher notion of state legitimacy without any of the silly claims about Epstein or Mossad.
That's why I suggested it should be a philosophy thread instead.
Idk, I guess if I write again about it I'll have to write about Kantsaywhereistan.
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We can have the discussions people want to have. You cannot force people to discuss things the way you want to discuss them. If you keep trying to start a conversation and it doesn't go how you want, perhaps the reason is not other people.
But indeed I do not want to do that. Rather I would like a different space for us who want to discuss it to do so in peace. It is our Motte Aliyah, you see? We must ascend to our thread on the hill, to have our discussions. Or rather I say we should descend, since our discussions are lowly. Yes, they are disgusting, and we would never want to force those who are too good for them to participate. That's why we'd rather not subject them to it in the CW thread.
But if those people have the right to have their superior and indeed more popular discussion, it interrupts my pitiable and ugly little discussion. Can't my discussion have a little mercy?
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