site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5618 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 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.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

2200 comments on the previour CWR!! Strong outlier. I think mean is 1400 and stddv is 100.

Who knew the gender war would give new life to the motte? Definitely taking out some oxygen but its a hobby horse of mine so Im not too bothered.

I guess it is predictable. Probably something like 99% of people care about sex, whereas the fraction of people who care about other typical The Motte topics like AI, HBD, and religion is much smaller.

whereas the fraction of people who care about other typical The Motte topics like AI, HBD, and religion is much smaller.

It's also much harder to contribute to them because you have to be familiar with them in the first place. I don't have much domain experience with AI and don't bother to read the research papers so I therefore have very little meaningful to say about AI; I have a lot more domain experience with religion so I can point out things other people miss in that regard.

By contrast, the only real thing you need to do to weigh in on a gender debate is, well, be one of two genders and have interacted with the opposite sex at least once. You don't need original research to come up with an original statement or help someone else understand a problem, so people feel like they can contribute more. This can be for more anodyne topics, or it can be just a bunch of traditionalists dogpiling the one progressive in the thread when the phrasing of the argument exposes the fact that traditionalists are just temporally-embarassed progressives, which I think is one of the reasons this forum can't keep enough progressives (and then it comes to pass that the best way to "troll" the forum is to pretend to be a progressive, but the designated troll not-really-but-effectively-sister-site rdrama pulls a lot of them away).

All that having been said, though, it's also true that the more of those posts exist the easier it is for more interesting comments to be spawned from a particularly good or bad take simply due to the increased surface area upon which to attach to the topic, so maybe I'm complaining about it too much.

It seems to me that much of that was driven by the now largely predictable and frankly boring phenomenon of 'disaffected leftist commenter gets outraged by reactionary garbage mottizens and makes a scene'.

We were tracking well above average even before that.

By volume, quite a lot was "garbage reactionary mottezens make largely predictable and frankly boring replies to leftist commenter".

The only feasible, practical alternative to that is banning disaffected leftist trolls.

And have The Motte turn into yet another boring right-wing circlejerk? No thanks. It's better even to have some leftist trolls on here than to have no leftist opinions at all. The soup must be stirred if it is to be tasty.

Anyway though, I am not sure who you mean by leftist trolls. What would be an example of it in your opinion?

Let's not pretend that the interwebz is full of "boring right-wing circlejerks". In fact, they're exceedingly rare, and on Reddit, nonexistent.

Frankly I find it hard to believe that your question is earnest. When referring to the act of trolling, I'm using the Merriam Webster definition of "trolling". That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.

That still leaves "garbage reactionary mottezens make largely predictable and frankly boring replies to each other", which is even more tiresome. Leftist trolls bring some novelty.

It's time to accept that a forum where people can freely post opinions is going to attract mostly right-wingers and eventually turn into a moderate-to-right-wing pipeline.

People with opinions that don't get them banned from 99% of social media, disparaged in national news or fired don't need to wander off to niche websites, unless they are especially intellectually curious.

Why bother having discussions about intersectionality and the correct way to respect women on anonymous websites when you can have them attached to your real name and boost your social status?

Hear ye hear ye, it’s elevatorgate redux! Anyone who has ever interacted with the other sex is cordially invited to bitch about them!

Hey, at least it's more interesting than the 50th Dajooz thread of the week.

?

I'm just bored enough to have checked this, but a simple search indicates the mean is 2058 and the stddv is 361 excluding the thread that dropped today.

slowly drying up. Last 12 threads 1882 , std 225.

i mean, if the stddev is 361, 361/sqrt(12) = 104, so a 100-200 decrease for 12 threads isn't that much

Too early to say. The early months of themotte.org were dominated by USA election season, which has always spurred heavy traffic in the CWR, and the early months of 2023 have been big dry spell for the culture war. (Of course, 2020-2022 was probably the most intense culture war period of my life, so maybe we're settling into a new equilibrium.)

I expect us to whither and die but I'm not sure I'm seeing that yet.

I think there’s a lot more demand for niche internet communities now than in the mid 2010s when everyone was allowed to have their own subreddit.

I think there’s a lot more demand for niche internet communities now than in the mid 2010s when everyone was allowed to have their own subreddit.

Oh, I believe there's a demo that wants us. But our discoverability is toilet tier compared to being a subreddit.

Some communities sustain themselves through pure word of mouth, like Kiwifarms. (Hey! They're alive!) But most... don't. They shrink as their initial seed members drift away without being replaced.

I'd be interested if there are any commenters, (or lurkers, what the heck you're in this thing too), who joined after the jump.

I'll report in as a datapoint.

How did you get here? Anything we can do to funnel your kind into the net?

My response to your first question.

As for your second, I really couldn't tell you - I can't think of a place off the top of my head I would feel comfortable exposing to this place.

OK, you were already caught ages ago, you just got reeled in recently . The search for new fish continues.

I lurked but I started posting after the jump.

Same story here.

Same here

Same.

I'd also like to know this. Any numbers @ZorbaTHut ?

I don't actually know how we could have numbers for that, honestly - there's no consistent way for us to associate pre-Reddit and post-Reddit people, I know a bunch of people changed nicknames.

I guess I meant how many new members since the initial influx. I think we were at 2,000 last time someone asked?

We were, although that was long past the initial influx. Looks like we're at 2259 now, although I don't know how many of those are attempts at spambots and so forth.

More comments

Looks like my guess is seriously off and the motte is doing better than I thought.

I think the cause of my error is that I mentally keep track of how many comments the thread has by sunday then jusy forget about it. But they continue to accumulate comments as people continue discussions in the old thread.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats