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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.

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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.