This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
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Notes -
I like the idea of this place, I really do, but why do people write such long posts. It strikes me as quite obnoxious. Don't you get bored of writing and reading so much text?
The Motte is inherently about rigor. To defend an outrageous claim, you need outrageous evidence. So, people try to cover all their bases, and that inherently leads to longer posts.
While true understanding leads to more concise / distilled thoughts. I've found that brevity is often-times an excuse by novices to skim-over very real logic holes in someone's understanding. There is a relevant quote that perfectly captures this idea, but I can't find it right now. :\
better safe than concise.
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Ignoring the low-effort rule, we're casual here. "If I had more time I would have written a shorter letter." It takes a lot of unnecessary effort to be very succinct sometimes and most people just can't do it naturally, so I'll forgive some bloviating because it's a post on a discussion board that I'm reading for free.
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We are the spinoff of the spinoff of Scott Alexander's fan group. And he is the king of effortposting.
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I get how you feel, it can be tiring sometimes. But I was reminded last week why it's not so bad when someone linked a meta drama thread from Less Wrong in the Friday fun thread. The Motte is almost terse by comparison! And at least most motters try to write entertainingly, I often find myself sighing at the length of a post when I first see it, but then getting sucked in when I start reading it.
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Not really, no. I usually skim the first paragraph, and if I'm not interested I just collapse the thread. If there's valuable stuff deeper in the thread it'll probably show up in the AAQCs at the end of the month anyway.
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Interpreting “Low effort” as "short" is the most trivial way to enforce the rule and so it’s the way the mods are the most likely to enforce it. This isn't necessarily saying the mods are lazy -- more like every mod decision gets judged by the court of public opinion and mods are more likely to enforce a rule if the ruling seems uncontroversial.
Write 50 words of low effort and get slapped. Write 150 words and you don’t have to worry about arguing in good faith or being truthful because enforcing those rules requires making a judgement call.
And yet not. Very obviously, a short comment is more likely to be "low effort." Equally obviously, we do not mod every one-liner for being low-effort.
This is a frequent charge, and it's been false since before we left reddit. It's the sort of charge made by people who are perpetually angered by Russell Conjugations that go something like "My comment is succinct and factual; your comment is specious and low-effort. My comment is detailed, effortful, and semantically rich; your comment is a verbose wall of text full of midwittery and lies."
We often mod comments that are long and effortful and even get AAQC nominations, because the poster slips bad faith arguments or boo outgroup rants into their manifesto.
We also very often see posts get reported for "lying." Leaving aside the question of whether mods can or should judge the truth value of every post, almost always, "lying" is an accusation made about someone's perception of a contentious issue. We don't mod people for expressing an opinion you believe is false and the other person believes is true, regardless of what we personally think is true. We rarely mod people for saying something we suspect they might not actually believe, and certainly not because you think the other person doesn't actually believe what they are saying.
Sorry by "truthful" I don't mean "explicitly lying". I mean "omitting key context that a reasonable person would expect you to include if you actually cared about good discussion (and not just about booing the outgroup)".
The commenter I linked to decided that
accurately portrayed
To me this is a really obvious example of somebody going on a tirade about how bad their outgroup is. My main gripe (as somebody who disagrees with BLM) is that you have a less accurate understanding of what happened after reading his comment.
Could you argue that that comment makes this board a better place?
I think it's pretty clear mods are much more rigorous about enforcing things if there is some obvious flow chart they can appeal to if somebody questions their decision. "Less than 50 words --> low effort" -- who could argue with that?
Another good example is "consensus building" which should mean "don't imply we all agree with you" but instead means "don't use the phrase 'we all know'".
And so we have things like "Given Kamala's own exposure as a weak air-head" just stated matter-of-factly and in-passing, when any sane standards would require at least a context link.
The mods have (correctly) decided that allowing things like "We all know that Kamala is an air-head" is damaging to discussion, but when MelodicBerries simply assumes his reader agrees with him and that the claim needs no justification this is also building consensus. But it's not part of the mod flow chart "we all know" -> "building consensus", so it's completely kosher.
Basically no discussion board on the Internet actually asks its members to "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be" -- the onus is always on whomever disagrees with your claim to hold you to account. TheMotte and /r/slatestarcodex, according to their own rules, should be the exceptions. But I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually seen that rule enforced.
I think thats because that’s because the mods are human and enforcing it requires making difficult-to-defend decisions and that’s scary.
Look, you're not wrong that low-hanging fruit is easier to mod than long posts that require us to try parsing what someone is actually saying, about a topic we may not be at all familiar with, which is why we don't try to make judgment calls about how "honestly" someone is presenting the case. If something gets reported, we always look at it, but if it's a wall of text and someone is reporting it as "lying" or "uncharitable" or "boo outgroup," I will read through to see if anything is egregiously in violation of the rules, but I am not handing out Supreme Court judgments here.
That being said, I for one do not use any kind of mental "flow chart," and I do not worry a lot about whether someone might question my decision. (People question our decisions all the time. Some people even demand I "take it up with the other mods." Which, in most cases, I actually do, asking if anyone disagrees with my judgement.)
"We all know" is indeed a red flag that someone is trying to assume a nonexistent consensus, but it's not the only way to get flagged for consensus-building. If your point is that we mod by doing a Ctrl+F on certain phrases, no, not really.
What sort of context link would you like to support the assertion that Kamala Harris is an airhead? It's clearly an opinion. It's not a particular charitable opinion, but people are allowed to say "I think Kamala Harris is an airhead." Arguably, "Given" could be interpreted as "consensus building," but if I were to mod it on that basis, I really would be doing the sort of keywoard-based modding you're accusing us of. If you say "Trump is a venal, fascist clown," that's your opinion, and someone who likes Trump would very likely report you for it, but you don't have to post a link to support your opinion. If you say "We all know Trump is a venal, fascist clown" you'd get modded, not for using the magic no-no words "We all know" but because you are trying to imply everyone agrees with you and you are reinforcing a consensus opinion. Was @MelodicBerries doing that about Kamala Harris? Eh. I don't think so, but feel free to ask another mod what they think.
Then you aren't very good at counting, because we enforce that rule all the time (even though almost no one ever thinks that their claim was partisan or inflammatory or required evidence).
Either an insult is materially relevant to the argument, in which case it requires justification (and deserves a mod warning if one isn't given), or it is not relevant (in which case it deserves a mod warning for creating needless heat).
It's plain here that the point about Kamala that's actually relevant to the argument is that she has no hope of being the Democrat nominee. A context link that is appropriate is a link to a poll or a prediction market.
Instead MelodicBerries goes needlessly out of his way to call her an airhead. If this was relevant to the argument and supported by evidence it would be fine. Instead it's neither.
(This is a good time to mention that it has always bothered that TheMotte has never explicitly endorsed "Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite comment policy", but even if @ZorbaTHut doesn't like that, surely "don't insult people for no reason" is a good norm, since the round up text links to things like IN FAVOR OF NICENESS, COMMUNITY, AND CIVILIZATION and mentions "you should argue to understand, not to win", "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion", etc.)
Props for consistency (though, to be clear, I'm not arguing the mods are politically biased), but I strongly disagree on your trade off between light and heat. "Trump is a venal, fascist clown" should not be allowed unless (1) required by the point you're trying to make and (2) proactively supported. Having higher standards when people are being insulting seems like required, base-level moderation to me.
I can't remember if we killed this after leaving from the SSC subreddit or if I just never copied it over, but the problem we always had on the SSC subreddit was people saying "kind/necessary/true? well, I'm clearly right, and it's necessary that I tell this person he's an asshole, so what's the problem".
And after a few attempts at editing this for "but seriously you can't just be a jerk even if you think you're right", it ended up entirely subsumed into early rulesets without much hint of its previous existence.
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We do prefer "don't insult people for no good reason," but public figures are more or less fair game, as long as the post is not just a boo light. "Kamala is an airhead" or "Trump is a fascist clown" are not great comments, no, but we're not going to make a rule against saying mean things about politicians and celebrities.
"I think Kamala is a weak candidate and has no hope of being the Democrat nominee" is clearly an opinion. You are free to challenge it, but if we applied your proposed standard, we'd have to mod anyone who expresses any kind of opinion without providing a link.
Those rules already exist.
Or
Or
Or
Does every statement need a citation? No, but we need some standards to prevent literal for-it’s-own-sake mockery.
I'm open to sincere suggestions about how to improve moderation. So is @ZorbaTHut. But I do not think what you are asking for is reasonable. I am not going to issue warnings every time someone says something mean about a politician. Our norms have developed over time, and they are always evolving, and if you think they are going in the wrong direction, or are failing to maintain the sort of discourse we want, you can make that case, but so far I find your case unpersuasive. You seem to just want me to mod people who insult Kamala Harris. There is a threshold at which I probably would mod a comment. E.g., if someone said "Kamala Harris is a whore" - that's actually a falsifiable statement that would require some evidence, or "Anyone who votes for Kamala Harris is a weak air-head" - that's a very broad boo-outgroup. But calling Kamala Harris a weak, air-headed candidate who has no hope of winning the nomination? It's not kind, but it's an allowable opinion.
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The value of writing isn't measured by the number of words. It's measured by how much you can get your reader to understand.
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I agree with this completely. There seems to be a trend towards very long, and very low information density posts here, and it’s gotten a lot worse.
Something I think that LLMs have taught us is that a very small input can generate a very large output that still contains the same information.
“Trans people are exploiting the historical oppression of gay people as a recruiting tool for their sexual fetish, which I think is unfair” could easily be expanded into 5-6 paragraphs using an LLM.
The first statement would get you threatened with a ban here, whereas the longer LLM’d version (which contains no additional entropy), wouldn’t.
I’m reminded of this famous Seneca quote:
"You complain of avarice; but wasting of time is one of its forms. We waste time more recklessly than our most precious possession, and in comparison with it, property has only second rank. People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy."
I think this trend (and enforcement of it) of creating long, low density posts is a waste of people’s time. We should encourage brevity here, and not look at length as a substitution for quality.
Maybe a balance would be wise? Yes, things can just be expanded by an LLM, but if there is a lot to say, more space is often required. If the density is kept high enough, then length is more strongly correlated with value. And length can often filter out low effort comments.
Of course, on the other hand, that does require us to use more to measure quality than just length, and short comments can still be good, as this one hopefully is.
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Yes I see what you mean. I've become attuned lately to the idea of attention as a sacred act, a la Iain Mcgilchrist. What is it that we are experiencing, wanting to portray, what is important? This requires more time sitting and being and noticing and less time writing, though of course intentions fade away and I easily find myself back in reactive social media scrolling and commenting.
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Goodness no. Longer posts, please. The moderation guidelines for top level posts in the CW threads are fine the way they are, and if anything they should be tightened up a bit.
I don't think I've ever read a post on TheMotte that I would describe as "long and low density". Pretty much every post here is either quite enjoyable to read, or it's on a topic I'm not interested in to begin with, in which case I just ignore it.
I don't think anyone here does that.
This post is short, but kindof exemplifies what I’m talking about. Here is the total information contained in your post:
You could even have just replied
Or even
And no information would be lost. Your post contributes nothing to the discussion behind “I disagree”.
And yet I suspect that a one word reply of “false” would get moderator threats. Because you made your post longer than it needs to be it will stand.
Well, no. You're right that just saying "False" would get dinged for being low-effort, but he added quite a bit more than that.
That some people are more concise than others, and some people are better writers than others, is indisputably true. And requiring people to sometimes use more words than technically necessary also serves a purpose, in many cases. E.g., "I think Those People are terrible" is an allowable opinion, but you have to use more words than that so you are providing something more reflective and worthwhile to engage with than just how much you hate Those People.
You clearly do not like people talking about things that are of no interest to you, or using more words than you want to read. And well, you've got a really good and easy solution to that: don't read posts that don't interest you.
He added quite a bit of unnecessary words to fluff the length of his post, which is my point.
Then what is the purpose of this forum? What is the purpose of moderation at all? Is the idea of community standard interesting? Is the idea of discussing the way people here use words, and the way they could (likely are) using LLMs to fluff their posts up interesting?
"don't read posts that don't interest you"
Clearly this post does interest me. Clearly most things posted in the CWR interest me. You said the exact same thing to me when you got offended/defensive at my criticism of some girl posting ridiculous surveys the other week, suggesting that I'm disinterested in something because I am critical of it.
No, I am quite interested in the way that people signal things to one another. I think that is essentially core to the culture war, and since this entire thread and raison d'etre for this website is discussion of the culture war, I think it's completely reasonable to talk about the ways in which people wage it.
His words added quite a bit more meaning and content.
To cater to people who are interested in the things we talk about here, even things you are not interested in talking about.
I was neither offended nor defensive. I pointed out that "Why are you talking about things I don't want to talk about it?" is frankly a perverse attitude to take on a discussion forum.
That's fine. Feel free to talk about it. But when you make statements about what people are signaling and what you think is or isn't worthwhile to talk about, your statements may be disagreed with.
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This is plainly, obviously false.
I did state that I disagreed with you, but I also stated why I disagreed with you. Frequently it’s useful to give specific reasons when you disagree with someone because there are multiple possible reasons why you might disagree with someone’s claims, and it’s important for your interlocutor to know what your specific reasons are so the discussion can continue. If they don’t know your reasons, they can’t fashion appropriate counterarguments.
Your claim was that “this trend of creating long, low density posts is a waste of everyone’s time”. There are a few different reasons that I could have for disagreeing with this claim. Hypothetically, I could agree with you that TheMotte has a lot of long, low density posts, but I could simply not think that such posts are a waste of time. I could value them for the aesthetic quality of their prose, for example, despite their low information content. Instead, I gave a different reason for disagreeing with you: my reason is that I don’t think that TheMotte has any significant number of long low density posts at all! I stated this plainly in my post. Therefore, my post has more information content than just “I disagree”. Flatly stating “I disagree” leaves your reasons for disagreeing ambiguous.
Your criticism here reaffirms my suspicions that most people who complain about “verbose, low information posts” simply have poor reading comprehension and are insensitive to the information that’s actually being presented to them.
Let's go line by line and see if there is any information in your post that goes beyond "I disagree":
In summary: you disagree. Although "longer posts, please" does come close to going beyond "I disagree", it is in direct response to me saying I want shorter posts. Maybe instead of the total information in your post being "I disagree", it could be "I disagree. I would prefer longer posts."
You are literally quoting something from my comment here, and then...saying that you disagree with it.
Again you are quoting me and simply saying that you disagree.
In none of this do you link to any examples of why you disagree or do you include any new information or ideas other than your disagreement.
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The 'evidence in proportion to how inflammatory your claim is' rule has been de-facto replaced with 'amount of text in proportion to how inflammatory your claim is'. It's good that people can't just post uncompressed 'boo outgroup' statements, but the expansion of the statement would theoretically involve lots of evidence that can be discussed and litigated rather than idle speculation.
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As one of the probably top 5% of the worst perpetrators here in terms of length to novelty ratio I have asked myself why. In my case I think I feel the need to cover multiple examples and asides, even if it's redundant. Probably some anxiety about being misunderstood. Should just trust the audience more tbh.
I was trying to work on it and then I got really annoyed by a CW bete noire and fell off the wagon
I'm not in principle against longposting though, especially of the "effortposts of things I would never have researched myself but are actually interesting" variety.
There seems to be a range of preferences, so I wouldn't worry. I guess I have two or three comment styles myself. 1) reactive to a particular point someone has raised - I should probably give these up as its sometimes just nitpicking and a search for connection, 2) pre-canned ideas that I've already thought about at length, I have a few pet topics and I know how to articulate them easily, 3) full rant mode, which is more stream of consciousness trying to tie multiple things together. 1) and 2) tend to be short, 3) can go on but it's usually a kind of master thesis type thing that is also informationally dense.
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First, this probably shouldn't top-level cw thread because it's just not. Should probably have posted in any of the other main threads, because posts like these distract from the purpose of the site.
Second, we are all Pedants who have Things To Say. By saying something, you can be guaranteed that someone will respond as a contrarian, regardless of how close it sticks to the site's culture (law of averages and all that). Any position that expects to stand up to snuff needs to be quality or else it will get thrashed. On top, books lack the debate's intensity and verbal debate just sucks; this place genuinely is one of the few great places to engage in culture war topics, hence the verbosity and intensity.
Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and give unto Motte that which is Motte's.
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Don't see why long posts are inherently obnoxious. Short posts can be even more obnoxious. Twitter proves this.
People actually spend some effort making it somewhat fun to read and including all sorts of varied rhetorical flairs rather than just going for a nonstop wall of text.
You can't even complain that they're too verbose, it just takes a good number of words to fully articulate a position as precisely as needed for real discussion.
I could distill down a point to two words:
"Democrats bad."
And one could respond with three words:
"No, Republicans bad."
and someone could but in with four:
"Actually, both are bad."
Or each party could put some work in to make their true thoughts and reasoning clear so people aren't talking past one another.
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If you find reading long-form posts obnoxious, this might not be the place for you.
If you get bored, nothing is keeping you here.
In short, I agree with @arjin_ferman's sentiments, if not the way he expressed them.
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No, get gud.
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Most of the people here enjoy writing and reading large amounts of text. The community has self-selected for people who are into that sort of thing. So they don’t find it to be obnoxious.
When an issue is sufficiently complex, you need a large amount of text to explore all the nuances. The information is incompressible past a certain point.
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No, I'm incredibly bored, and the more high quality interesting text and discussions I have to read, the better.
And it's pretty obvious to me that if you want to write on and explore a topic in depth, then you need to devote a decent number of words to it. There are certain people here who are unnecessarily verbose, but the majority don't abuse the English language, and convey their points as succinctly as possible.
Fair play
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You're aware of nonfiction books, or academic journals, right? Finishing one of those takes a few hours, and many academics dedicate their entire lives to poring over and gleaning information from texts. And they're both much more popular and wordier than we are.
"I like the idea of music, but why do people listen to so many different songs? It just seems boring.". "I like the idea of talking to people, but - for more than a few minutes each day? Why bother? People aren't that interesting, my time is valuable."
Text is the same as written speech, and speech can do all sorts of useful things. Exactingly make an argument. Tell an interesting story. Communicate something subtle via examples. Dig into something you're uncertain about. Elaborate precisely why something is true, creating jumping-off points for disagreement. I can just say "trans is bad" and my opponent can say "trans is good" and we can lock antlers and grunt, or I can detail how and why I think that, and then find out where I might be wrong.
And maybe we are too wordy - but your question's clearly not enough. What is boring about our precise flavor of 'so much text'? A lot of things are made of lots of words, what's different about us?
Replying at the tail to these comments, which I've appreciated. Obviously nothing wrong with people's preferences and of course nuanced and complex ideas take time. I mean I write out some fairly lengthy ones myself, just if most of them lengthy walls of text, then quite intimidating. Maybe sometimes less is more, might it be just a habit of the community, as alluded to?
A norm of long posts is a an effort filter that cuts of some valuable contributions (e.g short points can trigger very good posts in response, a chain of short replies can add up to something very insightful) and I wouldn't mind things moving slightly more in that direction, but it's also a filter that cuts out a large amount of low effort ill thought-out jabs. Maybe being flooded the latter was more of a threat when we were on reddit.
Somewhat contrary to the spirit of the founding of this place there's now enough agreement between people that you probably don't need as much hedging as before before getting to the point, but then again if we figure out a way to draw in new users it'll be offputting if we all just assume everyone agrees on certain things in our discussions, so people still argue for and explain things that most people get already.
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Every forum discussing politics that isn't wordy gets very unpleasant very fast. In the spirit of this subthread, I'll refrain from theoryposting why that might be.
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This reminds me of the quote by Pascal:
So maybe people here are just too busy to write short comments!
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I sometimes wonder the same thing, although it strikes me as more counterproductive and silly than obnoxious. Maybe it's because 1) they are not good enough writers to express their ideas more succinctly and 2) they enjoy the act of prolonged reading and writing more than I do. Some people also get scared that if they write short top-level comments, the mods will get mad at them.
On the other hand, who cares. I mostly just ignore really long comments cause I figure, if you can't write your thoughts more concisely then probably there's not much there and even if there is, I don't feel like putting in the effort of getting to it. The really verbose people aren't harming anyone and they're not even that common here. Most comments here are fairly short.
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Do you go on other forums and ask them questions like that?
"So all you guys do over here is talk about films? Don't you ever get bored of that?"
"...I mean come on guys, I understand that you can like football, but at least go outside and kick the stupid ball yourself!"
"Wait, this is a community to talk about painting Warhammer figures?!"
Pop some Adderall, and try to keep up, Zoomer.
Try to keep up, man - everyone on TikTok knows that the Adderall hasn't been hitting the same lately.
(this is a joke)
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I sympathize with your annoyance, but you know better than to drop cheap digs like that.
I accept the warning, but just want to clarify this was meant in jest, rather than in hostility.
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If you think this place is verbose you should see what academia looks like.
Complex topics are hard to treat in small prose. But I can be laconic here:
No.
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