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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4001 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 30, 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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I got tired of the Culture War Threads’ thinly-veiled rants against the same handful of topics that are phrased as questions even though most of us agree on the answers and the poster knows that. Think it’s a shame that so many smart, relatively independent thinkers choose to post about that as opposed to their more unique areas of expertise and interests. I asked a question a few weeks ago in the Sunday thread that was “how did NW Europe become the world’s dominant civilization” and got a lot of great responses that seemed free of the demands of political correctness I might have gotten on Reddit. Would like to see more of that.

Even just more freeform takes on “hey here’s an idea/analysis I have that I want to share” would be preferable to the Culture War Thread imo.

I think you have a point, but it's also natural to talk about the big issues of the day. Culture war issues are aggravated by unnecessary polarisation and politics generally, but they are pretty big issues that we should all have a view on, eg abortion, the shift to gender ideology, shifts in attitudes to free speech, the rise of AI (not a culture war issue, but hugely important). The let's talk about stuff that matters less seems a bit apathetic to me. We should talk about global warming and the environment more, but that's plagued by so much scientific detail.

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