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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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Are we becoming a circle jerk?

I don't ask this facetiously--and for me to use the preposition we here is laughable, not because I do not wish to be included, but because my own contributions are so flimsy that I can scarcely be called a participant, though I am a great lurker.

Rather, I have a concern, perhaps misguided, that themotte.org has become a kind of Athenaeum where (we) sit around in our plush chairs (if that's what they do in The Athenaeum) and bandy opinions that everyone shares anyway, but (we) re-word them at times for cleverness' sake, and, at other times, simply bask in our smugness, content that we are correct and that anyone else who disagrees with us isn't. And don't get me wrong--I often find myself nodding in agreement at certain posts, particularly in the "The Motte Needs You" Janitor section, and wondering if I think they're good because I agree with them out of context, or if I truly think they hold high what I would consider the extremely rare and valuable banner of the Motte.

Of course this group consensus posting people do is in violation of one of the main rules of the Motte: Steelman your opposition. Assume that whoever your interlocutor is (or, put another way, whoever reads your post) may well disagree with you.

I am not suggesting that no one disagrees on any of the posts made here. A few well-known combatants go at it from time to time, usually respectfully, sometimes not.

Still, as a daily browser-not-poster, I feel as if I see a lot of posts that make what I would consider wild, self-assured generalizations without pushback. And very often I either don't have the time or inclination to do a proper pushback or I am, frankly, intimated intimidated by the horsepower some people seem to have on making effortposts as counterpoint. Today is a rare day: I have world enough, and time. I usually don't.

The question "Are we a circlejerk" is probably rhetorical, but feel free to answer however you will. I hope at least people will give the question some thought. As always I am happy to mingle at the party, nameless and unknown, eating the hors d'oeuvres and sampling the champagne.

Regardless of the answer, I think this site is a success beyond expectation, despite the bullshit dismissal of us on reddit.

Are we becoming a circle jerk?

...becoming? I like your optimism!

Three years ago, @TracingWoodgrains took a demographics poll that was delightful to read despite containing no surprises. The modal mottizen then was

a 29-year-old, right-handed straight white man with a Bachelor's degree, a US citizen who lives in California. He has finished his formal education and now earns around $65000 a year, though his net worth remains under $10000. He is single with no kids for now, but he plans on having 2 kids eventually. He is not affiliated with any political party. He was raised Catholic, but now considers himself an atheistic humanist. He considers himself a capitalist, a libertarian, and a classical liberal. He got 800s in both SAT-math and SAT-verbal, but despite this scored only a 1500 overall. He scored a 33 on his ACT. Per the MBTI, he's on the border between INTJ and INTP, which breaks out more clearly in the OCEAN model with very high openness to experience, average agreeableness and conscientiousness, slightly below average extraversion, and low negative emotionality.

He's worn glasses since childhood, had a hundred books or so in his childhood home, and mostly read for pleasure as a kid, though he also enjoyed video games, TV, and playing outside. He went to public school, but didn't like it. Now, he spends 8-12 hours in front of a screen daily, reads hours of longform text each day, and generally also watches videos and plays games. He sleeps about seven and a half hours nightly, and has not had the pleasure of a lucid dream. He lives in a city, but hasn't yet been convinced of the joys of living in a cyberpunk dystopia and prefers outdoor activities to city ones.

Now, this is of course aggregated data. There are women who post here, multiple people with doctoral degrees, many from outside the United States; we have posters who are older and younger, richer and poorer, and so on and so forth. But compared to the world, compared to any given nation, compared to a city, compared to a university... there is definitely a degree of homogeneity in our userbase. At minimum, basically everyone here is open to discussing culture war topics, and sufficiently comfortable in our own views and positions to do so. At that level of self-selection, it would be hard to make an extremely convincing argument that this place is not a "circle jerk," as you've defined it.

Sure enough--if you look at the Quality Contributions Reports over the last few months, you'll see a lot of discussion on transsexuality and transhumanism and artificial intelligence and other recurrent themes. Of course, by the definition you've offered, every Internet community everywhere will inescapably be a "circle jerk," certainly if the community lasts more than five minutes. Even reddit, taken as a whole, is basically a circle jerk, unless you limit yourself to certain subreddits which are themselves circle jerks. (So it turns out most people prefer circle jerks to lonely masturbation...? Perhaps the metaphor is unwieldy...)

This is not an excuse; most of those places are explicitly circle jerks that will ban you on sight for interrupting everyone's fun. Since we aspire to be "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," we do want to limit the, uh, circlejerkness! But we only have so many tools in our toolbox--though, as you observe, @ZorbaTHut is actively developing more.

But all of that said--I have almost never posted something here that did not meet with some disagreement. One of the upshots of the relative homogeneity we've got going here, is that a lot of us are pretty contrarian! And we have a lot of actually extremely rare arguments, here. After all--

He dislikes Black Lives Matter, the trans rights movement, gender-critical feminism, gun control, the pro-life movement, the furry fandom, and open borders. He can't stand intersectional feminism, white identitarianism, antinatalism, or social justice. He is ambivalent about animal rights and ambivalent leaning towards positive about the gay rights movement, second-wave feminism, and the pro-choice movement. He kind of likes the religious freedom movement and likes gun rights. He strongly supports Effective Altruism and would march in Hong Kong with the protesters there if he could.

Many of these topics are just outright banned elsewhere. If nothing else, our openness to discussions of this nature makes us much less of a circle jerk than, well, basically everywhere else on the internet, and certainly everywhere else with comparable civility standards.

So while "are we a circle jerk" need not be entirely a rhetorical question, and is certainly worth reflecting on from time to time, my inclination is ultimately to answer it with my own question:

Compared to what?

Compared to the best version of what this site could be, and sometimes is.

(I did post a long autobiographical bit here but am deleting it.) I appreciate your response.