site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27475 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

11
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

There's so much interesting stuff going on right now - why is every post here such a snoozefest? Is anyone else checking here less and less often because equal quality commentary seems increasingly available elsewhere?

  • -12

The reason why Twitter (uncensored) is popular for political discourse is because you don't actually need a forced verbose comment for most discussions. I've long felt The Motte could use a more casual venue as an alternative hangout with less strict rules compared to the weekly CW thread. Think of it as a downstairs café instead of the uptight think-tank.

But yes, I share your view that too much of content here is very "snoozy" and unnecessarily long.

My highly personal pet theory is that the culture war is changing is combination of

  1. Twitter changes with community notes, needing an account to see replies and so on
  2. Reddit changes, like shutting down alternative clients that "Culture Warriors" both users and mods relied on.
  3. The fall of highly polarized news blogs like Vice and Gawker Media properties mostly due to high interest rates. As it turns out activists aren't profitable, especially when the main platform to spread rage bait Twitter is changing(see point 1, some rage bait is just killed of with a community note).

I believe that the masses of culture war is not participitating anymore in the same way because of these things and the "heat" is turned down.

I think the effort requirement dissuades some people from posting. probably some users want to share bare links, with little or no commentary.

What is the interesting stuff?

I'd also like to know.

Most people don't feel like writing long toplevel posts most of the time, and the BLR isn't allowed because at least 'long effort post' is a content-neutral filter and the mods don't want to have a filter that isn't content-neutral (both for philosophical reasons and because it'd take more mod effort). I think this is a mistake.

Also, is there so much interesting stuff going on right now? Seems about usual to me.

Most people don't feel like writing long toplevel posts most of the time

I feel like most of the really enjoyable stuff I read here has the same template. Someone wants to talk about a topic but lacks an interesting opinion about it or haven't really thought it throughly. They make a clumsy top level post. Then they get dunked on by 2-3 second level posts explaining why the OP is wrong. The second level posts are typically much more heavily upvoted and well written/argued. Being that OP sucks a bit. I had an experience with this trying to start a discussion about a topic without a clear argument and then the comments destroying me were selected for quality contribution. They were indeed quality contributions but the whole discussion wouldn't exist without me sticking out my neck first and saying something possibly unpopular.

Where are people getting the idea that you need a longpost on the top level? Just write a conversation starter. A good writer could do it in a paragraph, a bad one would need 2-3 tops.

Some interesting stuff going on:

Elon Musk antisemitism controversy, advertisers defecting, etc

Beff Jezos doxed

Henry Kissinger dies

Israel vs. Palestine ongoing developments

2024 election developments

Apparent strength of US economy vs disconnect from voters

Cybertruck debut (not really culture war but a big story)

Russia vs. Ukraine ongoing developments

Protests/riots in Ireland

I would hardly say the news cycle is slow

Those are all pretty lame though.

Yeah, and we’ve discussed all of that here, so it seems like a baseless complaint.

The same amount of interesting stuff was present year ago, 2 years ago, 3 years ago, 4 years ago and so on.

On the subject of the BLR, I have been wondering if we could allow a reduced effort level in exchange for disallowing current events. Something like allowing a paragraph-long post with a link for things more than 1/2/4/8 weeks old. Not convinced that would work, but it at least (mostly) avoids stomping on someone writing a longer post.

"Bare links more than one year old" ?

That could be worth a shot. +1

I like that idea a lot.

If you have a problem with the quality of the discourse then the solution is to contribute with something more interesting, not to add an uninteresting complaint.

I know man, how frustrating it can be when these goddamn wordcels won’t give me my insight porn fix. Daddy needs his medicine.

I thought we were shape rotators?

Not me. The only thing I hate more than shapes is the idea of rotating them. It's unnatural. If God wanted shapes rotated he would have oriented them differently in the first place. I'll start trusting shapes when someone makes a hexagonal barbecue.

I know this is a shitpost but a hexagonal barbecue would be dope, almost as dope as an octagonal barbecue.

Seems like any 2D shape is a tradeoff between square at one extreme, which is easiest to store, and circular at the other, where you get the least cold spots on the grill.

If God wanted shapes rotated he would have oriented them differently in the first place.

Which way did he orient the circle?

Eastward. You answer your own question.

How do we know that?

Igi might play along, but I won't - you are far too old to still believe in circles. Did you know that the first circle was made up by an isosceles triangle to mock oblongs? Just because some oblongs ran with it and started worshipping circles doesn't mean they're real.

(I know, I'm nutpicking, the oblongs I know don't believe circles are real, just a metaphor for striving to be a well rounded individual.)

The problem with this is that I've drawn circles. Like just today, I drew one in PowerPoint. I think the Oblongs were just a bit earily in their worship.

More comments

I thought we were wordcels!

ORIENT

transitive verb

3.c. : to cause to face or point toward the east

specifically : to build (a church or temple) with the longitudinal axis pointing eastward and the chief altar at the eastern end

Truly, I am humbled this day. You are correct.

AAQC material for me.

Ask, and ye shall receive.

Damn, that's a nice looking barbecue too. Ok shapes, you're off the shit list - for now. But I'm watching you.

You can become the change you want to see!

The forum also might have seasonal effects, after Thanksgiving to New Years is a busy time for many.

I have noticed an increase in long posts with low information density. My two hypotheses are that some users are either abusing stimulants (a survey would be interesting) or padding out their posts with LLMs. The former I suppose can't be helped, but the latter should be banned.

some users are either abusing stimulants

Ahem, I do have ADHD, and I resent the highly targeted accusation that just because half my posts here are written because I'm procrasturbating on studying, that constitutes abuse of a controlled substance!

I agree with the ideological impulses of most motte users and I assume a lot of upvoting/downvoting here is driven by "This person argues well" rather than "I agree with them". So every time I see a wall of text I just quickly check its score to make sure it is worth reading.

but the latter should be banned.

enforcing may be hard

third option: you learned many of things that were new for past you

My two hypotheses are that some users are either abusing stimulants

some people are writing addicts

The latter is definitely banned. Anytime we catch someone doing it they get banned. If we think they are doing it but we don't have proof they are on our shitlist for a while.

Those users are just following mod’s incentives.

We've banned more people for using LLMs then we have for low effort posts.

That's a bad summary because it doesn't account for how frequent the things are. We haven't banned anyone for murdering their opponent even though that's a worse offense than either low effort or LLMs.

(And the proper comparison isn't LLMs specifically. You ban relatively fewer people for long grammatical, low information posts than you do for standard low effort posts. This creates incentives for long, grammatical, low information posts.)

We haven't banned anyone for murdering their opponent even though that's a worse offense than either low effort or LLMs.

Isn't that mostly a result of it being kinda difficult to reach through the screen and throttle the other person?

Now I'm wondering about a way of inducing death online via something like epileptic seizures and strobe lighting.

Don't worry mods, this is all purely theoretical as I have nowhere near the technical skill or knowledge to put something like that into effect!

Jiro says nobody's been banned for murder, and that evokes in me the same spirit as this exchange from "The Man Who Was Thursday":

“I say we are merciful,” repeated Gregory furiously, “as the early Christians were merciful. Yet this did not prevent their being accused of eating human flesh. We do not eat human flesh—” “Shame!” cried Witherspoon. “Why not?”

Isn't that mostly a result of it being kinda difficult to reach through the screen and throttle the other person?

Yes, that's the point. "There are more bans for X than for Y" doesn't imply that Y is being treated more leniently.

This topic has literally come up anytime anyone has even been lightly reminded to not post low effort top level posts. And just about every time, some user like grognard says something like "that is what the mods incentivize" and then some idiot goes and makes a new account and starts posting LLM crap. You all don't see it because we don't let it through the spam filter. Occasionally some long time user jokingly posts it in response to a grognard type post, and we ban them.

Making a boring post is its own form of punishment. No one reads it and no one responds, or if they do respond they just accuse you of writing an LLM post. I'm almost certain that the accusations of LLM posts are more common than actual LLM posts, especially for stuff that gets through the spam filter.

Also people absolutely do get banned for long posts all the time. Jewdefender was recently perma-banned, and it was not for low effort posting. The last person I temp-banned for a low effort post did a low effort drunk post on thanksgiving. I gave them the ban mostly because I knew I'd be the only mod to look at it for possibly a few days, and I was annoyed at them giving me work to do on thanksgiving. It didn't help that it was a user with a bunch of past warnings and bans.

People keep complaining about it because it’s a legitimate problem.

If we’re just going by: how annoying are they to scroll by, then the long, low information density posts are worse (by a lot) than what call low effort posts. (I think these long low information posts are pretty low effort too). At least with short posts I know if I’m interested in it in a few seconds. Long manifestopoasting might take a couple of paragraphs before I realize what garbage I’m reading.

+1 for banning the blogposters at least as much as you ban the link posters

+1 for please please please just bring back the BLR please.

I use to be in favor of the bare link repository, I was heavily against removing it.

I have since changed my mind because of the culturewarroundup subreddit. They died. We lived.

The reason I think this has happened is that we require people to have discussion worthy things to bring to the table. How do we determine if something is discussion worthy? We ask our posters to start the discussion. If they can't it tells us one of a few things:

  1. They can't start the discussion on a given topic, because the topic sucks for the discussion purposes. This was one of the original reasons for creating the bare link repository and then removing it altogether. What tended to happen is people just dropped controversial thing #937 into the mix, and it wasn't very interesting to anyone. The topic is a dead horse, heavily beaten. Or the topic is just boring and not actually very culture war ladden.
  2. They can't start the discussion on a given topic, because they aren't a great writer and they don't know how to start the discussion. Many of these turned into flame threads.
  3. They won't start the discussion on a given topic, because they are lazy. As grognard said "I know man, how frustrating it can be when these goddamn wordcels won’t give me my insight porn fix. Daddy needs his medicine." There seems to be this type of person that comes here looking for insight porn, but yet providing nothing. They want to dictate the direction of insight porn without providing any. Fuck them. They are leeches and parasites. Contribute first, and then you can dictate the direction of insight porn.

There will always be one place that caters to the leeches and parasites. It will be the best place for reaching the most number of people. We aren't that place. We can't compete on that dimension. If you want to contribute we do our best to help. If you want to constantly bitch and complain about your inability to dictate the direction of discussion, we aren't a great place to be. You are in the latter category. Your only quality contribution is a long winded complaint about the BLR. Your numerous warnings are all a result of you complaing about someone posting top level comment about a topic you don't want to discuss. You are a leech and a parasite on the good discussions of others.

Wow cjet, I disagree with you on something, and when the topic comes up, I say that I like brevity and provide that side of the argument for it.

That makes me a leech and a parasite on the good discussions of others?

Absolutely unnecessarily mean and hurtful. Yeah that’s the only comments you see from me because they’re usually replies to you when you’re being a jerk to somebody.

+1 on a hell no for the BLR. The point isn't even about a place dying, places like these can be pretty active, but they become one-note, depressing, and intellectually vacuous. My go to example was KotakuInAction, it was getting plenty of new posts and hundreds of comments for as long as I bothered checking up on it.

More comments

No. Even if RFK is projected to win (downthread this is your interesting topic) and we have the unusual event of a third party President, IMO that’s much less interesting than the discussions just this week. Teen mental health, demographic change, birth rates, and education all have a substantive and demonstrable effect on our lives. Trump proved that the President doesn’t matter all that much for changing things that really do matter all that much. In fifty years it won’t matter much who was president (not to mention there’s close to zero we can do about changing the result). What will matter is whether all the teenagers are screwed in the head, whether China has global superiority due to technological dominance, whether people in your culture continue to exist, whether quality of life is better or worse…

There's so much interesting stuff going on right now - why is every post here such a snoozefest?

Like? What is interesting happening like now? Right now the culture war is in the WWI trench warfare no man's land mode. And everything is more or less old news. There is plenty to be outraged about, but nothing new. I have also noticed that this place has fewer of the breaking news type of posts, but that is mostly because there is marginally more breathing room on twitter. So lately we have more bird's eye overviews.

Like? What is interesting happening like now?

Pokimane tried selling rebranded cookies at absurd markup. Twitch streamer drama is a criminally neglected topic on this forum. Shame given how central it is in deciding the course of state policy.

Is this a sarcastic post? As much as I think LSF-adjacent stuff does provide culture war fodder, I don't think it's all that good a fit here, nor is it that important in the grand scheme of things, outside of how much it indicts institutional culture.

Pokimane's cookies are like Bella Delphine's gamer girl piss - it matters way more than you actually think. I'll have you know that wars have been started over the latter.

Whatever that is, how does that matter more than I think?

Have wars been started over what you think? They have over the piss.

This is a bizarre claim.

ain't no claims about it, just straight FACTS

Last weekend, there was also an attempt to turn the Sandra Bullock vehicle Hope Floats into a midnight movie extravaganza a la The Rocky Horror Picture Show with theater patrons dressing up as characters and reciting lines in unison with the movie. It didn't work out.

I haven’t found anywhere with equal quality commentary. Twitter is terribly formatted and seemingly encourages by its very nature edgelording, rudeness and one-upmanship. Reddit is full of morons who tediously invade any serious discussion about anything, and any well-moderated communities are (as we found out) banned from having interesting discussions. So what’s left? A few other obscure forums (DSL is fine but worse than here, with worse writing, and I prefer the Reddit structure) and blog comments sections (where participation is structured around what the singular blog author posts).

When something interesting happens, this is usually the place that I want to discuss it. ‘Experts’ can be found on Twitter, but that’s not really the idea - after all, I’m hardly an expert. Instead, I want discussion about current events with smart, somewhat ideologically sympathetic people in an environment that respects long-form writing, politeness, manners and which is well moderated to ensure the above.

Where else has that?

twitter is alright. you just got to find the interesting accounts. Too bad Musk broke some of the functionality of the site though to save costs . for example, you can only see 30 of someone's followers. That makes it harder to find interesting people

I’ve been spending a lot more time on Twitter lately, particularly since I can mottepost there now. What I formerly read as fundamental constraints in the directions you point turn out to be mediated pretty heavily by the part of it a person spends time in and who they choose to interact with. There’s a self-selecting group in and around the ACX-adjacent parts of Twitter that is pleasant and full of smart, well-mannered, somewhat ideologically sympathetic people, with two clear advantages in my view:

  1. The decentralized nature means that incompatible personalities can self-select into slightly different subcommunities where people who get on with both can still interact with both in what feels like the same space, meaning in particular that the ideological range is much broader than here.

  2. The public nature means that when you chat with people in your quiet corner, your posts will occasionally leave the bubble and contact a much wider audience, sometimes including the public figures you talk about. In the recent OpenAI drama, for example, the interim CEO was a well-known regular in Twitter’s ACX-adjacent sphere.

I don't think 'fundamental constraints of a medium' are real, necessarily, every mottepost could be a TikTok video if there weren't any other options, just like 2000 years ago knowledge was mostly transmitted via spoken lecture or conversation. But as people figure out social media platforms, they'll tend to collect their serious, subtle posts in long-form text, and their idle chatter and jokes on places like Twitter. So even though Twitter has most of the same people people you see posting here, or in the ACX comments, it has a different 'culture', and it's one that's a lot less careful about accuracy, and more just people slinging vibes at each other.

Don't get me wrong, I spend a lot of time on twitter, and have for years. I think a lot of other people here do too. But there's a reason I still come here.

it used to be from 2009-2012 twitter had lots of celebrity gossip, as well as the celebrities themselves having a large presence . now just AI talk. AI discussion is half the site it seems; the rest is split between sports, porn, pro-Palestine propaganda, politics, and Musk.

The problem with twitter is posting anonymously. I could use an alt but for the most part there are too many spammy anonymous posts. And a lot of things here are close enough to the Overton window or past it that there tough to discuss in your real name if your not a trust fund kid.

I think it’s mostly that this place has the exact same people who have the same opinions all the time. We read most of the same several sources, the same newspapers and blogs, follow the same people on X, and therefore tend to produce the same or similar opinions to those sources, and often on the same topics. Then when people comment about those topics, they have similar opinions to the authors of those sources, and make arguments similar to what the writers most people here read say on similar topics. I consider such intellectual incest to be a problem in the production of quality writing whether fiction or nonfiction because it limits your exposure to new ideas and facts contrary to your narrative. Then you’re limited in where your thoughts can take you because you literally don’t see the interesting stuff you disagree with.

The average level of discourse in Astral Codex Ten comment sections is intellectually more advanced when it comes to the writers' areas of competence than it is here, at the cost of being more constrained by the Overton window.

The Motte commentary is dominated by a certain type of personality and political stance: "blue tribe person who is also a mild-to-moderate social conservative, and is highly online, and has a large level of anxiety about the threat posed by wokeism". The voting isn't necessarily dominated by that kind of personality. I note that posts of mine which mostly get responses that disagree heavily with me often still get highly upvoted. I hope this means that Motteizens are just really good at upvoting for quality rather than because of agreement, but I am not sure about that.

In any case, the typical Motteizen personality and political stance tends to funnel conversation here into the same few well-worn channels.

It would be nice to get more people here who have significant disagreements with the average Motte poster, yet are willing to post here instead of running away because this is a place where it is ok to openly advocate for political positions that are significantly outside of the Overton window.

Off the top of my head, I don't know how to attract those people here, though.

no way. the comments here are a definite step-up in terms of IQ compared to astralcodexten comments. Not just in terms of technical expertise , but also the engagement and incisiveness. most of the comments there are people talking past each other, and not even fully engaged with each other or the topic at hand. People there make pithy arguments that are ignored or weakly rebutted.

The average level of discourse in Astral Codex Ten comment sections is intellectually more advanced when it comes to the writers' areas of competence than it is here

I disagree. Scott’s comments are better for Inside Silicon Valley gossip or technical discussions about AI models, sure, but not more generally. The regulars are probably smarter there (on the whole); then again likely so are many people on the Harvard Law Review, but they also likely have far fewer interesting opinions. And his audience is probably more American and otherwise more homogenous than ours.

ACX10 is just dull at this point. SSC was headed in that direction before the switch to Substack. Scott was at his best when he was discussing Culture War stuff or at least stuff somewhat related to the culture war. When he gave that up (presumably to avoid causing any friction with the judgmental Bay-Area types he hangs out with) he gave up most of what made his writing interesting. I still check it from time to time but I don't read every article and certainly wouldn't pay for the content. The best part of the current site is the book reviews, and most of those are guest reviews.

I actually found this year's guest reviews to be worse than in the past, especially Jane Jacobs, The Educated Mind, Man's Search for Meaning. A few of the other ones were good. I haven't reduced my consumption of Scott content at all, but I find the 'dull' posts about AI, gay younger brothers, pharmacology, etc interesting in itself though, so that might be the difference.

Where are you looking?

Between new twitter, substack, and a few discords there seems to be one of everything available and two of most, I used to come here first to learn things, now I come looking for after-commentary and there often isn't even that

Which Twitter accounts/Substacks/Discords?

The best advice I can give for Twitter is basically “follow eigenrobot and work outward from there.” tszzl (roon) and growing_daniel are also good “hub accounts” for the tech side of things. If you prefer to start with motte-adjacency, go with ymeskhout, AnechoicMedia_, sonyasupposedly, CremieuxRecueil, and Kulak.

There are a lot more accounts I could mention (I follow around 900 people) but the clear entry point to Twitter for people from here is the ACX-adjacent section (TPOT), which maintains a high standard of amiability/sanity norms while talking about much the same stuff as here.

This place would be a lot more interesting if AnechoicMedia_ and sonyasupposedly were still around.

Twitter has this down to a science, when you follow CatGirlKulak or whoever you might like, it will recommend a group of accounts to follow along with it. So I don't even know most of the people I follow, at least initially

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