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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   30063 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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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?

  • -13

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.

Journalism salaries suggest it never even began.

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.

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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.

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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.

And you are almost certainly the same guy I've banned the last seven times you rolled in as a "Shocked by all the white nationalism in this casino" poster.

Post something worthwhile, if all you do is complain about other posters, I am going to lobby with Zorba to let us just start whacking moles faster.

This place is basically a more benign white nationalist forum than almost all other similar discussions boards.

you forgot Unz Review. This place is not really WN. Maybe biased to being sympathetic with WN at most

Only like 1 in 20 of the frequent posters here are actually white nationalists

That would be far far far more than in a typical community (including both internet and real-world locations in USA/Europe).

Sure, no one is claiming this place is a representative sample of global or Western population. But "white nationalists are overrepresented here" (mostly due to them being banned nearly everywhere else, I might add) is a far cry from "Jared Taylor and American Renaissance are a sister site".

there was one notable poster Minotaur...anyone remember him

They make a larger proportion of the people willing to spend three hours writing a massive top-level post about the Jews and the Blacks ruining America. Frequent posters don't necessarily get the same visibility or drive the discussion if they're just writing a couple lines in response to a top-level post.

There are a few of those, but they're still <1/10th of all toplevels.

I think some people use the 'one drop rule' for determining whether or not a forum is a white nationalist forum.

TIL I am a white nationalist. Good to know, good to know! One more square ticked off the bingo card before I can shout "Literally Hitler!"

To you and @Hawaii98: this place cannot be any more than what others contribute to it. Be the change you want to see, etc. Those who show up are the ones who decide what gets talked about.

Sadly, we do still get the drive-by progressive who considers everybody that disagrees with them to be a white nationalist.

Preferable to the scenario in which we don't get any potential newcomers at all.

I do wonder where they're coming from (new people that is). We've cut off the old pipeline of direct SSC affiliation or even just being on Reddit.

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.

not everything goes back to HBD example: https://www.themotte.org/post/772/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/164914?context=8#context

I'd agree with that, and I would like to see more leftists. The problem is that they either storm in with a blazing "J'Accuse!" post and expect us all to repent of our sins like the weeping Magdalen, or they stick around for a bit then leave with "this place is a nest of fascists" because they got pushback on their views.

Impassionata, God bless all who sail in her/him/it, is still going but hasn't dropped by in a long while, they prefer to post over on /r/drama about how they totes showed us Motte-fascists where to get off and are now moving on to sting other targets (they're still obsessed with Trump, if anyone wants a sitrep).

they prefer to post over on /r/drama about how they totes showed us Motte-fascists where to get off and are now moving on to sting other targets

This reads to me as alien as zoomer slang

I may be too online in some young person spaces and hence picking it up by osmosis.

But Impassionata is still going on about Trump, fascism, how The Motte is a haven of bad 'uns, and how they were and are completely right about everything. They do seem to have recovered some of their sanity since that grinning marshmallow thing, at least.

Why are there no liberals to be found here? Scott Alexander himself appears to be one, and I’m assuming much of his readership would be too

They have many better echo chambers to reside at.

A lot of us are liberals, for certain values of "liberal." But we have long since drifted away from being "Scott Alexander's readers." We're a spin-off of a spin-off of a spin-off, at this point, with all the filtering that implies.

The SSC diaspora has fractured into a number of different communities with different leans - the ACX discord leans left iirc, we lean right, etc

The "there is no such thing as antifa" "actually I support antifa and their goals" routine eventually got old, and once the sub moved to an independent site there was no value to be had in colonizing a mainstream discussion space. The only draw now is discussion with people who disagree with you, which members of the previous leftist user group have said does not motivate them (quotes available on request, I take a lot of screenshots).

I just looked at all the left wing accounts that used to post on the motte. If they were still here we would be arguing over whether or not Israel is carrying out false flag attacks to end hostage trades so that people don't find out how kindly Hamas treated the hostages. There would be fights to justify Ireland's new ban criminalizing possession of material that might incite racial hatred. There would be, uh, lots of posts about how "right wing people fuck toasters" and every member of Trump's family should be executed? That last one might be an outlier, but theschism is welcome to it regardless.
Are we interested in that? I'm sick and tired of it personally, because most of the engagement on reddit was bad faith arguments and outright trolling by people who enjoyed torturing their opponents with the backing of reddit admins.

What a fascinating history. Thanks for recounting.

quotes available on request, I take a lot of screenshots

I am indeed interested in seeing that for myself.

The only draw now is discussion with people who disagree with you, which members of the previous leftist user group have said does not motivate them

Also, I don’t know how to phrase this in a less derogatory way… but why are leftists like this?

Power.

Intellectual flexibility is only beneficial if your interest group is not currently running things.

This is why the actual Marxists still have debates even with nationalists, why modern day progressives lost the ability to think from the point of view of their adversary, and why the moral majority was completely blindsided despite their ostensible control over culture.

Goliath is a giant, clad in armor and wielding the bigger stick. But his strength loses him the humility necessary to even understand the nature of David.

There's a sort of sliding scale among the SSC diaspora; DSL is way more to the right of this place; this place is fairly right-tolerant; ACX is in the middle trending centre-left, SSC remnant is more liberal/lefty, and TheSchism is for the liberals/lefties as a safe space for those who felt harassed off here/constantly being dog-piled.

The above is by no means authoritative or dispositive, nor intended to be taken as such.

Is DSL really way more to the right of this place? That wasn't my impression

What is DSL in this context?

http://datasecretslox.com, a forum with various old ssc comments posters

On some things it's definitely more conservative (I think there are a lot of economic conservatives and political conservatives both there and on here, but that's not necessarily the same thing as socially conservative).

Perhaps they do not like interacting with people whose opinions get them banned on large Western websites.

This seems more like a sneer than a contribution. Themotte's opinions, other than the few white nationalists, don't get you banned on most large Western websites, e.g. even pre-Musk most of the HBD bloggers had unsuspended twitter accounts.

There's a wide spectrum of people banned on various websites.

There's Alex Jones who is not antisemitic and not really a WN as far as I know.

There are elections / democracy skeptics.

There are antivaxxers who are not necessarily WNs (Alex Berenson is a zionist judging from his substack).

There are anti-feminists like James Damore.

There are TERFs.

There are gamergaters.

There are people who mock the obese.

There are anti-homosexuality people.

There are people who follow the same trails of thought as a Chappelle and who are not necessarily WN (Kanye West excluded perhaps?).

There is overlap, but a lot of these people are not WNs and most of the time they do not get banned for WN-related discussions.

You get banned on most political subreddits for bog standard conservative thought. I was banned from /r/science for asking an AMA poster whether IQ could explain the differences in his group outcomes...

yeah i agree that's bad, but that's not the central example of conservative thought. there are plenty of places 100x larger than us where conservatives and liberals debate, so op's reason isn't correct

Where do you think that is?

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I did a few of those political compass type quizzes recently and turns out I'm a filthy centrist with opinions in the mushy middle 😁

And yeah, that seems to now be a term of insult, so probably I would get banned on large Western websites for that.

Because it became clear Reddit admins would intervene eventually on a number of forbidden opinions.

Way before that -- discussion on the SSC subreddit itself was vibrant as heck, and Reddit was not being a problem at that time. The NYT on the other hand reached out to cancel Scott, so he got uncomfortable being associated with certain elements. (HBD mostly AIUI, which I think he probably still basically agrees with in the weak form)

Although we’ve largely reached a point of ideological homogeneity on the “classic” culture war issues, we still have very spirited disagreements about AI - which is a more interesting topic than the culture war anyway at this point.

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.

I think there is a lurking leftist middle that probably exists here, at least I am one, and I certainly don't believe in HBD as it's typically used. The difficulty is that the world is complex and it's hard to build and formulate the kind of critique necessary to capture nuance and rebut the plethora of arguments hoarded by the HBD side.

I think the tribal thing is overdone with left v right, the problem is the failure of people to think for themselves. I mean your claim that all blue is pro-immigration seems unlikely, or is evidence of some serious group-think. Immigration is a complex, and contextual issue. If half the population has one view on it, that's stupid.

I'm broadly in favour of diversity and different cultures existing as a plurality but words like multiculturalism and for that matter diversity are ruined for me as they have a monolithic group think sense about them.

I see this site as having plenty of people from the left who escaped from this kind of mindless group think.

HBD isn't mentioned all that much these days.

I think the tribal thing is overdone with left v right, the problem is the failure of people to think for themselves. I mean your claim that all blue is pro-immigration seems unlikely, or is evidence of some serious group-think. Immigration is a complex, and contextual issue. If half the population has one view on it, that's stupid.

I think the problem is that even though there may be widespread nuance in individual thought on issues like immigration, when it comes to rubber-meets-the-road rhetoric and policy, there's a knee-jerk reversion to the unnuanced view. It doesn't matter if someone or a lot of someones in Party A think some combination of B,C,D & E is true when they will only vote for people who say and pursue E as policy because it's the option that makes the best PR-tested battle cry. This is true of both major parties, who are more scared of losing than figuring out a problem, so instead of threading needles, all the front-line warriors are using sledgehammers. And while the nuanced thinkers sit back threading their needles, they're cheering on the sledgehammers.

1990s non-religious centrist conservative, part of Jonah Goldberg's "Remnant."

Yes, I agree, there's a reversion to slogan type simplification thing.

What do you mean by as it's typically used? The thing that annoys me the most about hbd is that I'm never sure if the person mentioning it thinks something obvious like 'genes impact outcome' or something idiotic like 'genes determine outcome'.

Well genes obviously impact outcome but it's whether there is a long term association with a particular ethnicity/culture grouping over time that I need more on. I mean I know there are lineage studies and various IQ research that does show group difference, but culture and socioeconomic factors are confounders presumably.

I know that various people will come on with this paper and that paper which tie the whole thing up, but there's a lot of links and difficult science to think about before I would start to assign attribution to various parts.

Also, like perhaps a lot of issues, it's not framed in a way that lets in much light. It's kind of, 'I've looked into it all and this is the result'. Ive also seen research being misunderstood, so extrapolating an interesting contrast experiment with a rare gene population being mixed with normal population and seeing a change in properties being extrapolated to racial mixing generally.

Finally, when it goes with what looks like basic prejudices and stereotypes one has to ask is their motivated reasoning. How hard has the person thought about complex genetics and statistics to form their view, or have they run with a view they like?

That is true. I should have specified that I mean culturally blue tribe. Most people who post here are white collar workers who live in cities and have primarily intellectual interests, they are not trades workers who live in small towns and watch NASCAR for fun.

HBD, which is believed by nearly everyone here,

I don't think this is true. I think that the majority probably agrees with HBD and thinks it's the main explanation behind black underperformance. It doesn't seem like some level of overwhelming consensus though, and coming from someone in the mushy middle(HBD is a perfectly good explanation for why there are few black math olympiad champions, but the relative criminality and lack of economic success is mostly cultural, and most of the uber-dysfunctional parts of black culture stem from liberals deciding to incentivize single motherhood) I don't think there's some overwhelming consensus that the black-white achievement gap is unfixable.

Did they used to be here? Why did they leave?

Because the evidence for HBD and related theories is so overwhelming that mainstream left-wing ideology cannot exist in the same environment. There's no convincing refutation of HBD-related theories that I've encountered so far, and without the ability to speak power to truth by getting HBDers fired, the mainstream left can't actually argue against it in any real way. So they just don't bother - they don't have an answer for HBD, and the implications of HBD just sink so many of their policies and beliefs that there's no way to reconcile the two. There are people on the left who are trying (Freddie deBoer for instance), but they're not actually finished yet.

No, they never came to the subreddit much less the site.

I don't think that's true. Blue tribers did show up in the themotte subreddit, but they left eventually. This was long before the move to this site though.

You would know more than me - I showed up after the creation of it.

My understanding is that the blue and red tribe refer more to cultures than to a set of ideas. Of course these cultures and certain political ideas go hand in hand, but they are not necessarily the same.

To quote the original SSC article coining these terms:

I think these “tribes” will turn out to be even stronger categories than politics. Harvard might skew 80-20 in terms of Democrats vs. Republicans, 90-10 in terms of liberals vs. conservatives, but maybe 99-1 in terms of Blues vs. Reds.

This is purely speculation and gut feeling, but I suspect most people here are part of the blue tribe minority whose politics do not line up with their tribe. HBD to me sounds more like an idea for disaffected edgy blue tribers, than for red tribers to be honest. I'm not from the US so maybe my perception is completely off, but I don't have the impression that the average grill-pilled rural Trump voter knows what HBD is. The people talking about HBD on the internet and the red tribers might both be anti-immigration, but that doesn't make them from the same tribe. A white Westerner converting to Islam on paper shares a lot of beliefs with the average Arab, but he doesn't become an Arab, even if he might be a more conservative Muslim than the average Arab. A middle-class college educated urbanite might develop edgy right wing political opinions, but that doesn't make him red tribe.

I get the same impression that being deep red tribe makes me a minority here, and that nearly everyone being a blue tribe conservative contributes to a lot of the doomerposting.

I'm not from the US so maybe my perception is completely off, but I don't have the impression that the average grill-pilled rural Trump voter knows what HBD is.

You're correct, of course, but the average blue triber doesn't either; believing "most blacks are stupid and we can't fix it" would be coded as a red tribe complaint about AADOS culture. The phrase "blacks have genetically lower IQ's" would come off as a little more blue tribe, but mostly for dialect reasons. The mainstream of both thinks that IQ is not particularly hereditary; for red tribers this is usually in the form of "a culture that values hard work and learning will generate smarter people. Look at the orientals- they were dirt poor when they came here, now they're the smartest and richest people in the country" and the blue tribe in the form of "education resources dictate outcomes" or something like that.

The mainstream of both thinks that IQ is not particularly hereditary

They may believe it doesn't vary by ethnic group, but they certainly believe it's hereditary in the sense that they expect smart parents to result in smart kids and that the opposite is true as well. Many may have conflicting views in this area, believing this on the micro-level while denying larger-scale consequences.

Yeah. The tribes are not a particularly well-defined thing anyhow, but from what I've understood, it would be a mix of various scales like:

Blue vs Red Urban vs Rural Secular vs Religious Academic vs practical job "Anywhere" vs "Somewhere" Post-sexual-revolution mores vs. pre-sexual-revolution mores

Of course you could continue this list quite a bit (views feminism positively or negatively, dietary questions, attitudes towards military service etc.) but those would probably be the most important ones.

Insofar as the rationalist community goes, I daresay most would be firmly urban, secular, academic "anywhere" and have post-sexual-revolution mores, ie. blue tribe, whatever their views on politics are. Not everyone, of course. The whole "gray tribe" thing, as has been said repeatedly, is less a tribe and more of a way for people who often are super-duper blue tribe, so blue that even most blues blanch, to disattach themselves from whatever "blue" political views and qualities they feel uncomfortable with - perhaps aided by the very process of tribal detachment that the extremeness of their "blueness" causes.

Unfortunately, these days people often just use "red tribe" to mean Republican and "blue tribe" to mean Democrat, even though thre are loads of blue tribe Republicans (even a lot of the Republican leadership would feel more comfortable at a dinner party with professors in Rhode Island than at a barbecue with plumbers in Texas) and red tribe Democrats (someone like Jim Cornette is a classic example, albeit imperfect since he's an atheist).

Reality is indeed unfortunate.

Tribal splits are polarizing. Polarization is a process; the system's state changes over time, in this case with the divide between the tribes growing more and more stark as people drift toward one of the two poles. And in fact, within a year or two of that article, a considerable number of prominant republicans endorsed the democratic presidential candidate over the candidate of their own party. "Blue Tribe" did, in fact, mean "Democrat", even for purported Republicans.

Two or three times a month, people reference the part of the article where Scott states that Blue Tribe and Red Tribe aren't equivalent to Democrat and Republican. But if tribal identity grows more important to people over time, then we should expect to see the correlation between blue:Democrat and red:Republican to increase over time, not stay the same. And this is, in fact, what we've seen. The tribes and parties are more closely correlated than they were when the essay was written, and they will be more closely correlated still in the future as the culture war continues to escalate.

No, they really don't. You're going to have to provide some evidence or an argument that isn't "just trust me bro" if you don't wanna get downvoted to oblivion on here.

They mean blue tribe in the more vague sense as in urban PMC, which most people here are.

It’s a cultural reference point. Many people here watch the same shows, have the same hobbies, the same jobs, send their kids to the same schools, live in the same places, vacation in the same places and are friends and family with the modal PMC urban progressive type of person. Their reactionary views don’t change that they’re both part of the same cultural substrate (and share the same social and economic class).

Do they? There is at least in my experience a big divide pre and post kids.

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.

You're the guy who keeps getting banned on a new account, right? Not confident, but it fits.

Almost certainly. "jewdefender" got banned I think november 23d, and this guy joined the 24th.

uncredentialed

why do you assume so?

He posts astute and data-driven threads on a wide cariety of topics worth talking about, including a number that are of obvious direct personal interest to me. Why on earth wouldn’t I recommend him?

I very frankly do not care who someone is "adjacent to"; I care who they are and what they say. Your favored public thinkers, whoever they are, are extremely unlikely to talk about things as in the link above. Know why I can say that? Because I follow just about everyone who talks visibly about that stuff. People should talk about it more. That he does so is a credit to him and a strike against those who complain that I would so much as mention him.

Your line about "Jews" betrays your own ignorance about him, incidentally. He's anything but antisemitic, and inasmuch as I have disputes with him on that broad topic, it is that he sees Israel's hands as rather cleaner than I personally do. Your opponents do not all fit into a single bucket that you can label "fascist" and have done with it, and I have little patience for dark insinuations of this sort.

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

That's asking to be moderated, which is the lion's share of the problem.

I have, I made a cool comment not so long ago about RFK jr and a possible multiparty election https://www.themotte.org/post/704/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/146753?context=8#context

The resulting conversation did not spark joy. Most people actively responded like the exact automaton I was initially criticizing.

Because that post posits an extremely unlikely scenario where people can actually vote for RFK.

You briefly, very briefly, mention ballot access. As if that isn’t the whole shebang right there. Even if he has some groundswell of support, what’s the plausible plan to find those voters, get signatures, get signatures in a way that comply with the arcane bits of local election law, and then defend against the DNC’s very experienced legal teams that know exactly how to stifle ballot access?

You also got unlucky with the timing there. Another poster posted above you not even five minutes later about wikipedia. And that thread in general was full of good top level posts.

Case in point.

He just polled today at 17%, his average is 16%, we're clearly not dealing with the same fact pattern

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2024/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_biden_vs_kennedy_vs_west-8289.html

That's less than Perot who got zero electoral votes and was also irrelevant to the 1992 presidential election.

His popularity is interesting, but we've all been on this ride (of third party Presidential candidacies) before, and it doesn't end well. The system isn't structured for it. At best, all they accomplish is to take votes away from the main party candidate that's closest to their views, thus ensuring that the one further from their views wins. See Ross Perot. If you want to seriously argue for it, you need a reason why this time might be different.

At best, all they accomplish is to take votes away from the main party candidate that's closest to their views, thus ensuring that the one further from their views wins.

The interesting thing about RFK i guess is that both other candidates seem about equally far from his views; kind of different axes but not really.

And what tends to happen to third party candidates when the vote actually happens? They collapse. The next president will, unless either of them die, be Trump or Biden. Discussing the spoiler effect might be interesting, but that’s not a ‘three horse race’, it’s a two horse race with some not-uncommon (see Perot/Bush) dynamics.

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