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Notes -
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?
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.
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:
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.
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.
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