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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.
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