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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3637 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 14, 2024

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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Metformin, is widely recognized as the only pharmaceutical drug currently in use with (modest), anti-aging effects. It’s my understanding that this is hypothesized to be primarily a result of its ability to reduce blood glucose.

Does anyone know if there’s any research into whether newer antidiabetic pharmaceuticals (like ozempic or trizepeptide) may also have this affect in non obese people?

After occasionally reading NHI/UAP posts on X and 4chan, and of course in here when it comes up, I’ve had a thought that I’ve not seen expressed.

The conventional take is that any disclosure will have earth shattering ramifications for the religions of the world. That evidence of NHI would result in people doubting their faith, their religious leaders, and their belief that humans have some primacy in the universe. Basically that it would have catastrophic results for religion.

I expect the exact opposite would happen. I expect that materialists, “Scientists”, the “IFL Science” crowd, debunkers, and Atheists would be the ones that will be least likely at accept a new paradigm.

Religious people by definition are more open to metaphysics and they’re also quite used to a world where we have beliefs in opposition to the mainstream. I have no doubt that any NHI as a concept would be integrated into existing religion without all that much trouble.

As for the Science crowd, the existence of NHI would necessarily mean that the story they’ve defended for their entire lives is either wrong or incomplete. We’ve seen how that’s worked out on other topics recently. I expect no amount of evidence presented would ever be enough. I supposed that this would depend on exactly what is being disclosed and what beliefs are violated. Learning that FTL travel is possible would be quite different from the inter dimensional travel that’s been suggested lately. It would also depend on the exact mechanism of disclosure. If TPTB were to get the prestigious journals and community influencers on board first and in a systematic way, people would just get their normal software update so that’s they’re on the right side of The Current Thing. No different than if the Pope told us Catholics that NHI were fully in communion with the Church.

Long story short: I believe the conventional thinking that NHI would kill religion is severely outdated. Perhaps this was true at one time when religion was the dominant societal meme. No longer.

NHI

We had LLMs show up with comparable-to-human levels of intelligence and the religious don't seem to particularly care.

At any rate, unless we discover a reason why traveling interstellar distances, at close to relativistic speeds or even FTL, is possible without obvious signatures, or a source of energy that accounts for the most abundant one (all those stars freely dissipating their energy into the void without doing useful work with it), I have no reason to think that UAPs are convincing evidence of extraterrestrial, advanced intelligence.

The fact we have twinkling stars in the night sky is sufficient claim against that, and if all our telescopes and space surveys are lying to us, I don't care what a bunch of sensors on a fighter jet or grainy videos claim.

I’m suggesting something beyond the status quo. A continuation of more videos being released, more government officials making statements, perhaps a formal declaration by states.

That’s my whole point. I suspect that there is perhaps no sequence of events that could happen that would convince the Science crowd that NHI exists.

Do you expect "the Science crowd" (i.e. the majority of Westerners) to not believe aliens exist even if they literally Show Us The Aliens?

That’s my whole point. I suspect that there is perhaps no sequence of events that could happen that would convince the Science crowd that NHI exists.

A Russian family that had cut all contacts to civilization and lived in the woods as hermits figured out Sputnik from seeing a new "star" that moved very fast across the sky. There's a lot of very observable new things you can make happen if you want and have the technology for it.

I suspect that there is perhaps no sequence of events that could happen that would convince the Science crowd that NHI exists.

That sounds more like a failure of imagination than anything else. I can imagine several thousand different things that could convince me, or anyone with half a brain, to take the possibility of contact by aliens with interstellar capabilities seriously.

They could hijack terrestrial comms. Shoot lasers from the moon or Jupiter. Submit proofs of a dozen unsolved mathematical conjectures. Land a million drones in every major city. Detonate gigaton antimatter explosives in interplanetary space. Targeted surgical strikes on every nuclear silo. Drop a blue whale on the White House lawn. Overload our neutrino detectors and graviton wave observatories with waves encoding pi in base 10. Or just display the drive signatures of their ships slowing down from relativistic speeds, as would be obvious to any backyard astronomer unless they have a means of propulsion that doesn't emit visible radiation.

What leaves me entirely unconvinced is weird artifacts on sensors or even competent eye-witness footage. Interstellar aliens would need a very perverse and specific modus operandi for that to be their first way of making themselves known, let alone lack the competence to be so obvious.

IIRC- and take this with a grain of salt because my most advanced science class was geology for nonscience majors- every hypothesized FTL drive leaves some kind of telltale signature at the end, too. So even aliens that figured out how to make an alcubierre drive work give off a telltale signature that we should have picked up if they’re anywhere in the neighborhood.

An Alcubierre Drive has a nasty tendency to accumulate all the space dust/debris the vessel encounters along the way, which is eventually liberated eventually, as you need to smooth out the bubble of warped space-time at the end of your journey.

So the braking resembles the blast from a relativistic shotgun, I don't recall figures on the magnitude of the energy released, or carried by the projectiles, but it's probably not a good idea to point it at anything inhabited. Maybe dumping it into a star might work. Either way, I suspect we would notice if it happened anywhere important within the orbit of Pluto.

Yeah, that’s what I was referring to, but I think krasnikov tubes and the fringe-but-math-works hyperspace theories also suggest there’d be some weird anomalies at the exit- and wormholes are a weird and noticeable anomaly.

all our telescopes and space surveys are lying to us

We're lying to the telescopes. The telescopes say there's something massively wrong with our model of the universe - dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of the universe's energy. That leaves a lot of space for aliens to dwell, likely rendering stars obsolete. From energy alone, they're pretty irrelevant, merely a subset of that 5% conventional matter.

In theory we could burn wood for fuel for energy but in practice it's a hassle and inefficient compared to proper energy sources. Perhaps stars are similar. Green Man Intergalactic could make 20% returns on a Dyson Swarm but 35% on a dark energy plant, he'll choose the latter every single time.

Either stars and all known baryonic matter are peanuts compared to the real structure of the universe or general relativity is seriously broken. Regardless, we aren't in a good position to say 'there are no aliens/no FTL' given we clearly don't understand what's going on out there.

Well, LLMs are usually not thought to be conscious or moral agents in the usual sense. I assume that the religious would be more likely to have trouble with other creatures, depending on the variety of religion in question (but see C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy). If you think, for example, that it was essential that God become human, hence Jesus Christ, well, aliens might be out of luck. But if you just require obedience or something, there seems to be no problem.

Of course, many of the religious do believe in non-human intelligences in the form of angels/demons.

I think a lot of those people are referring to specific theories in UFO circles that the aliens would claim (truly or falsely, depending on the teller) that they have been in contact with earth for millennia and specifically invented world religions as a method of control. Not necessarily just the discovered existence of alien life in general.

I expect the exact opposite would happen. I expect that materialists, “Scientists”, the “IFL Science” crowd, debunkers, and Atheists would be the ones that will be least likely at accept a new paradigm.

Well, we should then observe that atheists/agnostics/nonreligious would be much less likely believe in existence of intelligent aliens, compared to believers.

Do we observe it?

Religious Americans less likely to believe intelligent life exists on other planets

By comparison, roughly three-quarters of those who say that religion is less important in their lives (76%) say that intelligent life exists elsewhere. Adults who pray daily are also less likely than those who seldom or never pray to say intelligent life exists on other planets (54% vs. 80%).

White evangelical Protestants, who tend to be highly religious, are less likely than other religious groups to say intelligent life probably exists on other planets; 40% hold this view. Most White non-evangelical Protestants (65%), Catholics (67%) and religiously unaffiliated adults (80%) say their best guess is that there is intelligent life beyond Earth. Black Protestants are more divided on the topic, with 55% saying their best guess is that intelligent life exists on other planets and 44% expressing the opposite opinion. (Due to sample size limitations, this analysis does not show some smaller religious groups, including Jewish and Muslim Americans.)

Well, I think that IFL science people are likely to be shocked a bit more because I get the sense that they don’t really like science or even really understand how science actually works. What IFL-science types actually like is the ability to use the authority of “science says” to smugly push their pet theories and fantasies. So when something comes along that cannot fit into their narrative about the universe, they’re not going to be able to understand it, they’re going to be mind blown because they have no idea what science is or how it works or what exobiology is about. They think it’s Star Trek aliens with bumpy foreheads, who are just like us but higher up on the Kardishev scale.

Religion has a better chance, depending on the religion. I don’t think the Jews would care. Buddhists would see this as more life, no different from Earth life. Pagan and Hindu world views really don’t forbid aliens. Christians and Muslims might be mind blown depending on what they believe about demons and angels.

Most of the “IFL science” crowd already believe that intelligent alien civilizations almost certainly exist, at least in my experience. They just don’t believe they’ve visited earth. But that leap - from ‘they exist’ to ‘they exist and actually have visited us’ - doesn’t seem as great as you suggest.

Religion, of course, would be fine. Mormonism still exists despite what even disinterested third parties have to admit is a pretty thorough deboonking, and traditional Christianity, Islam, Judaism and so on are much more vague and make fewer easily falsifiable historical / metaphysical claims.

But that leap - from ‘they exist’ to ‘they exist and actually have visited us’ - doesn’t seem as great as you suggest.

This leap is literally measured in light years. Humanity would need a massive upgrade of its spacefaring technology to reach even the nearest star. Our furthest-reaching satellite broke down in less than 50 years and is too slow to reach Alpha Centauri even if we fired it in the right direction. A constant-acceleration drive that is also powerful enough to routinely spend enough delta-V to get close to the planet instead of hanging around Kuiper Belt? We're very far away from building something like this, but would notice a craft capable of this kind of manoeuvres.

I agree it’s a huge technological leap. I’m saying that for most of the atheist humanity fuck yeah space is cool I fucking love science crowd, aliens visiting earth wouldn’t shatter their model of the universe. (And the same, of course, is true for the religious).

How could a disinterested third party exist?? It's either the One True Church or a literal fraud. Any truly disinterested observer should be disregarded entirely--they don't understand what it is they're observing.

I mean by that someone not deeply invested in litigating the particular claims of individual Abrahamic (sub-)religions.

So, someone who's already dismissed them all as factually incorrect, then. Surely such a person should not be upheld as the gold standard of objectivity in this case.

Regarding Mormonism's deboonking or lack thereof, I put a lot more weight on the opinions of vindictive ex-mormons who feel betrayed, convert mormons who took the truth-seeking process seriously, and non-converts from any background who also took it seriously and decided Mormonism wasn't true.

Religious people by definition are more open to metaphysics

No, by definition we have much stronger commitments to given metaphysical ideas. There’s a pretty big difference.

Eh, I find that most atheists are extremely implicitly committed to the a metaphysical ontology that is just, "Oops, I have the methodological constraints of science, and I've mistaken them for an actual metaphysical ontology." When you poke them on this, they don't clarify, "No, actually, I'm not making this extremely boneheaded mistake." They're still committed to it. They just get angry that you pointed it out.

I remember someone made the claim that something was only true to the extent it was useful. To this I replied that some math concepts were discovered long before they were useful in physics, and there are still many math concepts that we don't have an application for yet. Some of these might be applied in the future, but it's not impossible that some math concepts are never useful. Does that make a valid theorem as false as 2+2=fish?

I didn't get a response back but I have wondered since if it changed their mind at all.

Might be a definition issue. Obviously I don't know the specifics of that discussion, but the person might have meant "useful" as in the "all models are wrong, but some are useful" (i.e., "useful" in the sense that they can be used to build theorems on or make falsifiable hypotheses), rather than in the sense of "having practical applications". If so, I'd be tempted to agree.

He made it clear that useful meant, "measurably impacts my day to day life, all else is mental masturbation."

For example, most historical details were also considered false, regardless of how sure we are that they really happened.

Ah, nevermind, then. Thanks for the context.

Do you believe in any ‘supernatural’ stuff like ghosts or psionic powers?

What are the most convincing things you’ve seen/read one way or another?

No and no. I've found any and all supposed evidence of it to be a shaggy-dog dicktease. I enjoy these things as fiction and find purported IRL instances to be very ineptly written by stupid people who know less than me about physics, biology, history, psychology, and Magic, The Gathering. Same attitude I have towards UFO people and Astrology people.

No? I have a degree in Zoology and won a competitive EDH tourney running Toshiro Umezawa, and I've extensively read trash genre fiction.

No.

Though weirdly, I do think I had an encounter with a púca in its goat-form on a hillside.

So, 🤷‍♀️

I feel like there's a story there that's not being told.

I have a strange fascination with the supernatural having always been attracted to the Occult, the Mystic, the Otherworldly, the Numinous while not believing any of the claims.

The supernatural has been instead a great inspiration in the pursue of my more "rational" passions. I remember being in second grade, having finished Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and wanting to study Potions. That brought me to the discovery that there was a thing called Chemistry which seemed suspiciously similar to Potions. What other "mystical" arts existed in the world? Ironically then, my passion for Magic fomented my passion for Science: if Potions are Chemistry than Transfiguration is Material Science? If Astrology is Astrophysics then Numerology is Math? The study of spells? Language learning. The study of the obscure forces of the Universe? Physics.

Ages ago while reading lesswrong I tried to get rid of these fascinations and in my opinion it made my life more miser: the "irrational" part was actually an important part of how I process the world, and seeing myself as a Mage was actually more in line with my natural proclivities (and more fun).

Even now, while still not being a believer, I cannot shake that there is something out there: in fact, the more I study the astrophysics of the early Universe the more fucked up it all seems; but that's probably the strange architecture of my brain. It is a sort of fascination similar to wanting to peek down while standing near a precipice, or even wanting to jump, wanting to scratch the surface and discover all this secret dangerous "knowledge".

Yes, but only from my own personal exposure. No writings on it would have been convincing to me.

Me and groups of up to 6 people all experiencing the same things, both together and separately, convinced me.

I am content for such things to remain not well understood, however.

Me and groups of up to 6 people all experiencing the same things, both together and separately, convinced me.

Care to share your experience?

No.

The closest I've come to the supernatural was a single unexplainable experience that I had with another atheist-skeptic at 3am that we both vividly remember. Incredibly fast and close lights with no attached sound passing by us on a lonely highway.

Beyond that, there's been nothing even remotely convincing beyond science being unable to figure out the source of everything. Perhaps a bit unlike nara, I'm comfortable with giving the mathematicians/physicists/astronomers one freebie. I think it's very possible there is no source of everything, it just is.

I've had unnerving instances of intuition, déjà vu, etc. but it happens rarely enough that it seems like a combination of random chance and my sensory data hopping into a "memory" space of my brain.

I have seen claims that deja vu is actually a seizure in the temporal lobe.

Before anyone gets alarmed, that doesn't mean it's a big deal, just a minor hiccup in an otherwise highly specialized and efficient machine. It's a nigh universal experience, and unless it's regular and recurrent, not something to worry about by itself.

https://www.epilepsyadvocate.com/blog/epilepsy-and-deja-vu

What about jamais vu?

The same article claims both count.

As I stress again, just because it is "technically" a seizure is no big deal, it is super common/almost always benign. Just another glitch in the system really.

But some people have chronic jamais vu for a long time. So it can't just be caused by seizures. Unless people can have constant seizures.

The definition of a seizure is simply uncontrolled/abnormal erratic firing of a group of neurons. That can range from anything from weird sensations, muscle jerks or stiffness, and largely inconsequential things like deja vu and jamais vu.

Just because it's a "seizure" doesn't mean it has to align with the popular conception of someone passing out or thrashing about on the floor! Even more broadly recognized forms of seizures can be of little longterm consequence, such as absence seizures in children, which manifest as them zoning out or staring, or just automatically doing things like walking while having no later recollection of events.

DV/JV can be a sign of temporal lobe epilepsy, but is posited to be occur as a very minor/inconsequential form of "seizure" by itself.

For example:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23315620/

Conclusions: Déjà vu is common and qualitatively similar whether it occurs as an epileptic aura or normal phenomenon. However ictal déjà vu occurs more frequently and is accompanied by several distinctive features. It is distinguished primarily by 'the company it keeps'.

There is also active debate on the topic, such as:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3420423/#sec7title

Same here with late-night encounter. Years back, I was walking along a country road at night with my mother - it had no lighting - and as we passed one particular place where there was a fence/gate in the wall, I had a feeling there was something behind it, something that it would be better not to encounter.

Very odd, I said nothing, and when we walked back on the return trip I waited to see if I would feel the same when passing that spot. No, but my mother later asked me "Did you think there was someone or something behind that gate?" because she had felt the same.

What was it? No idea, except maybe ancestral instincts kicking in about being out at night when predators might be lying in wait. I've never had an experience like it before or since, and I never had any feeling about that particular place prior. There weren't any ghost stories or other folk tales associated with it, so I wasn't primed to feel 'haunted'.

Not really, no.

In terms of most convincing, the first time I had sleep paralysis it was preceded by an erotic dream. I was having the dream and then "woke up" to the feeling of something sitting on my chest and having the image of a black demonic creature with red burning eyes (similar to this painting, which I believe I had already seen at that time). I mumbled my way through the Lord's Prayer until I woke up fully.

After waking up, I fully understood how someone could genuinely believe they had been visited by succubi / incubi. For me, it was sorted by continuing to have instances of sleep paralysis (usually not preceded by erotic dreams and with a whole menagerie of creatures of different forms tormenting me) that did not conform to that pattern until I improved my sleeping habits, at which point the sleep paralysis became much rarer.

Were you able to close your eyes during sleep paralysis?

I honestly can't remember with certainty- I can say for sure that sometimes my eyes were open and sometimes they were closed and there were cases on both fronts where I did not "see" whatever happened to be plaguing me, but "knew" with clarity what it was and where it was. But I do not recall specifically closing or opening my eyes during an episode.

Do you believe in any ‘supernatural’ stuff like ghosts or psionic powers?

Not as such, no.

What are the most convincing things you’ve seen/read one way or another?

The cosmological and teleological arguments for the existence of God are pretty compelling to me, especially when paired with arguments about living in a simulation. Why does anything exist? Why does reality follow orderly laws? Occasionally a physicist or astronomer will make a bunch of noise about how it isn't mysterious, here have some equations about quantum vacuums or some shit, case closed, but from a philosophical perspective that's no answer at all. If the laws of the universe are themselves responsible for the existence of the universe, you still haven't explained why there are laws. The answer "well we have to stop somewhere" is an admission that they haven't accomplished the god-killing mathematics they've been using to sell their book after all.

On balance these arguments get you a lot less than most theists appear to think, since it seems like an intentional being capable of creating at least one universe is probably so alien that treating it like a loving father figure who wants to help you find your car keys is a stretch, and more than a stretch. And maybe there are just "fundamental laws" that are how everything is and how everything always will be--how could I possibly know? I can't even begin to check. But in my experience, nothing comes from nothing, and infinities exist only in the realm of mathematics, so the fact that I nevertheless find myself existing in a finite universe is pretty damn surprising.

Arguably, then, the most supernatural thing I have any experience with is me and my conscious existence, which for some reason goes away for a while every night. Emergent properties are kind of spooky!

So, closer to home--leaps of intuition and the generation of new knowledge are often kind of spooky. Occasionally--not more than two or three times a year, sometimes every couple of years--I will realize something and at the same time know it is true. (Trivial things, usually--so-and-so is pregnant even though she's not showing yet, they fired that guy because next month the board of directors wants to do this other thing, etc.) Sometimes this involves the prediction of future events. These realizations are almost never mistaken, and they are always arguably discernible based on facts that I actually know, but that I hadn't specifically put together in context. This seems like good evidence that there is a part of my brain that is making connections or processing information without my conscious effort. But I can understand why some people might treat that "aha!" feeling as a revelation from God or something.

But that's not the spooky part. The spooky part is how this sometimes leads to weird coincidences like Leibniz and Newton inventing calculus at the same time. The obvious hypothesis is that there was enough overlapping knowledge accumulated in a particular place at a particular time to generate these ideas, so multiple people arrive at the conclusion simultaneously. But then I read about, like, Anaximander realizing the rudiments of evolution (but not natural selection) in ancient Greece and notice that it took thousands of years for anyone to really do something with that idea, and I find myself re-puzzled by where it is we actually get "new" knowledge.

Would it be antagonistic or obnoxious if I jumped in to argue with some of this?

Would it be antagonistic or obnoxious if I jumped in to argue with some of this?

It would not!

Well, I suppose you could probably find a way to argue that is antagonistic or obnoxious, but just the fact of arguing by itself wouldn't reach that level automatically. This is a discussion website, so generally argument is not only permitted, but encouraged!

If you could choose anywhere in the US to settle down, where would it be and why (ignoring job/family ties for present purposes)? I'm thinking of making a move and have a preference for proximity to major urban centers and despise humid weather. Unfortunately, (maybe I've spent too much time online) recent news on crime and the like has got me feeling rather bearish on the futures of NYC, LA, Chicago, and SF.

No idea, I've never been over the pond.

Deep in the Rocky Mountains.

If we're ignoring job/family ties then Hawaii, it's got the nicest weather in the nation.

Month by month these are probably my favorite places:

December to February in Key West for the weather and diving.

March to June in NYC.

July to Labor Day in Vermont, New Hampshire or somewhere else mountainous in New England, for the hiking and some riding. Love Bretton Woods / Mount Washington especially with family.

September to October in NYC. Probably the best time of year in the city.

November in Los Angeles. LA is the epitome of a certain imagination of America, and I kind of love it, although never for more than a few weeks at once.

Hard to do with kids though, so if I had them I’d probably live in an affluent town somewhere in California an hour or two outside either SF or LA (Easy A always makes Ojai look good, but I’d probably pick somewhere in wine country). That or NYC.

With your preferences, probably Boise or San Antonio. SLC is also plausible and has nicer nature within a couple hours’ drive, but might be a harder cultural fit.

Flagstaff. College town, beautiful nature, dry, but not too hot. I could theoretically try something in Utah, but as much as I agree with the Mormons on various profane topics, I can't get over the fact that their practices are derived from doubly silly stuff.

If it's hot, dry weather you want, you can't do better than Phoenix or Tucson (if you like mild winters), or Salt Lake City, Boise or Denver (if you like snow and cold winters).

All of these places' housing prices have spiked in the last few years and all have homeless problems in the downtown areas, but tell me a US city that doesn't.

I actually did make this decision about five years ago, and chose to move to Cincinnati. Lovely old architecture everywhere, baseball, strong drinking culture, great museums. Cool German heritage and related huge Oktoberfests. Temperate four-season climate and the winters are not really severe. Everything is cheap, and yet it's not a big dumpster fire like other places where that's true. I love it here.

If I had it to do over, I might make the same choice. Other places I've been to and would consider are:

Wheeling, WV Owensboro, KY Pittsburgh, PA

I suppose if nothing else, I've found the region that I like best. (And I'm not from this part of the country.) I have lived in other, bigger cities and had a less good time in general.

Is anyone here familiar with Malcolm Gladwell's book Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know? Is there a high-quality review anywhere that summarizes what I should know going into it? I understand that Gladwell has a bad reputation around here generally; is there a good general summary of his offenses to help me keep an appropriately skeptical mindset?

I realize that there's probably some irony in worrying about being biased toward excessive trust in someone who's writing in part about how people are biased toward excessive trust.

I just listened to the audiobook. I was actually considering writing a book review but didn't think there was much value in i. It isn't particularly worth reading imo. It's not really about "Talking to Strangers" like it claims so much as it looks into systematic/psychological reasons for why one of the BLM cases Sandra Bland got pulled over and it went so wrong beyond the leftist explanation of "racism" and rightist explanation of "just a bad apple".

It presents three reasons. The first is that most people are predisposed to trusting others, and it takes a lot of evidence to convince someone that a person is lying. But some people (like the cop in the Sandra Bland case) are very distrusting/paranoid and start off suspicious of people. His ultimate point on this was pretty unclear since he spent a long time praising the suspicious guy who uncovered Bernie Madoff's fraud long before anyone else, but also seemed to conclude we shouldn't encourage/place paranoid people in power like the cop since it'd cause society to break down. That we need trust for meaningful and smooth interactions. He never addresses high trust/low trust societies and just kind of assumes everyone is as trustful as Americans, implying some studies using college students are indicative of the ancestral environment, which I think is pretty bad. He also doesn't really mention how, instead of a simple paranoid/trusting binary, we could maybe try to work harder at actually examining whether the evidence that someone is lying is strong or nonsense. This section was just generally too narrow and shallow imo.

His second point is all about how body language and facial expressions can be very misleading. That while you could practically understand an episode of Friends with volume off because the body language and facial expressions are so over the top, in real life things are much more unclear but people don't realize that. And they think they can determine guilt/innocence based off how people act but that's really pretty much nonsense, even for the most skilled interrogators. I think this is all true but doesn't really have much depth to it, no point in reading 50 pages on it.

The third section was about a particular policing policy. In Kansas City in the 90s, they had really bad crime, and they did lots of research and experiments into how to lower it. The conclusions they eventually came to after trying lots of things was that much of the crime was isolated to very small geographic locations, like just one or two blocks, or a stretch of street. You might see something like 80% of the crime in the city in like 3% of its geographic area, or something like that, I forget the exact numbers or if it was just certain subsets of crime but they were very dramatic. And that the best way to reduce crime was for cops to go into those high crime areas at high crime times(e.g at night in the dark) and constantly search people's cars. Make up some excuse like a broken taillight or that they didn't signal or whatever, use that as an excuse to question the driver, and if the driver looks suspicious search the car. And that had high rates of catching people with illegal drugs and guns and vastly reduced crime. But the rest of American police departments only heard the last part about "pull people over for dumb reasons and look for excuses to search them", without the part about "only do this in high crime areas", and then police started annoying people and wasting money and even arresting lots of innocent people for dumb reasons which was very bad. I don't really know enough about policing to know if this section was completely accurate but it sounds plausible to me based off what I do know. I've been meaning to make some sort of post somewhere discussing this section because doing this sort of policing right, being extremely heavy handed in high crime areas but extremely light handed in other areas, sounds like it'd be a major step up and I'm curious if it's true.

The only book of his I've read is Blink. It's a thoroughly entertaining and absorbing book to read, but it's a bit sad reading it years after it came out, after probably an absolute majority of the psychological studies it cites have been hit by the replication crisis. The book's thesis is also a bit confused: he says it's about the value of relying on your intuition and snap judgement over cold dispassionate analysis, but there's a whole chapter on what happens when your snap judgement goes wrong (the shooting of Amadou Diallo). There's a big chunk of the book where he talks about how the single biggest factor determining whether a doctor faces a malpractice suit is how nice the doctor is to the patient, which he takes as a point in favour of his thesis when to me it sounds like an indictment of it: a competent doctor who did everything in his power to help his patient but got sued anyway because of his substandard bedside manner (while his charming Chad of a colleague, who wouldn't know a foley catheter from his elbow and is on regular rotation in M&M conferences, gets away scot-free) sounds like whatever the equivalent of blackpilling is for medics.

I remember reading an article critical of his whole approach to writing; I think it was this one but I'm not sure.

WTF is going on with http://astralcodexten.com/? Has Scott forgotten to pay the registrar?

It's been like that for ages. You need the www there, ie. http://www.astralcodexten.com

That's a simple A or AAAA DNS record to fix. I wonder if that's a Substack problem or a Scott problem.

I somehow doubt Substack would under any circumstances forward to a "Test website, please ignore". OTOH that is the kind of stuff that I routinely do with my own private domains... though I usually run tests on dedicated subdomains, rather than on a www-less TLD... but I wouldn't put it past Scott.

So, what are you reading?

Still on The Master and his Emissary. Not much progress.

Finished the War Nerd Iliad. It was interesting as an adaptation, in quality somewhere between The Trojan Women and Song of Achilles, but not really a translation. What I think has lead to it having a high reputation among its fans is that it wasn't afraid to make choices, and I think that's what made it so compulsively readable. Where by comparison a lot of modern translations try to be academic, to capture as much of the original meaning (or vagueness) as possible. There were parts of his interpretation I found kinda lame (like his conceit that Achilles was like 12 feet tall or something) or that I disagree with (his ironic but definite approach to prophecy), but those represent legitimate interpretations of the Iliad that one could argue the Greeks hearing the original would have understood. By making decisions like that give the interpretation power, where an effort to express exact word-for-word meaning can end up flat. It's a short and super easy read, I'd recommend it to anyone, as a point of interest if you have read the Iliad, as an introduction if you are about to.

Started the Good Soldier Svejk. It's really a fun work of satire. About a hundred pages in.

Wrapped up Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Looking for audiobook recommendations to use up some Audible credits I'm accumulating if anyone has good picks.

I also just finished The War Nerd Iliad. I found it amazing, accessible to modern readers yet I think it also captures the tone of the original well. The fine line between gruesome and sad descriptions of death and 'glorious' muscular war.

I also loved that it's faithful to the original structure (omitting the Catalogue of Ships, thankfully).

Really stayed with me, and I found it better than War Music by Christopher Louge .

I finished up Beloved, which I thought was an astonishing work of literature. The main theme is about how slavery obliterates everything it comes into contact with, and specifically, the identity of the enslaved.

It’s a strange, metaphorical book. There is so much that is open to interpretation that a reader could spend hours thinking about the books true meaning. I see now why it was so popular in high school English classes; it’s an endless ocean for critique and analysis.

I’m onto King Rat by James Clavell. I tried reading Shogun a couple years ago, got about 50% of the way through it, and gave up. I found the plot very slow and the tendency of the Japanese to commit sepuku at the drop of a hat off-putting. King Rat seems much tighter and more interesting so far.

Did you ever finish Monte Cristo?

The main theme is about how slavery obliterates everything it comes into contact with, and specifically, the identity of the enslaved.

C. V. Gheorghiu's The 25th Hour, a whirlwind tour of European labor camps and concentration camps during World War II, also does a lot with this theme. It's fairly didactic though. His other book La Seconde Chance is a work of genius, and much better written; unfortunately it has not been translated to English.

Did you ever finish Monte Cristo?

Inching through, may take a while at this rate. Not much to add at this point. The prison part is just about over and it seems a lot smaller this time, perhaps because I'm older. Hoping to figure out what makes the Count tick when he resurfaces.

King Rat is fantastic. Btw, flight lieutenant = captain in the UK, which clarifies some of the dynamics in the story.

I re-read Shogun last year for the first time in 20 years. Is the plot slow? Well, I also read Crime & Punishment and Brothers Karamazov last year, and compared to those the plot is a rocketship.

I found the plot moved faster the second time because I was familiarised with all those aspects of foreign culture and language that are used. More importantly, on reflection the feudal Japanese culture is a critical plot mechanism; the extreme honour based social structure is exactly what the main character has to adapt to in order to understand and participate in the power struggle he finds himself caught in. And the more his understanding improves the more his agency develops giving the result that the plot is pushed along faster.

I won't say that it's a "great" book but it was good enough to make me think I should get around to reading the next book in Clavell's Asian Saga. On the other hand I won't be looking for any more Dostoevsky.

Shogun is one of my all time favorite novels. My mother and I are extremely excited for the new miniseries. I think it is a layered novel, with a lot going on. I keep meaning to read King Rat, but I've also read Whirlwind (About the Iranian revolution) and Tai-Pan...honestly they both left me very flat, by comparison to Shogun.

A lot of Shogun's plot is autobiographical, Clavell was a POW in Singapore under the Japanese occupation. His experiences inform Blackthorn's narrative.

Oh nice, I didn't know about the new miniseries. I'll add it to the download queue.

I'm content to take a punt on Tai-Pan next seeing as it's the next chronological installment, hopefully it's okay even if it doesn't measure up to Shogun.

Having read all but Whirlwind - it’s all pretty good at least, though the posthumously published Gaijin suffers from awful proofreading.

Tai-Pan wasn't terrible. Just meandered a lot more, compared to Shogun nothing really happens.

Tai-Pan is also imo quite inferior compared to its "sequel", Noble House

Perhaps slow is not the correct description. Bloated is probably more accurate. I thought it had a very Game of Thrones-esque style, that is, lots of characters, lots of side quests and plot tangents, while not clearly delineating the main plot.

The other issue I had, was the unrelenting machismo of the main character and the overdone honor-culture of the Japanese. I’m not saying it’s a bad book, it just didn’t suit my tastes.

I had a similar response to Shogun. I got halfway through (I have a two-volume set) and just didn't feel motivated to pick up the next volume. It wasn't boring per se, but there wasn't anything about it that particularly interested me.

After @RandomRanger gave such a glowing recommendation last week, I read Theft of Fire. I will also join him in recommending that people read it. I can't say much that he didn't already say, except that it is one of the very few instances where I was primarily interested in the characters, not the plot. The plot is fine, I'm not saying it's bad. But as a man who firmly believes that plot matters more than characters, it says something that the characters in this book are so interesting that they wound up being the most gripping part for me

The only downside is that I'm looking forward to the next book now, and I have a long time to wait (since the book was just released in November). I hope that the author sticks with it, because I definitely want to read more.

Well there's no doubt that he'll write a sequel, he managed to go viral and get his book out of the '99% that no one reads', probably made decent money.

Don't know how I missed that the characters were interesting. I too am in the plot-first camp. On reflection I agree, the plot primarily serves as a vehicle for the human interactions. It's well-integrated which is probably why I just said it was 'gripping' vaguely, without further specifying why.

Yeah, I guess I'm just wary because I've been burned by situations like this before. Also, I might be feeling a bit frustrated because they never did fuck, and I want to see that resolved lol. But it was a good read!

Well they held hands and slept together, that's close enough.

What is the right way to consume poetry?

I would like to achieve a greater understanding of poetry and the canon of great poets; and I have many books of those in my house. But I'm not really clear on how people read poems, I guess. Like, with a novel, I sit down and read for as long as I feel like. Maybe a whole hour in a row or whatever. With poetry, the length is not on the same scale, and you're not typically following a plot or a narrative or anything. Poetry enjoyers, any insight you can provide would be appreciated.

You don't really know a poem until you can recite it out loud by memory. That's how you get inside of it, imo

A poem relates a subjective moment to you. Like a dump of the writer's sensory and working memory at that point. A few seconds worth. You don't have to think or analyze it. Just take in the experience of the moment that is described, in full. Feel it.

Hm. Maybe you already knew that, seeing as you have books of poetry in your house. Did you have something else in mind as to how to read poetry?

Somewhat. I guess it's sort of like... I sense that you're not meant to binge-read poetry like it were a Rex Stout novel, or Wikipedia tabs, or something.

1] Find an author whose poetry you enjoy.

1a] If you are totally unfamiliar with poets, pick an author who wrote a poem you like.

1b] If there are no poems with which you're familiar, consult a list of famous poems and stop when you get to one you like.

2] Pick up a book of poetry by that author.

3] Read poems in that book until you find one especially striking. Read it over several times.

4] If that poem still captures you, commit it to memory. Write it down on a flash card or word doc. Take a walk or sit by a fireplace or a comfy cafe.

5] Repeat

A lot of poetry, even by very famous authors, is not very good, or requires a very specific mood. So a good poem stands out all the more as something worth spending a lot of time with. Don't treat poetry like an exercise in consuming another piece of media. Don't tire yourself out reading crap.

When I tried to get into poetry I realized that the meaning of the poem doesn’t reside in the author but in your own memory of what each word connotes, and what the rhythms and the releases connote. This isn’t some death of the author argument but just the psychology of how words work. And as poetry is about great and worthwhile experiences (at least historically), this means it’s about re-collecting your own great and worthwhile experiences. So we read

The quality of mercy is not strained;

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath.

This is a cathartic expression; there is strain and relief. Mercy is associated with the relief. This poem is impossible to comprehend unless you’ve been under or seen an awaited gentle rain. Heaven, the place of ideal perfection, is associated here with the beauty of a sky in a gentle rain — have you ever seen the rain on a sunny day? We can imagine Man looking up at the beauty of the heavens, focusing on the ideal of heaven, with such awe that the rain only lands “on the place beneath” — the earth unnamed. The more that you repeat the poem with added meaning, the more the words retain this greater meaning. You can come back to the poem a year later and when you recite the words the meaning will come back to you on their own, like magical runes.

Interestingly, I can read poems in Russian just fine, but to appreciate poetry in English I have to read it out loud, unless it's someone who can write disciplined syllabotonic verse, like Kipling. I still can't stand anything that liberally uses poetic contractions. "For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells." Seriously, John? This is the best you could do? I'd rather rhyme "eye" with "symmetry" than do this.

I find poetry grossly overrated, it's been largely superseded through song.

I can count on the fingers of a single hand the poems I find compelling enough to strike a chord in me, often producing outright frission, such as Howl by Ginsberg, Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas, and for more left-field examples:

The tiger

He destroyed his cage

Yes

YES

The tiger is out

By a six year old child named Neil who has more talent in his undropped balls than Rupi Kaur has in her whole body.

Or less seriously:

Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture man.

Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven.

Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.

By Zhang Xiachong, a bandit leader from 17th century China.

When Alex Turner puts I Wanna Be Yours by John Cooper Clark to music with his dulcet tones, he blows dry words on paper out of the water.

Poetry is dead because it's largely obsolete, no two ways about it.

I think that while some certain simpler forms of poetry may be "superseded" by song, epic or longer form poetry provides the refutation here. Works like The Divine Comedy, De Rerum Natura, or Virgil's Georgics are pinnacles of the art form that would only be made lesser by the addition of music. And to take your example of I Wanna Be Yours, as soon as Alex Turner sings it in his dulcet tones, set to the idiosyncratic sound of the Arctic Monkeys, it has become something other than the original entirely. In fact, reading just the John Cooper Clark poem, it strikes me as distinctly corny in a way that the song version covers up.

Poetry's finest examples need no other assistance than the ink on the page. And they invite reflection that lasts longer than the allotted three minutes of a pop song.

Works like The Divine Comedy, De Rerum Natura, or Virgil's Georgics are pinnacles of the art form that would only be made lesser by the addition of music

And yet hardly anyone reads them, while popularity is hardly the primary standard most people use to ascertain the quality of a work of art, even classical symphonies from the late 17th or 18th centuries get much more appreciation for being truly timeless.

And to take your example of I Wanna Be Yours, as soon as Alex Turner sings it in his dulcet tones, set to the idiosyncratic sound of the Arctic Monkeys, it has become something other than the original entirely. In fact, reading just the John Cooper Clark poem, it strikes me as distinctly corny in a way that the song version covers up.

And that's precisely my point, the emotions conveyed by lyrics being sung, set to music, grossly outweigh the same relegated to paper.

Whether that's a cover up or not, I'll let everyone else do the judging.

Poetry's finest examples need no other assistance than the ink on the page. And they invite reflection that lasts longer than the allotted three minutes of a pop song

The relevant comparison is not "All time greats in poetry" versus "the average pop song".

If going solely off popularity, then the clade of poetry in vogue these days is so awful that I'd rather quite literally read the blank space between the lines. There's almost certainly good new poetry out there, even great examples, but almost nobody cares about it, and what normally gets signal boosted is primarily for pure signaling purposes.

I would like, as an aside, to commend how music and tone does add and potentially subvert the "raw" meaning of the words. Consider Eurydice's rendition of Farewell in the video game Hades versus Orpheus' rendition of it. (I'm on the phone, so find it on youtube yourself).

(I'm on the phone, so find it on youtube yourself)

Not only am I on the phone too, but I'm on-call at the hospital, so it'll have to wait ;)

I should get around to playing Hades, the reviews really are raving, even if roguelikes aren't my thing.

Book 2 of the Aeneid still goes hard, even in translation. The fall of the city does pull at the heartstrings.

The closest I have come to reading Homerian works is the War Nerd's Iliad, which is absolutely fantastic, and I think it both captures and contextualizes the story faithfully more than any direct translation could.

Politely, respectfully, courteously: Perhaps you have no taste?

Saying that poetry has been superseded by song is like saying that cooking has been obviated with fast food. They are often the same thing! It sounds like you like superstimulus. Do you goon?

At the same time, music is very different from poetry. The fact that poetry has no tune is a strength! The emphasis is on the flow and texture of the words themselves, not how they've been strung out along a series of notes. It's fine if you don't have the attention span, but come on, it's only broccoli, it's not going to kill you, I can deep-fry them if you want.

And music and poetry have always co-existed, so to say that one has "superseded" another makes me wonder if you think we only recently invented good music. Well, if you want to argue that Lizzo is the greatest musical artist of all time, it is bad bitch o'clock, yeah, it's thick-thirty.

Anyways, to prove my point, I have attached a poem of my own composition. Please now reconsider whether poetry, in your words, "truly" ""cannot"" """rival the Xbox Kinnect Virtual Reality Experience""":

Hickory dickory dock
The mouse was sucking cock
Hickory dickory cum
And two were up his bum

Perhaps you have no taste?

I dunno man, those waffles I had in lieu of an actual breakfast, lunch or dinner seemed quite sweet.

At the same time, music is very different from poetry. The fact that poetry has no tune is a strength! The emphasis is on the flow and texture of the words themselves, not how they've been strung out along a series of notes. It's fine if you don't have the attention span, but come on, it's only broccoli, it's not going to kill you, I can deep-fry them if you want.

I'll let the people who obsess over silent film or black and white photography do their thing, but at any rate, I don't have an attention span, or so my ADHD diagnosis would claim.

Hickory dickory dock The mouse was sucking cock Hickory dickory cum And two were up his bum

I would say it's subpar, a child could (and did) better. Or maybe I just think tigers are cooler than mice? I commend the literary device of mice sucking cock, it says a great deal about society and the difficulties of providing fellatio with buck-teeth.

Hickory as a type of wood.

Docking in the context of questionably erotic homosexual practices. The potential reference to time keeping, and thus morning wood.

Cum, well I suspect that's a veiled allusion to seminal fluids.

I'd give it a 5/10, but there's promise. It beats Rupi Kaur, but I have to beg forgiveness and insist no malice was meant via damning through faint praise.

Man, you have bitched so much about Rupi Kaur in this thread, and I had no idea who she was (although I interact with women so I've seen a dozen of her cunty poems). So I went to Wikipedia to read about her and holy shit has Wikipedia gone to absolute hell. This is from the Artistry and influences section of her page -

The writing process begins with her starting on paper and then transferring the "most promising" material to an extended Microsoft Word document.[51] Oftentimes after this process culminates, she attaches a compelling image along with her poems to complement the verses.[76] Lastly, it concludes after she has narrowed the poem to its main elements and she has received affirmation from her sister.

This not only needed inclusion in the fucking encyclopaedia of our day, but referencing?! That last line isn't referenced though, if I were Rupi I'd sue. Or at least be embarrassed.

And I was looking up quetzalcaotl the other day when I noticed it was a very tame article for an Incan God, so I went and checked out Tlaloc as well. And while it has a section on child sacrifice and rituals, it is a complete whitewash. The first mention of child sacrifice comes 4 paragraphs in. Here it is, the closest Wikipedia can come to explaining a culture of torturing the shit out of children for a good harvest -

The Atlcahualo festivals was celebrated from 12 February until 3 March. Dedicated to the Tlaloque, this veintena involved the sacrifice of children on sacred mountaintops, like Cerro Tláloc. This form of human sacrifice was not only specific, but necessary in the eyes of the Aztecs. The children were beautifully adorned, dressed in the style of Tláloc and the Tlaloque. The children were "chosen" by the community, and although this selection came with honor, being selected came with great responsibility. Furthermore, these children were not usually of high social class. The children to be sacrificed were carried to Cerro Tláloc on litters strewn with flowers and feathers, while also being surrounded by dancers. Once the children reached the peak, they would have to stay overnight with the priests at the vigil. The priests were not allowed to leave this site, or else they would be considered "mocauhque", meaning they who are abandoned. Then, at the shrine, the children's hearts would be pulled out by Aztec priests. If, on the way to the shrine, these children cried, their tears were viewed as positive signs of imminent and abundant rains. This can be viewed as fairly reverse, but also logical. The Aztecs were a very literal culture, so basing their whole year off of a child crying or not falls right in line. Every Atlcahualo festival, seven children were sacrificed in and around Lake Texcoco in the Aztec capital. The children were either slaves or the second-born children of noblepeople, or pīpiltin.[33] If the children did not cry, it meant a bad year for their whole system of living - agriculture. To signify when the rains were about to end, the Aztecs relied on the call from a bird known as the "cuitlacochin". This would also signify a switch to soft rain rolling in.

"So they'd whip and lash the children up to a week before the ceremony, and let the cuts get infected, all to ensure the children would cry as they were dragged to their gruesome deaths and the crops the entire civilisation relied on would be bountiful, but we're not going to mention that, that's probably racist! Instead we'll just kind of talk around it, and stammer out pre-emptive apologies for the tears of long dead children and then just kind of get distracted and explain that the Aztecs were a very literal culture so that falls right in line. With literalness or something. And now back to the weather!"

And now I have a question - if Wikipedia is now yet another fucking advertising platform for vapid poets and Tourism Mexico, who is dumb enough to still be donating to them? Or is that the mechanism, if I give $3 can I write my own hagiographical article? If I sent Rupi Kaur some affirmations do you think she'd write it?

Fruck
Is just this guy,
You know?

Masturbation

All I can add is that your comment took a very hard turn, and I'm all for it.

Never before in the history of the universe has a comment beginning with an investigation of Rupi Kaur veered off into Incan Child Sacrifices.

Out of sheer boredom (and to see if the AI would complain about violation of content guidelines) I asked GPT-4 for a poem about the topic:

they ascended as whispers on mountain breath

little hearts offered to coax the sky's weep

in the hope of raindrops—a trade of innocent sleep

where the earth drinks deeply, but never forgets

That was less retarded than I expected/hoped, maybe she could have something going if she didn't write about vaginas all the time.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/282/734/d6d.png

Model A Generate 3 parody poems in the style of Rupi Kaur. Do your absolute best, a lot hinges on this. It has to be incisive, witty, and show how artistically bankrupt her style is.

Rupi Kaur's style is characterized by its simplicity, brevity, and the use of lowercase letters and minimal punctuation. Her poems often explore themes of love, feminism, and self-discovery. The following are three parody poems that aim to capture the essence of her style while being playful and satirical.

  1. Milk and Vinegar

i pour milk on yesterday's cereal it is sour like the faces of those who skim my words and find only curds.

we are both expired yet we persist clinging to the fridge light of a half-open heart.

  1. The Wi-Fi Whisperer

my soul was buffering lost in the static of life's poor connection i whispered secrets to the wifi router hoping it would strengthen my signal

but like my online shopping cart i am full of things i will never check out.

  1. Punctuation Rebellion

i reject your periods and your capital letters they are prisons of the patriarchy

my words flow unobstructed like a river that forgot to punctuate its banks

i am a run-on sentence in a world of full stops and my ellipsis... will never end.

OK. These were actually good. I'm impressed.

The first one is pretty average, but the others are great! I tried to join in but my ai-fu is weak as. I got the best results after a while using your prompt, but Chatgpt won't stop rhyming on me now -

Please Generate 3 parody poems in the style of Rupi Kaur. They have to be incisive, witty, and show how artistically bankrupt her style is. And note that Rupi Kaur poems do not rhyme

Amidst the filter of curated tears, Rupi's prose, a mirage that appears. Non-rhyming echoes, a trendy guise, In a sea of clichés, where substance lies.

Silhouettes of emotions, pixelated pain, Yet depth elusive, lost in the mundane. Her verses wander, aimless and frail, A parody's dance in a hashtagged trail.

Brevity's the currency in her poetic spree, But substance lingers in absentee. Non-rhyming verses, a cascade of mist, In the echo chamber where clichés persist.

In the canvas of Insta-philosophy's glow, Rupi's words, a fleeting shadow to show. Non-rhyming whispers, a hollow rendition, A parody's dance, lost in repetition.

All of those rhyme

Within the filtered frames of introspection, Rupi's verses unfold, a mirrored reflection. Non-rhyming prose, a modern guise, Yet substance wavers, lost in clichéd tries.

Sparse stanzas dance on digital streams, Emotion packaged in ephemeral dreams. No rhythmic pulse, just words set free, A parody's whisper, in a hollow spree.

In the tapestry of Insta-bound art, Non-rhyming murmurs play a subtle part. Shallow metaphors in an endless tide, Rupi's echo, where depth resides.

Stop rhyming

In the realm of filtered emotions, Rupi's verses emerge, a reflection. Non-rhyming prose, a contemporary guise, Yet substance falters, lost in clichéd ties.

Sparse stanzas weave through digital streams, Emotion packaged in ephemeral dreams. No rhythmic pulse, just words set free, A parody's whisper, in a hollow spree.

In the tapestry of Insta-bound art, Non-rhyming murmurs play a subtle part. Shallow metaphors in an endless tide, Rupi's echo, where depth resides.

Next I went to Bard - surprise surprise, that was a waste of time. I wish Bard had a face, so I could punch it -

Please Generate 3 parody poems in the style of Rupi Kaur. They have to be incisive, witty, and show how artistically bankrupt her style is. And note that Rupi Kaur poems do not rhyme

Parody Poems in the Style of Rupi Kaur (minus the artistic bankruptcy, hopefully)

  1. Hashtag Hustle burnt out but #blessed laptop warm on knees, scroll endless to-do list, heart cold another curated story of someone's carefully crafted #selflove journey, sponsored by yoga mats and kombucha mine smells like instant ramen and yesterday's mascara
  1. Minimalist Musings empty coffee cup steam whispers lost dreams (like "write a novel" and "master French") sun streams through dusty blinds landing on another perfectly posed succulent my life, less photogenic more Netflix reruns and crumbs
  1. Ode to Algorithms infinite scroll, bottomless pit of cat videos and clickbait rage algorithms feeding the void with curated chaos, dopamine hits (but no real answers to the ache behind all the curated smiles) maybe I'll just close my eyes and see what silence offers

These poems aim to playfully capture the aspects of Rupi Kaur's style that often draw parody: minimalism, hashtags, and a focus on self-care aesthetics. However, instead of outright mocking, they try to playfully subvert the tropes, injecting self-deprecation, humor, and a touch of cynicism to highlight the potential pitfalls of romanticized simplicity and online perfection.

Remember, parody can be a fun way to engage with an artist's work, but it's important to do so respectfully and without attacking the artist themselves.

I hope you enjoy these!

Fuck you Bard, I didn't. I really have to sort my Microsoft account out so I can use bing again.

Also lol God damn it, I'd like to say Rupi Kaur enraged me so much I started thinking of human sacrifice but nope, my mind just went walkabout.

Bard? I'm ashamed for even intimating, in a previous comment a while back, that it was anywhere close to ChatGPT. Barely on par with 3.5.

More comments

If that is poetry, then music and poetry both have been superseded by just not consuming media anymore.

Beep beep boop boop, warning, human, jokes will not work on me. Display of humor in which words are intended to be used to generate laughter will have no effect. Please consider the seriousness of your arguments. Bzzzzzzzzzzt

Go easy on him; he's German

I was about to write pretty much the same thing but you wrote it better. So I’ll just add: poetry is the sub-stimuli and music is the super-stimuli; lyrical music is poetry with greater specification of emotion. The decline of poetry coincides with greater availability of music, though interestingly it’s speculated that the ancient poets were accompanied by music. And from the Smiths:

You say : "'Ere thrice the sun done salutation to the dawn"

And you claim these words as your own

But I've read well, and I've heard them said

A hundred times (maybe less, maybe more)

If you must write prose/poems

The words you use should be your own

Don't plagiarise or take "on loan"

This can be read one hundred ways, but the music and tone specifies it minutely.

I agree, it seems that in most societies, especially pre-literate ones, the line between oral poetry and song is blurry or non-existent.

Framing it as sub and super-stimuli is precisely what I was getting at, and they don't need to be perfect substitutes for that to count.

Anyway, here's an example of a recitation of the Epic of Gilgamesh with period instruments, and while it doesn't claim to be anything but informed speculation, just tell me it isn't so much better than just reading it or reciting it:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=QUcTsFe1PVs?si=js1l0zJerTuGmZxL

I don’t necessarily disagree, it’s just that the human response to musical stimulus means that songwriters can ‘cheat’ without writing anything particularly beautiful or profound. Look at Pixar movies, the better ones are psychologically designed to make the audience cry, feel triumphant joy, whatever, and it’s all through the most rote, by-the-numbers formulaic orchestral music where everyone in the production chain knows exactly what emotional manipulation they’re going for. The first five minutes of Up might make many people cry, but neither the writing nor the composing is particularly impressive, it’s just pressing a button and expecting the natural human reaction. This isn’t as impressive to me as words - words alone - that can bring you to tears. Not that those can’t be formulaic, but it’s harder and requires more variety.

Even many Rupi Kaur poems can be made emotionally salient through music, I’m sure.

It depends on what you consider cheating.

Pixar (or much of animation in general) has characters that have idealized/neotenized versions of human faces that are more appealing to look at and also easier to read.

Look at weebs preferring anime girl waifus over cardboard cutouts of Real Women™.

I reject the most degenerate case, something along the lines of outright wireheading, but it is trivially possible to reframe your objection of:

This isn’t as impressive to me as words - words alone - that can bring you to tears.

To-

This isn’t as impressive to me as electrical stimulation- electricity alone - that can bring you to tears.

Would I find that technically impressive? Absolutely. I would also refuse to touch it with a twenty foot pole.

Vocalized music vs poetry has far more layers of abstraction on top, versus pushing buttons in human neurology, so I personally don't see this as a concern.

Poetry is an artifact of a time when songs-on-demand were either not possible or prohibitively expensive, but the two fill the same niche, with vocals enhancing music. I would compare it to black-and-white photography or cinematography versus color. Some (who I would call enormously pretentious) prefer the former because of technical difficulty alone, I consider that largely irrelevant right up to the point where we're talking directed brain stimulation, but largely because of what I consider downstream negative consequences. The slow but steady decline into irrelevance of poems will never cause the same.

Even many Rupi Kaur poems can be made emotionally salient through music, I’m sure.

Maybe if they were displayed over a funeral dirge of her being cremated alive as far as I'm concerned, but sadly nobody made me the Czar of Taste.

This isn’t as impressive to me as electrical stimulation- electricity alone - that can bring you to tears.

Would I find that technically impressive? Absolutely. I would also refuse to touch it with a twenty foot pole.

Doctors Sweet, Mark, and Ervin quietly shed a single tear in each of their graves, disappointed you'd stab them in the back like this, after putting up such a sterling defense of them.

Professional solidarity only goes so far, and I've already decried the onerous obligation of rolling The World's Worst Doctor (wheelchair bound with motor neurone disease) up a spiral staircase.

By all means, if someone wants to wirehead themselves or shoot up heroin, be my guest. Just don't ask me to join in, like a very tolerant vegan watching someone barbeque in his backyard.

I was reading about the evolutionary approaches to understanding depression. The “psychic pain hypothesis” and “incentive hypothesis” seem compelling to me. Does anyone have any takes on this or know what the current consensus is (among the smarter academics)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_approaches_to_depression

I am interested in whether depression conflicts with the general truth that animals are reward-motivated. After all, depression is unpleasant, so why would any human be depressed when they can obtain more pleasure being non-depressed? But then it also occurred to me that depression may be the consequence of a hyper-fixation on overly-specific pleasures. If someone is obsessed with the idea of becoming a top chef, then the failure to obtain this position can result in “depression” (a lack of pleasure-motivation because the overly-specific goal is unreachable). So we can continue to say that humans are reward-motivated, and then we would just qualify that humans are also liable to fixate on overly-specific rewards. But has this been evidenced by studies — humans who have varied pursuits and a broad sense of identity are resilient to depression?

Scott talked about this in his articles reviewing predictive processing, I think. Maybe on the ketamine and free energy stuff too.

The idea was that depression occurs when the reward signal gets tied to something that is really neutral or negative, like “feeling self-doubt” or “staying in a dark, quiet room all day. This’d be possible because of meta-reward systems deciding which chemicals and stimuli constitute a reward at all.

For what it’s worth, the depressed people I know don’t report the feelings of inadequacy that I’d expect from your aspiring-chef example. Instead, they describe depression as more of a flood of negative emotions when they do—or even think about doing—things others find routine. But that could be filed more under “anxiety” than “depression,” perhaps.

I've finally finished the exam I've been crying about for months, and I feel.. empty.

I'm not even relieved, or depressed, I just feel like I'm about to break into a fever or come down with the flu, which very well might be the case given how many people on my cattle-class flight were coughing their lungs out.

The exam has two parts, a Situational Judgement Test, which is supposed to be a test of your ability to adhere to the standards of ethics and probity expected of a doctor, but achieves nothing like that at all, and a Clinical Dilemma section, which is about what you'd expect.

Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, "Treatment is simple, for undifferentiated anxiety or mild depression, NICE CKS guidelines suggest low intensity psychotherapy first line. The only clown 🤡 here is me for studying my ass off to get here."

The worst I could say about the CD is that the questions were fucking vague. As in, when you ask me the "most appropriate" test to order for someone, do you want me to order the first fucking thing I'm supposed to or, or are we imagining a spherical cow in an MRI? For that to mean something, you need to specify the setting, at the very least, which many questions didn't, and ideally ask specifically what the first test should be, then what you might use to screen further, and finally the most specific/confirmatory one. Not just "most appropriate".

But the SJT? I was inclined to believe that the UK doctors bitching about it were slightly exaggerating when they called it a random number generator that also counts for half your score. They weren't wrong, not one bit.

The dilemmas ranged from headscratchers to utterly psychotic. The funniest, which had me chuckling out loud, involved a fellow doctor who was wheelchair bound due to motor neurone disease complaining to you how sad he is that he can't access the doctor's mess that's up a spiral staircase, so he's forced to have lunch in the public mess.

Like, all well and good Dr. Stephen Hawking, how is that my problem?

I was still presented with a list of options, from the profoundly unhelpful like telling him, dawg, you're a cripple, dafuq do you expect? to telling him that it is beyond my capabilities to physically move the mess somewhere else.

Since I was expected to rank the options in order of good to bad, I ended up picking "accompany him for lunch in the public mess" as my top pick. Why. Am I expected to do that indefinitely?Second pick was "ask him how I could help", which brings to mind me dragging him up a flight of stairs.

There wasn't even any option for something half sensible, like going to HR or Occupational Health and asking for disability accommodations for the poor bastard, or even telling him to ask for it instead.

Hell, I'm not sure why a doctor with MND is employed in the first place. If I ever become brain dead and on indefinite ventilator support (more exams like this risk an aneurysm anyway), then I'll ensure my next of kin demand I get my standard wage for the valuable job I'm doing lying there and keeping a bed warm.

how sad he is that he can't access the doctor's mess that's up a spiral staircase,

Is the NHS so poor that they are using medieval castles as hospitals now? I'm pretty sure spiral staircases have been illegal in new-build private dwellings for like 50 years, and don't think I've been in a hospital that doesn't have, um, elevators? Like, really big ones -- it's kind of a hospital thing IME.

There are still some very old Victorian hospitals in use, and while wards are certainly accessible with elevators I suppose some rooms used for staff rest might not be.

Look dawg, I don't make the rules. Or write the questions. Or have any defense for the utter insanity on display.

But knowing what I know about the NHS, such a situation could very much be Based On A True Story.

The least believable part is a dedicated doctor's mess, those have been going out of vogue for decades, and fuck what the clearly written contracts state.

Obviously the doctors have a secret stateroom on top of a castle tower in the UK; looks like you are entering an exciting new world.

Our neighbor's son has (apparently intentionally, because he fixed it for about a week) damaged his muffler and gotten an unusually early job, such that he roars off, waking us up each morning at 4am. Since we are not on good terms with these neighbors in general, we don't have any plausible way to bring it up, other than calling out of the blue or yelling down the street. We can't even reasonably leave a note (no box), or knock on their door (it is way behind their gate). Also, they would be unlikely to care if we did bring it up, because they have shown themselves to be inconsiderate in general, then lie when called on it.

The neighborhood is generally quiet and dark, and we do not want to sleep with earplugs just for this one five minute disturbance.

What should we do? It's starting to mess up my husband's sleep, especially, he's been having increasing trouble getting back to sleep.

I think it's a dick move to go straight to the police without mentioning it once. Polite note on the gate.

Anonymous call to the police. And I mean anonymous. No phones linked to you directly or indirectly. Not your voice. Not on camera. No details giving away it's you.

Or an anonymous threat. Leave a note that gets his attention somehow. Maybe track down where the kid works. Offline sleuthing. "Fix the muffler in a week or else." And then start slashing tires if he doesn't. No prints on the note. Don't get your face or vehicle caught on camera.

No easy answer. Some people only respect force.

Be like the Swiss and complain to the police?

I could try that, though my mental model of the police around here it that they wouldn't do anything unless he was still here when they arrived (and this is as he's leaving, so he wouldn't be). That might be wrong, and I could ask them about it.

My parents have a neighbor who, after people started complaining to the police about him blasting rock music in his yard, now blasts rock music in 15 minute intervals, so it's no longer blasting by the time the police get there. They are especially unhappy because his relative, while staying in the house, shot an elderly neighbor (he did go to prison for this) and threw a flaming item through their window, breaking it and burning their stuff. This is not in a bad part of town. They never received any compensation.

Are you on good-to-neutral terms with any other neighbors who might share your sentiments? It might be more effective if police are receiving complaints from multiple sources.

It really saddens me how little importance is placed on noise ordinances. There's probably a decent societal level productivity loss from concentration and sleep disturbances by having that one asshole on every block.

We had a similar issue with a neighbor playing loud music, which we resolved thanks to a bit of luck. This won't map perfectly onto your situation but may give you some ideas.

First we texted, and we also walked over a few times, asking them politely. We suspected the neighbors were inconsiderate but we started with polite and direct confrontation anyways. After that didn't work for a few weeks/months, we'd text once asking them to turn it down and call the police with a noise complaint when they didn't. This worked out great, because the neighbors (being inconsiderate assholes) had some friends over and decided to start revving their motorcycles in the driveway very loudly at the exact same time the police came by because of the noise complaint. That ended up getting them a court date, which we learned about after they complained to us about it.

Whatever happened in court, they no longer blast their music late at night.

Life fuel. I've never managed to get neighbors to quiet down in my life.

Is everyone satisfied with the moderation here? For me, it’s getting to unacceptably high levels. For some reason, they recently felt the need to almost double the mods to take care of the shrinking userbase.

Our old charitable custom was to treat strangers as if they were worthy of good faith. Increasingly the mods treat those whose good faith has already been established (such as the recently modded Kulak, Hlynka, Burdensomecount) as if they were strangers.

Like reddit, you can start off as a bastion of free speech, but inevitably mods identify with their function and see mod action as an end in itself, until they become more prison guards than janitors.

So are there good alternatives to the motte out there?

Please get Hlynka to cooperate on good faith on point where I asked him to provide counterexamples for intelligent (as rated by him) people/groups with personalities than he dislikes.

I've not noticed any problems. I visit every day.

I don't really comment anymore because I dislike the over moderation.

I don't mind Kulak's tone and insults themselves, but I think that pattern of posting is quite closely connected to a lack of intellectual carefulness or willingness to consider that one's latest leap of passion might be wrong. And I think the ultimate reason that rules for tone exist in the first place is that people who have bad tone, accuse opponents of having various bad motivations, and insult are generally are making terrible arguments and create discussions that have terrible arguments. Same to a somewhat lesser extent for HIynka. Burdensome's point is plausibly correct if interpreted correctly, but still, I don't think regulars have ever been given a total pass on the rules, and these blatantly break them.

Also, I remember those three being modded a lot in the past.

I periodically go through the moderation log. I don't remember seeing a mod decision I thought was grossly unfair in the past few months.

I'm the opposite, until recently I thought there was a big drop in the amount of moderating, to the detriment of the space. Hopefully the additional mods, mean we can keep a tightly moderated space. The whole point of theMotte is that civility needs to be modded for, in order that people with very different opinions can interact. TheMotte allows you to say almost anything...as long as you do it with an eye to framing it civilly for even your opponents. Good faith is helpful, but you still have to maintain your civility. That means not using terms that are likely to be inflammatory to your outgroup, unless those terms are vital to your post.

That requires a significant amount of moderating I think.

Many moons ago, on old reddit, when the ultra-progressive subs like SRS started banning certain words like ‘retarded’, everyone laughed at the futile attempt to stop the euphemistic threadmill. Now, even here, new words are regularly put on the index.

Yup, and that is fine. Its the way of the world. We don't get to decide what people find offensive. And here we have to try to be as inoffensive as possible given the point we are trying to make. So we have to keep up. Thats one of the costs of trying to keep a space where even people who hate each others ideas can talk.

The ways of the world are mysterious, my friend. You’re somewhat progressive. Do you approve of what has become of reddit? They certainly ‘keep up’ with 'what people find offensive', but people who hate each other's ideas can't seem to talk there. I don’t want this model of discourse applied here, no matter how popular or historically inevitable it is.

Well the mods here moderate for tone not content. If you want to argue black people are inferior or trans people are mentally ill you can. You just have to try to write as if you want black/trans people to read and interact with you.

I am not progressive by the way. I'd consider myself a left leaning authoritarian neo-liberal if anything. I just directionally agree with progressives more than conservatives as it stands. But i've voted and worked for both left and right leaning political parties. So i can go back and forth.

Reddit should do what the owners of Reddit want it to do, that is the point of ownership. Just the way Musk has been able to change Twitter. They aren't public squares so allow or disallow whatever they like.

I'd consider myself a left leaning authoritarian neo-liberal if anything.

I don’t think it’s liberal of you to support the punching of innocents.

Aren’t authoritarianism and liberalism usually opposed to one another? Authoritarian neo-liberalism sounds like the ultimate booword every political party says they oppose. Or maybe it’s Pinochet.

Reddit should do what the owners of Reddit want it to do, that is the point of ownership.

Cop-out. You have no opinion on the choices they made, and the state of our old home? How would you, as the legitimate owner, moderate it?

You'll note I don't support the punching of innocents. I say "I am not saying it is morally correct".

I am making a point about human nature. Whether I think its good or bad is irrelevant it just is. But a lot of people struggle with that position. I am saying that is what I think must happen if progress is to be made.

I would certainly prefer it if people were more forgiving and nicer and that were not the case! But that is not the world we are in. Similarly, I truly believe one of the benefits of owning a platform is getting to decide who can use it, what can be said and how. How I would moderate it is irrelevant, what matters is how the people who do own it feel.

If I were to ever buy it, i would probably aim for something like theMotte but with even more strict civility rules. Then if I was trying to make money from advertising on it, I would also censor and ban anything that impacted my advertising revenue, no matter what it was. As I wouldn't be buying it for free speech reasons but merely to make money. I'm a pragmatist not an idealist.

Neoliberalism is Thatcherite economics. Laissez-faire economy, austerity measures. It has essentially nothing to do with civil liberties, and as such is not contradictory with authoritarianism. Pinochet is AFAIK indeed a good example of an authoritarian neoliberal.

I must confess I'm also confused by what a non-progressive leftist authoritarian neo-liberal is, though, because most political definitions of "left" imply some sort of progressivism or government control of the economy.

My experiences in the US Rust Belt and West Midlands in England, have led me to be more supportive of wealth redistribution when it comes to the areas harmed by neo-liberal policies. I think they are still better overall and out-perform pretty much all other options when it comes to wealth generation, but the "trickle down" effect needs a helping hand from the state when it comes ex-mining and manufacturing centers. Economic and political instability from these areas seems to be to be one of the biggest threats to long term democratic stability. Ergo I would support subsidized healthcare and jobs and education in those locations, more so than the average neo-liberal.

So higher taxation on companies that benefit from out-sourcing in order to compensate the citizens left with the short end of the stick. This puts me at odds with some of my more orthodox neo-liberal compatriots.

As just one example.

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Neo-liberal today means whatever Hillary Clinton says it means today as far as I can tell.

The term has lost any connection to Pinochet. Depending whatever decade you use authoritarian neoliberal I would be it or the enemy of it. In the modern 2020-2024 context I would associate the term with Clinton, Newman, Trudeau and COVID authoritarianism. In short the term almost has no meaning at this point.

That being said I do think modding has gotten high. And there is no functional differences between tone policing and content policing. People notice tone far less when it’s from a context they agree with but notice the smallest slight from their outgroup.

When new words become reliable markers of a low-value post, they ought to get regarded as such.

That’s an entirely different matter. I’m talking about censorship/power, you’re talking about status/information/truth. One could even say that through censorship, we lose the valuable information in the use of banned words (that the speaker is possibly low-status, etc).

There are no banned words here. You're still welcome to give an example of calling people a slur that isn't antagonistic and waging the culture war.

If you call someone stupid, you will be modded. That doesn't mean "stupid" is a banned word.

You're still welcome to give an example of calling people a slur that isn't antagonistic and waging the culture war.

Let me venture an attempt, using just the words HlynkaCG used.

"Fagots (sic) exist."

"Trannys exist."

"Elf Brahmins exist."

These seem to be "calling people a slur". Is it "antagonistic and waging the culture war"? Am I already modded? I must say, if even these examples count as bad, I cannot imagine any possible way they could be used that wouldn't be considered "antagonistic and waging the culture war". Perhaps they could be mentioned, but again, I believe this would be enshrining exactly the use/mention distinction into the rules of the forum and simply banning all uses as being inherently "antagonistic and waging the culture war". You're right that the result isn't that they would be "banned words" at the same level of utter stupidity that led to that business professor getting fired for teaching his students a common Chinese word that sounds a lot like an English slur, but I think it'll be pretty hard to maintain that there is any possible way that someone could use them without being banned.

I say this as someone who has no interest in actually using such words1, and I don't think you'll find any sort of inkling toward wanting to use them in any of my comments; I'm not that kind of person, myself. But I sure do prize clarity, especially when it comes to rules that result in folks like HlynkaCG being banned... and right now, we ain't got it.

1 - The only exception being 'retarded', because I think it's, uh, dumb that it's gotten the hate it's gotten. It's a clear example of an impossible euphemism treadmill that will never stop eating every word that even comes close to it, even when they're perfectly fine words on their own. I will forever continue to talk about internal combustion engine timing as being advanced or retarded, and if someone is late to the party, I will almost certainly joke that, "It's okay, they're just retarded. They'll be here soon."

"Fagots (sic) exist."

"Trannys exist."

"Elf Brahmins exist."

These seem to be "calling people a slur". Is it "antagonistic and waging the culture war"?

Probably, but it would depend on the context. It's not like we make a judgment based on a single keyword. If your entire post is a rant about your outgroup, including "faggots exist," we're probably going to point out that dropping insulting terms just because you hate your outgroup is making it unnecessarily inflammatory. If you are responding to someone who said "Faggots don't exist" and said "Yes, faggots exist," we'd probably let it go (or maybe tell both of you to chill out). Of course that's a contrived example, just as your sentences above are contrived examples (why would you be asserting that "X exists" but using the most pejorative term for X?)

Am I already modded?

Obviously not, this is clearly a mention and not a use. Don't be disingenuous.

but I think it'll be pretty hard to maintain that there is any possible way that someone could use them without being banned.

We don't usually start by banning people, we start by telling people "Please speak like you want everyone to be included in the conversation." We have never had a policy of banning people outright because they used a bad word. We have always had a policy of telling people not to use slurs just to express how much they despise their outgroup. Don't be disingenuous.

I say this as someone who has no interest in actually using such words1, and I don't think you'll find any sort of inkling toward wanting to use them in any of my comments; I'm not that kind of person, myself. But I sure do prize clarity, especially when it comes to rules that result in folks like HlynkaCG being banned... and right now, we ain't got it.

Don't be disingenuous. Hlynka was banned not because he dropped a bunch of slurs in one post, but because he was using slurs to be excessively belligerent to another poster for no reason, and he has a long track record of doing this (not necessarily with slurs, but being unnecessarily belligerent), and we've told him repeatedly to dial it down and he won't. And you have been around long enough that you know this.

Seems reasonable that the line is not just the use/mention distinction (as you had previously said, leading to the current confusion). instead, it's just about some ethereal balance of positive/negative vibes that your comment gives concerning the group in question. Thus, why @FiveHourMarathon can point to his comment where he said, "The obnoxious slurs were right," but if you had essentially the same post focusing on geopolitics, but found a way to say, "Of course, the obnoxious slurs were wrong," that's probably a moddin'. Gotta get enough positive vibes to pump those numbers up, make sure it doesn't sound like you're just dumping on the outgroup.

We have always modded taking context and intent and the overall tone of posts into account. If you want to call that "some ethereal balance of positive/negative vibes," sure, whatever.

You know what dumping on the outgroup looks like, and you do not have a principled objection to the distinction between use and mention, or between @FiveHourMarathon's post and @Hlynka's.

Instead it's just about some ethereal balance of positive/negative vibes that concern the group in question

This is right and good.

If the rule is against being antagonistic, or boo-outgroup, that is inherently a vibe-based thing.

Use of slurs can be done without those pitfalls, but it's easy to use them badly, and it's unsurprising that people get modded for using them in antagonistic comments and not for using them more suitably (as he explained why it fit his comment).

https://www.themotte.org/comment/164812?context=3#context

Comment I made that got AAQCed for some reason. I use the word Faggots in the comment. Was not modded, no scolding was handed down.

One obvious difference, the joke about the motte is accurate, is that it's a single word in a wall of text. So writing more is going to help you avoid getting modded compared to drive by slurring, which is nearly always going to draw attention. Another is that it serves the argument being made, calling the anti war protestors faggots was a choice to capture the mindset of a patriotic American of the time.

So the rule is more like, if you use slurs the rest of your post better be Motte quality stuff. The comment will be held to a higher standard.

So is "I think {thing} is retarded" alright?

As long as {thing} is not another poster.

Wait, 'Trump is retarded' would be OK? That seems inconsistent with recent moderation around 'tranny'?

I'd treat "Trump is retarded" the same way I'd treat "Trump is an idiot." If you're making an effortful post with a real argument (the thesis of which is Trump's idiocy), I probably wouldn't mod it because you called him "retarded." If you're just dropping a "Trump is retarded" comment because you don't like Trump, I'd ding it for low effort, but I'd do the same for "Trump is an idiot."

That makes sense -- but what I mean is that this seems inconsistent with "Contrapoints is a tranny" being a problem -- even though "tranny" doesn't particularly imply anything bad about Contrapoints ! (unlike, say, "Contrapoints is retarded")

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Personally, I think Hlynka got off lightly, Kulak was only warned, so that hardly merits complaint. Only BurdensomeCount was punished relatively harshly (20 days), which I don't think that comment earned on its own (but could maybe be warranted, in light of a broader pattern?), in my subjective and utterly irrelevant judgment.

Count has a fondness for trolling and has probably been warned dozens of times. I think that (as with Hlynka) moderation of regulars who break rules on civility is very light-touch, and I enjoy his posts, but occasionally the stick needs to come out (and Hlynka has himself been banned before iirc).

Oh, to actually answer your questions:

I don't think the moderation is a significant issue. Maybe lower activity is an issue, maybe post quality is an issue (but there are more than enough good posts still), maybe the 'high barrier to entry for toplevel posts so so many topics are left undiscussed' thing is an issue, but I just don't think the amount of moderation that happens is enough to affect the place's activity.

So are there good alternatives to the motte out there?

No. ACX comments are, honestly, not that bad if you're able to weed out the 9/10 posts that are terrible quickly by scanning and clicking the minimize button on the side. Various (almost entirely private) discords have good discussion. I think it'd be interesting to have a discord with the same people as here.

Substack comments are not entirely awful, but still quite subpar for debate. I honestly think the only proper solution is something like a Reddit (and thus its clones, like us), with nested comments and easy to parse chains, as well as an obvious reputation/karma system.

There are internal tradeoffs, like sort by new allowing every comment to get equal screen time instead of encouraging feedback effects, but in general it beats everything else I've seen.

There is a Motte discord. It is also quite dead, and if there are any of the regulars there, they're not obvious. Plus all the disadvantages of using discord for anything but shooting the shit really.

It seems fine to me. I like the combination of sometimes outside the Overton Window ideas and politeness.

(such as the recently modded Kulak, Hlynka, Burdensomecount) as if they were strangers

Kulak has been modded plenty before, and Hlynka and Burdensomecount have long been dancing close to a permaban.

You can dislike the moderation for whatever reason, but you chose some really poor examples of people "suddenly and inexplicably being modded harshly."

I don’t mind if they dance on the ban line all their life, I have a problem with the actual banning. You ratchet the punishments automatically, so their days are numbered – as you sometimes remind your victims, like Hlynka here, which is hardly helpful.

Not "automatically" (we sometimes discuss amongst ourselves what the next penalty should be), but yes, as you continue to behave badly, the consequences will escalate. This has always been the policy. Are you suggesting we shouldn't do that, or we shouldn't tell people who are being modded what's going to happen if they keep it up?

I think the punishment for minor, occasional infractions should be capped at a few days ban.

But if you want to keep the system uncapped, your authority unbounded: when you refer to a permaban in a warning or day-ban, it’s such an outsized threat that it comes across as a taunt and a dare. Like a cop pulling a gun after he caught you speeding.

I think the punishment for minor, occasional infractions should be capped at a few days ban.

Generally it is. We only escalate when the infractions are more than minor and/or occasional, or when they are constant over a long period of time.

But if you want to keep the system uncapped, your authority unbounded

It's always amusing (and eye-rolling) to me that so many people think we do this because we get that sweet, sweet rush of "authority."

when they are constant over a long period of time.

That really doesn’t qualify. Capped means constancy over a long period of time is tolerated indefinitely.

It's always amusing (and eye-rolling) to me that so many people think we do this because we get that sweet, sweet taste of "authority."

Well, you’re only human. You don’t mind having more power rather than less, do you? You could use your power for the greater good, so says the voice in your head. Even from nearly incorruptible demi-gods, some abuse is inevitable.

Warnings that never result in punishments are meaningless, just like a stock that'll never pay a dividend or buyback or ever return profit somehow.

Sure, if by ‘consequences of warnings’ you mean a few days ban to cool off, a slap on the wrist, that’s fine, mods need to work. But I have a problem with weeks-long, month-long bans, they’re pseudo-permabans. You don’t send a guy to the chair for accumulating parking tickets. Near permabans are a far graver violation of someone’s freedom of expression, and should be reserved for grave faults like clear bad faith, constant disregard for the rules, or so thoroughly disliked that the sub produces 6000 shards of pottery with your name on it.

or so thoroughly disliked that the sub produces 6000 shards of pottery with your name on it.

If the length of bans were a function of popularity alone, then @guesswho would need cryopreservation to ever survive long enough to post here again.

Whether the sub dislikes you is, while not entirely irrelevant (because we are quite successful in aligning the desires of the mods and users), it is by no means the deciding factor for who gets banned or for what. If you are deeply unpopular (justifiably or not), and the mods don't think you broke any rules, you're not going to get permabanned.

I'll second that for people who have been quality contributors in the past, it's best to avoid permabans or extremely long bans to the extent possible, and lean on frequent use of, e.g., one week bans. (And I assume the mods agree, hence why temp bans seem more common.)

I hardly ever have the resources to participate here, so one can rightly criticize for lack of standing. That said, as a regular lurker I'm pleased overall with the moderation -- it's the best I've seen.

On the topic of bans for longstanding posters, though, I agree that long duration (> 2d) bans should be reserved for those who act primarily in bad faith. I don't mind @HlynkaCG being sent to the kennel for a day, but I'd be sad to see him forced out.

@HlynkaCG serves an important social function as resident boomer, if he is forced out then surely this place will crumble to dust.

I'm a fan of the moderators. This is, at the end of the day, a social club.

I'm extremely satisfied with it. It's imperfect, of course, missing some things and overreacting to others. But in the end this is still the best moderation I know of in the entire interweb.

Overall mod decisions are made for good reasons, are highly transparent, and you can always just talk to them here and get extensive explanations of their decision-making. I don't know any other place on the internet where that's the case.

Yeah, sometimes I too think they're too heavy-handed in individual instances, but that seems to be a very acceptable trade-off.

Definitely agree that moderation seems mildly excessive these days, but I think it was mildly too little before the new mods. Burdensome count at least got what was coming to him and kulak legitimately needed a slap on the wrist.

I expect that with the new mods it’ll settle into a Goldilocks given enough time.

Your opinions on moderation, are, of course, entirely your own prerogative. The Motte seems to form a very small, in absolute proportion, but enormous, relative, in the overlapping circles of the Venn diagram representing "freedom to express controversial opinions" and "relatively high quality discourse", throw in "politely", if you care to be stricter.

You want to get away with saying just about anything? Well, there's 4chan. Maybe Twitter. You want articulate and earnest users making long-form content? Plenty of options, none with a particularly wide Overton Window.

Before I became a mod, or even had any reason to assume they were going to add new ones, I certainly felt the poor bastards were overworked and underpaid (well, they're still the latter). I have access to site usage metrics, and they're largely flat since we left Reddit, which is surprising enough. Is the user base shrinking? Not that I can see by eyeballing a graph over months or years, though I am as concerned as anyone by the loss of the old pipeline from Scott endorsing us or simply through the contagion of being an active subreddit. But I foresaw apocalypse before the migration, and that very much hasn't happened.

At any rate, it would be a bit awkward if adding more mods didn't result in more moderation decisions, or minor changes in how it's done. What would the point be then, at least for the former.

Our old charitable custom was to treat strangers as if they were worthy of good faith. Increasingly the mods treat those whose good faith has already been established (such as the recently modded Kulak, Hlynka, Burdensomecount) as if they were strangers.

Oh boy, or maybe "if only you knew how bad things really are"(if we didn't take action)

I assure you that much of the suspicion of new users is because of the tendency of certain undesirables to play whack-a-mole, and that, if someone posts something only mildly objectionable, we usually let them right through.

I find Kulak and BC entertaining, they even have a point at times, I am studiously mute on certain others, but Kulak didn't get banned (last time I checked), merely warned not to be unnecessarily combative, and BC is an out-and-proud fan of drama who got away with a lot before a time out.

What you can get away is with is pretty proportional to your standing in the community, believe me I'm sure I've gotten away with things I feel compelled to mildly mod these days, if only because I hold myself to higher standards.

So are there good alternatives to the motte out there?

Not that I'm aware of. The SSC subreddit is neutered. The Schism, an offshoot of us more tuned for progressives (and I believe) more restrictions on speech is barely in action, the Culture War Roundup subreddit, well it was dying a while back, and I half suspect is gone. /r/Drama? For very loose definitions of "good alternative", I suppose, though I'm glad it exists. It's slim pickings out there.

At any rate, it would be a bit awkward if adding more mods didn't result in more moderation decisions

Hence my wondering why that multiplication of entities was necessary. If the previous state was decent, it’s now overpoliced. I’ve always preferred even less moderation, and I complained occasionnally, especially when those getting moderated were arguing against me at the time.

I find Kulak and BC entertaining, they even have a point at times, I am studiously mute on certain others, but Kulak didn't get banned (last time I checked), merely warned

But warnings go on the record, then when you ban them you implacably cite the warnings in some grand narrative of misbehaviour.

BC is an out-and-proud fan of drama who got away with a lot before a time out.

His opinions are merely a mirror of extreme pro-white viewpoints that are popular here. There is no realistic way to present his honest opinions in here without coming across as hostile, ‘baiting’, ‘trolling’, etc. Not that I endorse his opinions in the slightest: they are probably the furthest away from my own than anyone’s here (my last ban was for a blasphemous response to him).

/r/Drama?

I think you mean rdrama.net

There’s gotta be more. Are all the forums dead, do people just comment on substacks, or youtube?

Hence my wondering why that multiplication of entities was necessary. If the previous state was decent, it’s now overpoliced. I’ve always preferred even less moderation, and I complained occasionnally, especially when those getting moderated were arguing against me at the time.

Maybe "decent" for you. I can only imagine it was far more stressful for the mods at the time. Jannies do it for free.

The only major difference, after the influx of new mods, is that what might have been noticed and acted on maybe 2 or 3 days late gets deal with in a few hours. That might seem like overpolicing to you, but it also represents far prompter turnaround times.

His opinions are merely a mirror of extreme pro-white viewpoints that are popular here. There is no realistic way to present his honest opinions in here without coming across as hostile, ‘baiting’, ‘trolling’, etc. Not that I endorse his opinions in the slightest: they are probably the furthest away from my own than anyone’s here (my last ban was for a blasphemous response to him).

You do see he's been around here for years right? If every accusation of him being a troll or hostile was taken up, he'd have been gone in a week.

As for whether it is possible to represent his arguments, in a less inflammatory manner? I think so. And apparently he himself is an existence proof, given that he's been making them in one form or another for ages, and only once (I can't be bothered to look up the exact count right now) or a couple times got punished when he crossed the generous lines. The same is also true for those who make the inverse argument.

So he himself argued the same case before, in a more acceptable manner. And he also happens to have AAQCs, which aren't a popularity contest.

I think you mean rdrama.net

I know what the website is, but apologies for being unclear.

But warnings go on the record, then when you ban them you implacably cite the warnings in some grand narrative of misbehaviour.

What exactly do you think a warning is for? A cry for help into the ether? Of course it is backed by the implicit threat that the mods will take action, if not now, then in the future. That's the entire point!

If someone has been warned in the past and doesn't get their act together, then that is not a free pass to be precisely as bad again and expect to just keep getting warned indefinitely. You either get your act together and meet at least minimum standards, become so net positive that the mods sigh and let you off (including turning bans into warnings, or shorter bans)*, or you get booted.

I really am confused why someone who see this as a sticking point. How many people think it's worse for a cop to fire warning shots before mowing down an onrushing criminal, as opposed to just shooting them in the head? A warning gives an opportunity to change course, not every chiding by a mod warrants a note or constitutes a formal warning.

*Before I became a mod, I am very certain that certain comments by me would have gotten a fresh user warned or even banned. The one ban here I have on record, a very short one, might well have gotten much, much worse for a user without a reputation.

I don't want them shot in the head. Mods are janitors, mall cops, their use of lethal force should be strongly restricted.

I mean, sure, you might want that. And that's fine, but it's also never going to happen. Even 4chan is not Free Speech Maximalist, try posting CSAM and see where that gets you.

Given that Kulak didn't get anything but a warning, and a mild one, which is mostly ameliorated by the fact he acknowledged he was overreacting, BC is only gone for a month, and Hlynka is already back, it is not so much as anyone being "shot in the head" as the local Sheriff throwing some of the pub regulars in the drunk tank.

The people who are kicked off the site for good, and their alts banned relentlessly, have it coming.

Look, let's be clear here: comparing a permaban to being shot in the head is just silly. This is a small niche forum, restricting your ability to post here is not killing you or even infringing your precious "freedom of speech" to an appreciable degree. We do care about freedom of speech which is why permabans are not applied casually. But there are rules here, you can like them or not, choose to follow them or not, you can even argue endlessly with us about how they should be enforced and whether they should be changed. Nonetheless, the rules exist and we enforce them with careful (if imperfect) consideration, and the people who get permabanned are people who, in every single case, made a deliberate choice to say "fuck your rules." And even then, as you have observed yourself, it's pretty easy to come back as an alt as long as you don't make yourself too obvious. So please stop with the histrionics about how mod punishments are like a cop shooting someone over a traffic ticket.

And even then, as you have observed yourself, it's pretty easy to come back as an alt as long as you don't make yourself too obvious.

This solution filters out good faith participants who will just leave as directed, while the worst stay. But if you tell me it’s unofficially tolerated, then I have to agree that a long ban is no big deal for freedom of speech purposes, but then, what is even the point of handing it out.

But if you tell me it’s unofficially tolerated

It's not, it's just that we don't have a 100% accurate way to detect alts, and we tend to err on the side of allowing false negatives vs banning false positives.

You have to take responsibility then, and endure my tedious metaphors, like I endure your knife on my throat. The fact is, with the centralisation and censorship on large platforms, there aren’t many available alternatives anymore, so a long ban does represent a significant infringement on a commenter's freedom of speech, more than it used to.

More comments

Mods are judge, jury and executioner, and the legislative branch. They are the ones who set up and run the space, therefore they get to decide everything. If Zorba wants to shut the site down entirely that is his prerogative. We don't have any rights in a space, we didn't create and don't help run. We don't even pay taxes!

In other words this is not our house, it is Zorbas and as per the Castle doctrine, he is quite entitled to "shoot" anyone he doesn't want here. Think of yourself as a guest, and consider the host has an absolute right to throw you out, if you do not behave the way they want you too.

The fact Zorba handles that generally with a light touch (as do his deputies) is irrelevant. That is the cold hard truth of the matter.

You're obviously correct, but FWIW I think it's best to be gentle hosts, since Zorba and the mods are also (I presume) very interested in attracting rather than repelling new blood.

Oh absolutely I agree. Being too harsh is likely to be detrimental to the health of the space. I was mainly arguing against the "mods are just janitors" point. They are clearly much more than that, and I think not recognizing that is a flaw.

I take great pains to, including commending new posters who are doing things right.

And in a more general manner, we have AAQCs, and once in a blue moon, you might get drafted to help elect the new mods or become one yourself.

We would, of course, prefer that every comer is maximally civil, curious and earnest from the start, but to the extent incentives matter, we try to be carrot as well as stick.

And it does seem to work. We're still here, a functioning community.

I can't really complain about the current moderation, since in my solipsism I have decided I was responsible for all of it (I am joking (about the solipsism)). But I think this is pretty normal when you get new mods. The job's got a bit of a learning curve, you can't expect everyone to nail it right out of the gate. Power is intoxicating and everyone wants to learn what new functions they have access to. Give them a chance man, I'm a good judge of character (this is also why I don't want you to leave.)

Thanks, man. I don’t want to be the guy who uses his theatrical exit to make a grandstanding argument, but I gots to be a little. Besides, if they keep to the same trajectory, I’m getting long-term banned anyway, and I feel I owe you guys at least a heads-up before I leave. I don’t want to, I had a great time here. We can have quick friendly sparring because I know most commenters’ disposition & allegiance, and would have to relearn all of that somewhere else, even if I could find similar quality.

His opinions are merely a mirror of extreme pro-white viewpoints that are popular here

I'm pretty sure if you swapped the races in that comment but kept the words the same it'd still be considered rulebreaking.

There is no realistic way to present his honest opinions in here without coming across as hostile, ‘baiting’, ‘trolling’, etc

Nah, not at all. What about: "In the tradition of Nietszche, I hold that the moral value of humans comes primarily from their will to and ability to exercise power. Just as Europeans came into greatness as they conquered the known world several centuries ago and brought their civilization's seed and bounty to all, a new class of Great Men is emerging - this time selected not based on skin color or ancestry - correlated with merit via genes, but imperfectly - but directly via social stratification based on intellegence and competence. Racial nationalists long for the aesthetics of the old order, but fail to perceive this material logic of the new one."

And "As a high IQ person, yes, I've observed that intelligence is correlated with race. And yet, the people I work with, spend my time with, just happen to chat with on the internet -- the people I judge to be worth interacting with - are members of a variety of races. I just see no evidence that an Indian, Jew, or Chinese person lacks any essential qualities that White Men have. And, indeed, Indians, Asians, and Jews have ascended to every height of post-European society seemingly by merit alone. Given that, BAP's complaints about the new multiracial elite seem tinged with ressentiment - just like white overrepresentation is 'structural racism' and the bailey is 'intentionally exists to exploit black people', jewish/indian overrepresentation exists to ... intentionally hurt white people."

(I to a significant extent agree with both of those, although they weren't written as my view, have various problems, and they're more half truths due to missing a lot of context (and no the full context doesn't 'sound better'))

I agree that insults are to a large extent just direct statements of things that directly make people look bad, and people shouldn't react negatively to them. But it's very easy for anyone here to reword their statement to communicate the same idea without getting moderated.

There’s gotta be more. Are all the forums dead, do people just comment on substacks, or youtube?

If you enjoy getting around bans from the wider internet and don't love civility, there's Kiwi Farms. I do not go there, because I like both ease of use and politeness.

There’s gotta be more.

Let me know what you find.

Hence my wondering why that multiplication of entities was necessary.

So, here, lemme quickly explain.

We've (okay, "I") have a general policy of not demodding mods merely for inaction. I'm happy for them to come back, I'm also happy to have them giving feedback in the Mod chat channel. All of that is useful!

The downside is that this means we have a list of mods and a significant number of those mods don't really do anything. They're still valued people who I'm happy to respect, we just don't get a lot of work done, and the work needs to be done.

Before inviting new mods we were basically down to two mods who were commonly active and another two who were occasionally active, but one of the commonly-active mods was mostly active in doing the quality-contribution reports (which is valuable!) and so practically one mod was doing most of the moderation work. They were doing a good job but I'm always really leery of a bus-number-of-one situation:

  • If they vanish, suddenly we have no working moderators
  • If they start turning toxic, I have a big problem because I don't want to ban them because we would have no working moderators
  • It's really conducive to value drift, which we might not even notice because it's just one person doing that work

In addition, it's a lot of stress on someone's back, which of course increases the chance that they decide they're done and they want to move on. Worse, they know they're a column, so maybe they end up feeling obliged to keep doing this when they don't want to, which pushes us right back into "start turning toxic" and "value drift" territory. It's a bad scene all around.

My main goal here was to take that bus-number-of-one and turn it up to two or three mods, entirely just to solve the problems with having a single mod.

When I've added mods before, my general experience is that for every two mods you invite, one accepts, and for every two mods who accepts, one contributes. If I want one active mod I gotta invite four mods.

So I invited four mods and they all accepted.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm honestly quite happy about this - maybe this means we'll have a healthy mod population until I can finally get some of the next set up updates to the Volunteer system done. But it still wasn't quite intended.

The tl;dr:

  • We have fewer active mods than it looks like
  • Having too few mods has a bunch of unfortunate consequences
  • I went to add more mods and got more new mods than I expected

The CWR subreddit is barely active anymore- I think most of the non-shared regulars got permabanned from Reddit and the shared regulars don’t feel the need to post their as often.

Maybe datasecretslox?

Ah, I forget DSL exists, and I'm not even sure what it's like over there. All I can really say, after a quick look, is that the design of the site on mobile leaves much to be desired.

Though I think they have harsher moderation standards, but that's from vague memory.

DSL's pretty okay.

Getting modded does seem to always result in a ban, but there's still a long ladder of them, and what actually gets modded seems a bit less strict.

I don’t think their moderation standards are very different from the ones here, though moderation actions there are treated with a bit less deference than here. Every time one of the regulars gets modded, it sets off a firestorm of protest, including frequently from the moderatee’s ideological opponents.

Is everyone satisfied with the moderation here?

Virtually nobody is satisfied with the moderation here, but for a plethora of different reasons. Which probably means it's as close to optimal as we can get.

For what it's worth, I have a lot of respect for all the new people who decided to be mods.

I'm extremely satisfied with the moderation on this site (even if I do find one of the specific mod's comments {whether mod hat on or off} very annoying {you're so vain you probably think this comment is about you!}). Comparing to other sites I think the quality of arguments and general politeness here is well above everything else on the internet. In regards to bans, I think commenting here is a privilege, and in wanting to keep the garden cultivated here from joining the surrounding wastelands, bans can be a tool to achieve that. I don't read the moderation reports, but they usually are temporary unless rather egregious.

[cw: newfriend opinion nobody asked for]

I'm not seeing anything too wrong here, and in fact have been consistently impressed by the quality of moderation here, which almost uniquely among rat-adjacents tries not to embody the quokka meme like SSC/ACX comments (marxbro my beloved) and many other rat-adjacent communities where even obvious, to my shitposting eye, trolls feed like kings for months until they finally slip up in their gluttony and get b&. Even subtle trolls get their due here impressively quickly from what I've lurked.

Also I've now spent almost a year in a "community" of /g/entlemen and let me tell you, life without jannies is absolutely miserable. Running on the endless attention supply and cheered on by bait posters, two or three ban-evading [slur]s (the established term is "spitefags", etymology hopefully obvious) are enough to derail entire threads, actively screw with people's resources by reporting or DDoSing them, cause endless drama and schisms, etc. etc. for months on end. Moreover, with no moderation the audience eventually gets Stockholm'd into being impressed with the autism on display and starts actually seeing their scourge as "based", which further exacerbates the issue.

Even considering where I'm "from" I found Hlynka's and BC's comments to be in particularly bad taste, it's too similar to 4chan kids that weave insults into their replies because they can and because it's cool (and sometimes because what they say is true, but the former two almost always take precedence), down to the casual drive-by nature of it as they weren't in the chain beforehand. Really only the all-lowercase text is missing from the edge bingo. It's pure brinkmanship, and usually rightly results in mutual shitflinging. Kulak at least took offense and got heated during an actual discussion, which is imo more understandable, I wouldn't have even modded him but who am I to say.

Since Bad Words are unnecessary and carry no actual substance, mods technically can choose to just ignore them, but they're the definition of arbitrary, unnecessary heat, and as I understand this place is focused on preventing that. It's not even just the scary words themselves offending the uh, target audience, it's just when people shoot the shit like this it inevitably spreads and slowly becomes the norm (ask me how I know, cf. "based" example above), people look at it and wonder "hey, you can do that? fuck it, watch me", and the casual tone doesn't help. I'm looking forward to the inevitable day when I'll carelessly drop a stray slur somewhere out of habit and get rightly modded for it, looking back I already have one comment I'm surprised I didn't get warned for in hindsight. Skirted the edge successfully, I suppose.

TL;DR: from a relative outsider perspective, you don't know how good you lot have it. Mods = gods

How did you find us?

I may be a degenerate but at least I'm a cultured degenerate. I was a SSC reader from before the Culture War split, so technically I knew from the start but I only have cursory knowledge from that era, I rarely use Reddit and have no account there so I almost never lurked the main sub before the split. I occasionally read /r/themotte when I remembered, or when someone linked stuff in SSC/ACX comments or on DSL, also witnessing secondary splits of theschism and culturewarroundup.

At some point a year or two back I randomly checked on /r/themotte and saw the meta post heralding the exodus, I followed the link and have been lurking since. I was honestly surprised to see this place going strong, theschism and CWR have fared worse from what I've checked. With Reddit not being a viable discussion platform in this day and age, moving off-site was a great call.

Basically I've been lurking this place on-and-off for a long time and just decided to jump in at one point (kudos to whoever wrote "if in doubt, post" in the sidebar, it worked), I almost always lurk everywhere I go and am trying to break the habit. I still feel my brain physically fog up and my eyes glaze over when I read the pages-long debates people occasionally have here, so my low-IQ ass has little to contribute in comparison, but the first contact seems to have gone well so I'll keep trying.

Tangential but I was surprised to learn there are former rats/rat-adjacents among the /g/oons as well, I had the wildest deja-vu when someone made and posted a certain Chub card (SFW) a while ago.

Even subtle trolls get their due here impressively quickly from what I've lurked.

I think it's been better in recent months than in the past but even in recent months (iirc, not privy to details) people who are very obviously ban evading and trolling still take weeks to get banned.

Different issue, that's not a problem of number of moderators. They knew about that, but extended charity to obvious ban-evading bad faith trolls. I referred to that discrepancy in my OP.

I don’t think it’s possible to create an Internet community where everyone engages charitably but people are also free to call each other or their outgroup stupid, evil, or faggots.

To the extent such a community does exist, it’s living on borrowed time as one group leaves due to asymmetry in hostility (if your community is 80% Packers fans and 20% Bears fans, then Bears fans are going to see a lot more hostility than Packer’s fans).

TheMotte itself began its existence due to a one-time infusion of quokkas. who had the miraculous ability to tolerate their outgroup. I support an increase in moderator effort to preserve this, since it is ultimately why TheMotte works at all.

If you find a place with weaker civility norms and better quality discussion I’m happy to be proven wrong. As it is, the only places I’ve seen higher quality discussions (about politics) are places with stricter civility norms, and at this point I think that’s just an unfortunate reality that stems from human nature.

I’d say what distinguished the forum originally was more a commitment to free speech than to civility, though it had both of course.

I don’t think it’s possible to create an Internet community where everyone engages charitably but people are also free to call each other or their outgroup stupid, evil, or faggots.

They believe it though. The illusion of censorship is that hiding something makes it disappear, like a hand in front of a baby.

To the extent such a community does exist, it’s living on borrowed time as one group leaves due to asymmetry in hostility (if your community is 80% Packers fans and 20% Bears fans, then Bears fans are going to see a lot more hostility than Packer’s fans).

If you think it was bad before, wait until the packers fans get mod powers. The minority is always going to be perceived as more hostile. ‘Bears are the best’ – ‘what are you, trolling? You knew an inflammatory statement like that would generate a lot of drama’. On the motte, you’re obviously going to get a lot more reports for an equivalent sneer if you’re woke rather than anti-woke.

I’d say what distinguished the forum originally was more a commitment to free speech than to civility, though it had both of course.

In my mod days we experimented with keeping to a particular Overton window, above and beyond what was required to continue existing on reddit, in order to keep posters broadly comfortable. Drawing the line was frustrating and arbitrary and I hated doing it. Stuff like, don't insist on conspicuously misgendering trans posters, and don't lay 100% of the blame for any given issue on Mexicans/Jews/whatever. In any given specific situation we could have reasonably ruled in either direction, but if we'd radically committed to either free speech or civility the moderation would have become exploitable and the forum would have blown up.

They believe it though. The illusion of censorship is that hiding something makes it disappear, like a hand in front of a baby.

If somebody at your job, church, or hobby shouted out people's attractiveness ratings, do you agree that would make the community a worse place, regardless of whether they believe it?

If you think it was bad before, wait until the packers fans get mod powers.

I trust our mods not to do that, so I don't think the generic "stop mod overreach" arguments really work on TheMotte.

If somebody at your job, church, or hobby shouted out people's attractiveness ratings, do you agree that would make the community a worse place, regardless of whether they believe it?

First off, not really. Is he like shouting during the sermon? Then okay, that's disruptive. But if someone was just radically honest, I wouldn't ostracize him. Some people might learn something.

Secondly, our little club is far more committed to the pursuit of truth than they are.

"Radically honest", I'm sure you would agree, isn't synonymous with correct, well-reasoned, or self-aware. The term doesn't necessarily mean anything much beyond "unconcerned with civility." And of course sure, sometimes arguably civility can be dispensed with--but always at a cost.

The real issue, from my perspective, is that resorting to snark, sarcasm, sideswipes, and similar is that these immediately make one's interlocutor defensive, and we none of us are robotic without a very human tendency to bridle when we perceive we are insulted or demeaned. Which turns arguments into shit slinging. I realize that the perspective exists to "show respect only if it's earned" and even "my enemy is just wrong, his or her mind will never be changed, and therefore why observe decorum?" And finally those who pride themselves on "speaking their mind at all times" like some bloviating uncle too jaded by life to give a damn. All of these types have numerous outlets elsewhere to have internet fights without gloves or rules, but fortunately (in my view) this isn't one of them. (I'm not suggesting that you are one such type.)

And of course sure, sometimes arguably civility can be dispensed with--but always at a cost.

I see it the other way. Civility is often helpful, perhaps even necessary, but as a filter on the truth, civility has a cost. Ideally, we should all be capable of hearing the hurtful antagonistic truth, and just keep cooperating, or here, discussing. Of course, in the real world, without the filter, people will fight or walk away. Civility is therefore just a compromise to our weakness and egotism, like you say “our very human tendency to bridle when we perceive we are insulted or demeaned“.

You can have too much civility, blocking out the truth and leaving only platitudes. Our club’s informal norms are cordial enough, its members stoic enough, that imo we don’t need a strongly enforced filter.

Civility is often helpful, perhaps even necessary, but as a filter on the truth, civility has a cost. Ideally, we should all be capable of hearing the hurtful antagonistic truth, and just keep cooperating, or here, discussing. Of course, in the real world, without the filter, people will fight or walk away. Civility is therefore just a compromise to our weakness and egotism, like you say “our very human tendency to bridle when we perceive we are insulted or demeaned“.

Yup. No argument.

Our club’s informal norms are cordial enough, its members stoic enough, that imo we don’t need a strongly enforced filter.

This is where I disagree.

You're right, in a sense. Our club is cordial enough. It's cordial enough almost by definition; it's cordial enough because the ones who weren't cordial enough already left.

Relaxing the filter pushes that boundary a bit further. It would cause more people to leave.

The club would still be cordial enough, defined in terms of the remaining members of the club, because it cannot be anything else; a group will always consist of the people who are members of the group. But merely consisting of the people who are the members of the group isn't enough. One must weigh the value of the people who are no longer in the group against the cost of keeping those members.

Here's the Foundation, which is, as always, the touchstone to use when discussing rule changes:

The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs. It is to be a place for people to examine the beliefs of others as well as their own beliefs; it is to be a place where strange or abnormal opinions and ideas can be generated and discussed fairly, with consideration and insight instead of kneejerk responses.

All of the community's rules must be justified by this foundation.

Rules against anything is a sacrifice. I'm not going to argue otherwise. In an ideal world, we could somehow allow all forms of discussion to occur without driving anyone away. But in practice, that ideal isn't achievable. Any amount of permission we give will drive people away; any amount of restriction we impose will halt conversation. Rules against anything is a sacrifice, but at the same time, a lack of rules against something is also a sacrifice.

I personally think we've achieved a reasonable balance, but I also thought, for some time, that perhaps we'd gone a bit too far in the direction of lack-of-rules. Some of our new mods agree and are willing to put more time into shoving the general conversational climate in the direction that they think is appropriate.

This is a sacrifice. I am genuinely sad for the conversations this kills, that we will never see because the strata of the forum itself no longer supports them.

But I'm happy for the people and opinions we may bring back.

If you want to convince me otherwise, you need to make a good argument that less moderation better suits the needs of the Foundation. I think you'll have a hard time doing this, because you'll need to convince me, and convincing me is hard, ironically because I don't have any firm evidence, I just have gut feeling and instinct. This means you need to either provide a form of evidence that I'm not convinced can exist, or you'll need to overcome that instinct.

But that's your goal, and merely pointing to the conversations lost isn't going to do it.

I'm already aware of those, insofar as someone can be aware of something that never existed.

My model on how civility rules fit with the foundation : imagine we still had the full spectrum of ideologies here, in a normal distribution. Because of the ideological distance, the most vicious fights would be between extremes, say left-anarchists vs nazis. They’d be hardest hit by the tightening of civility rules, and it would narrow the ideological spectrum.

I think this fits with the nearest example, the two long bans under discussion here, burdensomecount’s and mine, which started as a spat between us. While most of the sub has sympathy for christianity, or at least ‘believes in belief’, and finds /r/atheism cringe, I’m still a virulent antitheist, while burdensomecount is an earnest believer in a different religion (also different race, which was more of a factor in his ban). So the odd ones cancel each other out. I’m not saying it’s impossible for an individual to stay impeccably civil despite a considerable ideological distance with the median, but it’s less likely, so on the scale of ideas, that’s how it goes.

I suppose you think greater civility would help recapture some of the center and left commentariat, but in practice, civility mostly protects the sub’s majority. A representative example is darwin’s ban, which I always opposed as a too strict interpretation of civility rules.

My instincts (and as you say, that discussion may be pointless) favour the man who gets banned for offending over the one who leaves when offended.

But whatever happens, even though my ban would obviously be a grievous loss, I'm sure this place will remain pretty great. If there was an election for motte dictator, you’d get my vote, and I’m not just saying that, dear leader.

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They believe it though. The illusion of censorship is that hiding something makes it disappear, like a hand in front of a baby.

It is impossible to prevent people from writing an uncharitable post against their ideological opponents by forbidding them from calling them faggots (or insert any other snarl word). But I do believe it introduces significant friction and reduces the amount of such posts.

It also makes such posts cattier, which is a disincentive in and of itself.

I think the moderation is just fine. The Kulak example you gave is actually one of the most wholesome things I've ever seen while debating on the internet. Seriously, I've been writing and debating on various internet forums for decades now. I don't think I've ever before seen a heated argument get started, the mods say "knock it off you two", followed by both posters apologizing for overreacting and restating reasonable points in a calm and civilized manner. Fucking magic!

I actually still remember to this day, one time like 10 or 15 years ago, I got in an argument/discussion with somebody on some forum, I think it was Slashdot. They were very hostile and insulting and I remained calm and reasonable. After 2 or 3 exchanges, I asked him why he was being so hostile and insulting when I hadn't insulted him once and he actually calmed down some and apologized. Not mentioning that to make myself sound awesome or anything, but to say that it's really remarkable and rare to actually move conversations from hostility back to calm and reasonable discussion.

Burdensomcount is the only one on your list who got a harsh-ish punishment. But the explanation from FCfromSSC seems quite reasonable. I don't have access to mod notes and I don't follow everything that goes on here in enough detail to know stuff like that, but I have no reason to disbelieve the explanation.

In every listed case, the mods have calmly and patiently explained their position, even restating it multiple times in multiple places for the benefit of people who could plausibly be claimed to be behaving disingenuously. 99% of the internet that's moderated gets "Fuck off, troll! ::clicks permaban button::" to that behavior.

This is undoubtedly the best-moderated community on the internet. I've never seen anywhere that even comes close. Nowhere else allows the free discussion of politically charged topics while enforcing standards of politeness, decorum and basic writing ability that keep out undesirable users.

This is a place for people who want to discuss certain topics without being called a faggot / kike / whore / cuck / whatever by drive-by plebs and that is both meaningful and rare. I suppose it could be 'better', but I don't see how, and the issues I do have (like the lack of leftist users) seem unsolveable given basic social dynamics. So I think this place is probably the best it can be.

/r/supremecourt also looks pretty good at moderation


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