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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Notes -
There was a community of people who called themselves "rationalists", centered on a website called "LessWrong". They were trying to figure out how to be less wrong, how to overcome bias and get at the truth. The community coalesced around a couple of prolific bloggers, one of whom was Scott Alexander. Scott was quite an excellent writer and had his own blog, Slate Star Codex, which went moderately viral during the 2014-2015 Social Justice brew-up online. He wrote a string of quite excellent essays attempting to analyze, critique or occasionally defend Social Justice ideas, and built up a thriving community of commenters interested in the subject. He attempted to keep culture war discussion contained to weekly threads created for the topic, and thus the culture war thread was born.
His popularity got high enough that his commenters started a subreddit, /r/slatestarcodex, but as the debate around Social Justice ideology got more and more acrimonious, Scott started getting more and more pushback from SJ proponents for his free speech stance. Eventually, he stopped hosting culture war discussion, and told everyone to take it to the subreddit. This did not succeed in insulating him from SJ disapproval, and he suffered a pretty serious harassment campaign targeting his career and personal life. The mods on the subreddit quickly decided that they didn't want the heat either, and likewise banned discussion of the culture war outside SJ orthodoxy, so the thread moved to /r/themotte. SJ disapproval of the Motte's existence succeeded in drawing attention from the Reddit admins, who made it clear through their actions that they would not allow the thread to operate according to its established principles, so we took the leap and moved off-site to hear. Along the way we've had other communities split off as well, but this remains the most active descendent community by a fair margin.
This place is not supposed to have an ideological stance, other than free speech and good communication. The goal is to facilitate and encourage meaningful communication between people with very different values and points of view, and the rules are designed and enforced with this purpose in mind. Moderation is for tone, not for content; we aim to not care what anyone says, only how they say it. The community leans pretty strongly anti-social justice, as many of the pro-social-justice posters the community had got frustrated and left one way or the other over the succession of moves.
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