This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This is not a warning, in the sense that I'm not putting a note on your account, but I have two moderator-level questions about your post that I'd be interested in an honest response to, if possible.
The first is your rhetoric concerning the Motte. You wrote:
Which can actually literally mean anywhere from one voice, to all voices; from a small majority to a large one, and anywhere in between. Then you wrote:
Which literally means the same thing as the first part of that sentence, in reverse. However you chose "many" instead of "some," which paints a certain picture of this space. You then dropped four quotes. But weirdly, the first and fourth quotes are from the same post, and it is a post for which that user got banned, which you don't mention. So my first question is: why did you decide to portray the discussion here with such uncharitable rhetoric?
The Motte exists as text. One of the things that sometimes happens to places like this is, what sets them apart from other spaces gets amplified as it gets noticed. So for example people notice that reddit is a teeming hive of fedora-wearing atheists, which attracts more fedora-wearing atheists (and repels non-fedora-wearing-atheists) until the admin slashes-and-burns their way through the algorithm (or whatever), converting the site to a teeming hive of reflexively woke young adults. In a way I suspect this is analogous to Flanderization, but with a community rather than a fictional character. Maybe sociologists have a name for this process?
Anyway, this is a space for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. But our "open debate, no positions banned" policy meant that people with Overton-suppressed political views found this space unusually welcoming. One way we try to tamp down the "seven zillion witches" problem that this eventually Flanderizes to is by emphasizing individual arguments over discussion of "groups" wherever possible. I have often repeated the line "you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic" to people who make sweeping claims about the Motte. It applies to your post, here: the reason I don't want people making claims about the Motte is that I think it tends to Flanderize the space. People read your claim, and it shifts, however slightly, their priors on whether this space is "for them." But of course it's for them! As long as they follow the rules, this space is for everyone, no matter what they believe. That's the foundation; that's the bedrock.
My second question is: why did you include the ChatGPT summary? Did you feel the need to provide a summary but didn't feel up to writing one yourself? Were you just padding your word count in hopes of avoiding a "low effort" moderation action? I'm not accusing you of anything, mind--I'm just curious. You have a pretty good posting history so I was caught off guard by it. Not only does generative AI minimize engagement with your audience, it minimizes your own engagement with the text you're citing. No one benefits from it. It seems to me that ChatGPT quotes are quinessential low-effort participation, unless maybe you're showing your work on a post specifically about generative AI or something. I don't think we've explicitly made it against the rules but I do think it's incompatible with the rules we've got--but maybe I'm overlooking something.
For your first question, you contend that I'm interpreting the conversation in that other thread uncharitably, but I don't think I am. In my eyes, those calling the cancellations justified were a bit more common than those calling explicitly for restraint. It wasn't by a massive amount, and the exact split would come down to how you'd classify some of the people who were ambivalent. But for a quick calculation, check out the upvote totals in this back and forth between KMC and EverythingIsFine. For further evidence, confuciuscorndog's post is what I'd consider to be the most repugnant. This was the one with "eat their own dogfood" bit and the explanation of just how much he wouldn't care if this woman killed herself. Credit where it's due, this post was modded since it flagrantly broke the rules, but even despite this, the reaction from onlookers was "yes, this is the type of content we want to see more of", voted Motte users by more than a 3:1 margin. Then, the post explaining why he was getting modded stands at a nearly equal vote ratio.
You're correct the first and fourth quotes I had were from the same post. I think they're both quite extraordinary and worth highlighting, but I should have kept them together and noted they were from the same post. This was sloppiness on my part and I've corrected it. But... I also wasn't terribly short on bombastic quotes. I've added a few others to the pile after I've reread some of that other thread.
I understand your point about flanderization, and how it can become a self-fulfilling if people keep repeating it even if it's not necessarily true. But the way you're presenting it seems a bit overbroad here. A blanket ban on meta discussions of the forum's ideological split would be to put our heads in the sand and ignore an obvious phenomenon. As it happens, I've been having a relatively bad time with this site recently. One part of it has been conversations with a handful of users that have degenerated to accusations of dishonesty, ad hominems, or disrespect in ways that clearly violate the spirit of the rules while apparently doing just enough to avoid being modded. As someone who has views across the political spectrum, it's hard not to notice that my right-leaning views are received well, my center views are received somewhat well, and my left-leaning views are received with scorn and derision. I've been meaning to do a top-level post on this to make sure it's not just all in my head, but then one presidential candidate got shot in the head, and the other dropped out.
For your second question on chatGPT, I've gotten mostly positive reviews when I've posted summaries on other relatively high quality subs like /r/slatestarcodex and /r/credibledefense. By that, I mean nobody questioned it and people responded to the points earnestly. I don't really like writing summaries but people seem to expect them and it's the type of rote thing that I'd expect an LLM to excel at. Though, notably, I didn't include the fact that it was AI-generated in my other tests, so I'm wondering if there's some placebo effect going on here.
Somebody else pointed out that it might be hallucinating so I've replaced it with Scott's 9 points.
Thanks for the response.
Discussions of the meta are not banned, of course--and I would re-emphasize that my analysis of your comment was not intended in any punitive way. Several users have raised concerns about a slide in the quality of discourse. Two mods have left the site, citing this as a reason. "The discourse is degrading" is not a new accusation; analogous complaints are arguably why the CW thread got kicked off the SSC subreddit in the first place. I've been moderating for something like five years and "the discourse is degrading" has been a steady drumbeat all along. And yet some of the most highly informative and uniquely insightful posts ever contributed to the CW thread were written long ago by users with names like "yodatsracist" and "trannyporno."
So I'm (yes, probably as an exercise in futility) trying to understand the shape of what's really going on. The Sneer Club subreddit (now defunct) was created eight years ago. Most of Scott Alexander's best culture war posts were written in 2014. The underlying mechanism of being "a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases" has contributed to the development of numerous semi-famous and arguably even influential substack writers and podcasters and the like. And yes--it has also resulted in a metric shit-ton of weird stuff, conspiracy-theory level madness, flat-earther tier denials of reality, etc. It has always been that bad, and it has always been that great. And as specific individuals have found its usefulness to them personally to expire, they have on many occasions departed with the declaration that now the Motte is just too much a hive of scum and villainy. But... maybe this time it's different? That's kind of what I'm trying to understand.
I myself no longer find the CW thread as useful as it has been to me in the past! But that's very much about me. The idea of freewheeling discourse being totally cool was well within the Overton window before 2016 introduced the idea of a "Misinformation Age" (whether things actually happened that way or not), and today, well... today people are much more concerned about epistemic hygiene, I guess would be the charitable way to say it. "Wrongthink bad" is not a new idea, but I daresay it is much more fashionable now than it was ten years ago.
I don't know where that leaves us. I've never been the solutions person. I know @ZorbaTHut has expressed some desire to implement solutions in the form of code, but the demands of day jobs are a curse upon us all. (Isn't there something in the Bible about that?) Anyway, thanks for answering my questions, I appreciate the effort and reflection.
I saw TracingWoodgrains posts about leaving here. Who was the other one?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link