This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
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Notes -
I think people have gotten more entrenched in their positions over time, and there are fewer semi-neutral interlopers who engage with actual 'curiosity.'
So the people who are left are basically fighting from positions they are VERY familiar with and thus can defend well, but there's going to be less movement of actual beliefs overall. I suspect.
Like, most of my contributions to the above report are me expressing at length positions I've worked myself into over a period of years, and feel very confident in. I am still very open to being challenged and changing my mind, but it seems less likely to happen. So I get a bit punchier in hopes of spurring someone to bring some stronger arguments against me.
Partially may be due to evaporative cooling, but I'm not sure if I'm even correct on the trend.
People were entrenched in the atheism vs Christianity debates of the 00s. I already had entrenched positions when I was 13, starting from the earliest internet debates that I can remember participating in. There was never a mythical time when people weren't entrenched. The fact that people are engaging in actual back and forth debate over an issue at all indicates that it's already an issue that causes emotions to run high.
Arguing to change people's minds is like playing high school football for the purpose of getting into the NFL. Yeah, it's technically not impossible. But if that's what all your expectations are riding on, you're probably going to be disappointed. Better to just do it for the love of the game.
I have had my mind changed or adjusted by arguments I read here over the years.
The quality of arguments seems about the same or even better in some ways, but there are not as many people just casually commenting on a given phenomena without staking out an actual position on the issue itself, around here.
My positions have changed over the course of my life, certainly. I don't think anything I've ever read on TheMotte specifically has ever changed my mind on anything substantial though. The last time I had anything that could be described as a major shift in views was probably... closing in on a decade ago. I've changed as a person in some ways since then; I've changed my mind on certain personal and idiosyncratic matters. But in terms of anything that other people would recognize as a major political/philosophical issue, it's been a while.
It's hard to expect someone to become an instant convert like Saul of Tarsus or that respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford just because they had a single discussion. Rather, the process of a well-intentioned discussion forces both sides to examine their own chains of reasoning.
And sometimes you both follow your chains backwards, fixing errors along the way, and you see that yours starts with "A is good" and theirs starts with "not-A is good". Okay, fundamental values dissonance, unless either of you have a literal revelation, you'll remain in disagreement. But sometimes it's "A is good" vs "B is good". And this is when you can change. You go, "actually, both A and B are good, I shouldn't disregard B completely. If A and B are in conflict, is there a way to avoid this? If not, what is the mixture of A and B that I find optimal and why?"
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I can distinctly remember two:
One was back in Covid days somebody pointed out that evolutionary pressures would make it almost certain that mutations of a virus would trend towards making it less deadly, which somewhat alleviated my fears of Covid running rampant and becoming more deadly as it spread.
The other was someone arguing that we currently have the capability of tracking any incoming asteroids or other celestial objects that are large enough to pose a danger to earth, and as long as we're actively looking we should notice one in with enough time, in theory, to intervene/deflect it, which led me to slightly downgrade "asteroid strike' on my list of existential risks.
One that the jury is still out on is whether LLMs/AI will end up hurting lawyer employment and salaries by supplanting entry-level attorney jobs, or if it will instead bolster lawyer employment by enabling contracts and other transactional documents to become MUCH more complex.
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I think the trend you’re observing is probably real, although in my case one of my contributions is a post where I express an opinion I myself am not 100% comfortable with and that is a change from my prior position. (Specifically, the one about how efforts to raise fertility are probably a lost cause.)
I do think we have a few high-effort contributors who don’t sort easily into any of the major ideological “camps” on the Motte, and I also think that most of the people who have fled the site entirely were not actually the squishy moderates but rather those who were most ideologically rigid and could not deal with the enforced charity rules. That being said, I haven’t been a Motteposter for nearly as long as some others in this community, so perhaps my perspective is skewed.
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That's pretty close to how I see it as well.
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