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I’m pretty empathetic to the job the mods have to do and won’t defend user antifa, but I tend to agree strongly with what you have to say here. For a place that claims to optimize for “light, not heat”, things such feel like an echo chamber in here too often.
I also don’t think it’s a problem that can be solved by any level of moderation. For example, this post from last week’s Culture War thread felt like the kind of low-effort strawman I am used to seeing on Twitter, yet it received a lot of upvotes and was not criticized by other users.
I think we should do more to hold ourselves accountable to a higher standard of discussion, no matter what political slant is being invoked. Mods can only referee here, they can’t make the plays.
It is a low effort post that could be dinged for consensus building, but is it really a strawman?
It's a skeptical (Motte-friendly) yet accurate description of what the article relays about environmentalism of the era. It is pretty much a bare link, but not every post needs 8 paragraphs. I would have appreciated a high effort counter-narrative posted here or elsewhere. The closest thing is an almost too charitable "that's how science works, stupid." This is Dr. Near, the same researcher in the article, quote tweeting. That seems to be a narrow interpretation when, in the article, opponents are quoted as saying:
If you have a different or better idea for a top-level you can do that. It seems more typical to leave the lazy post up if it generates good enough discussion. Once the thread is scrolling it's hard to justify nuking everything when mods can't be sure if someone else will make the effort post to replace it. Put the effort post under the lazy one. The only reliable way to get ahead of this is for You to make the effort post.
I took it as a strawman because the term experts was doing a lot of heavy lifting. I think you may have better characterized the correct criticisms of the post.
I have no skin in the particular game of that top-level post and not much to contribute to the discussion, but I reserve my right to criticize. On the subject of effort posts, I hope you will instead visit my recent top level post in Transnational Thursday though!
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It is intimately refreshing to read what you're saying because I agree wholeheartedly, except that it can't be solved by moderation. I believe moderation can solve it by setting the trend. If we can all agree what "not responding to eachother" looks like, or "debate fallacies", or "poor standard of discussion", which I think we can do, then we can start calling each-other out on it and only resort to mods for reinforcement/clarification. I swear on my pinky toe the same problem would be here if there was a healthy leftist population.
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