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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   33245 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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AAQC for this, strongly agree. This fallacy is deep in the western mind at present and is quite a rot.

Ironically the most liberal people who talk about manifesting and such have it right - if you engender the right mindset, you can absolutely do far more than you think you could.

That sounds like you are just treating AAQC as a super upvote for statements you really agree with. Upvotes based on agreement are already being a blight; taking even AAQC there would just complete the descent into circlejerking. Maybe Zorba should consider introducing MotteGold™️ awards to capture some of that energy instead.

There is no conceivable award system that WON’T devolve into super upvotes for comments you agree with. This is a human universal. You can tell people to vote on quality and not ideological alignment, but they (typically) won’t. There will always be a bias towards perceiving comments you agree with as being intrinsically higher quality. And that’s fine. Let’s face it instead of hiding from it.

Hmm, this sounds fallacious.

You can't just conflate a tendency in a direction with the endpoint that would be reached if no countervailing forces existed at all. Every law will be broken, but it still brings benefits to have and enforce laws; every system will ultimately devolve into disorder, but it still makes sense to tidy your room sometimes. We can, for now, push back against having a super upvote system and thereby eke out some more time in which the incentive is not just farming agreement, giving us more of a window to reap benefits in the form of posts that give new insights.

I think it's a quality contribution, though. I don't understand the issue.

I don't AAQC random one liners that I strongly agree with.

I don't particularly want to dunk on jeroboam (whose post is really perfectly okay), but I don't really see that post as adding any particularly new insight or explaining the old insight that is in it from an unusually persuasive or interesting angle. Would you like it if the forum were made up of posts like that, but for views you don't care for or strongly disagree with?

I think it's fine that my post doesn't win an award. It didn't take me too long to write and I didn't even do any research or sniff my own farts at any point while writing it.

But, yes, I would prefer that this board is mostly social commentary of short to medium length. I want to learn new things and hear interesting perspectives. I hope my posts provide that for others, even if they disagree with me. In fact, if they do disagree, I hope they can sharpen their mind by writing a good counterargument. Someone might even change their mind. I do occassionally.

I find the 5,000 word galaxy-brained posts to be insufferable.

Can you name anything (non-fiction) 5,000 words long, written by anyone anywhere, that you do appreciate? Or is this just a hard limit that no level of quality could surmount?

I read long non-fiction books all the time, mostly history. That's not what I'm here for.

Fair enough. But that is what I'm here for. I'm happy that there's at least one community on the internet that encourages long-form writing.

Nine times out of ten the 5,000 word posts aren’t insightful. And easily could’ve been 500 word posts.

I find the 5,000 word galaxy-brained posts to be insufferable.

Yeah, very much agreed. I basically skip them at this point.

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