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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   6208 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for December 2022

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.

A few comments from the editor: first, sorry this is a little late, but you know--holidays and all. Furthermore, the number of quality contribution nominations seems to have grown a fair bit since moving to the new site. In fact, as I write this on January 5, there are already 37 distinct nominations in the hopper for January 2023. While we do occasionally get obviously insincere or "super upvote" nominations, the clear majority of these are all plausible AAQCs, and often quite a lot of text to sift through.

Second, this month we have special AAQC recognition for @drmanhattan16. This readthrough of Paul Gottfried’s Fascism: Career of a Concept began in the Old Country, and has continued to garner AAQC nominations here. It is a great example of the kind of effort and thoughtfulness we like to see. Also judging by reports and upvotes, a great many of us are junkies for good book reviews. The final analysis was actually posted in January, but it contains links to all the previous entries as well, so that's what I'll put here:

Now: on with the show!

Quality Contributions Outside the CW Thread

@Tollund_Man4:

@naraburns:

@Bernd:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@RandomRanger:

@Iconochasm:

Contributions for the week of December 5, 2022

@zeke5123:

@ymeskhout:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@gattsuru:

@Southkraut:

@Bernd:

@problem_redditor:

@FCfromSSC:

@urquan:

@gemmaem:

Sexulation

@RococoBasilica:

@problem_redditor:

Holocaustianity

@johnfabian:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

@SecureSignals:

Coloniazism

@gaygroyper100pct:

@screye:

@urquan:

@georgioz:

Contributions for the week of December 12, 2022

@SecureSignals:

@Titus_1_16:

@Dean:

@cjet79:

@JarJarJedi:

@gattsuru:

@YE_GUILTY:

@aqouta:

@HlynkaCG:

Contributions for the week of December 19, 2022

@MathiasTRex:

@To_Mandalay:

Robophobia

@gattsuru:

@IGI-111:

@NexusGlow:

Contributions for the week of December 26, 2022

@FCfromSSC:

@gattsuru:

@LacklustreFriend:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

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One does wonder if it isn't some gap in the rules if we have to re-litigate "did Auschwitz really have gas chambers???!?!?" every week though.

Have a Holocaust megathread and after it starts dying naturally put a moratorium on discussions on the topic (unless it's cleary a byproduct of some other topic, aka there's a new Holocaust-related film that causes a huge culture war or something) for some time.

If you have a suggestion that isn't "ban certain topics/arguments," let's hear it.

I am also tired of the weekly thread about Da Joos and Their Fake Holocaust, and I'm sure many others are too. But this has always been one of those exploitable gaps in the Motte's culture of radically embracing free speech. One of Scott's more popular essays pointed it out back in 2015:

There’s an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches.

Scott didn't have a solution then, and we don't have one now. We have noted the witchward drift since we left reddit, and maybe that will be our final failure state, but the alternative is just deciding what opinions are and aren't allowed.

If you have a suggestion that isn't "ban certain topics/arguments," let's hear it.

A "mute comment chain feature". You click it, a comment and all it's children get collapsed in the normal view by default, and don't show up in firehose.

Might even help out developing it.

If you have a suggestion that isn't "ban certain topics/arguments," let's hear it.

I've always been a fan of rate-limiting, in theory. If the "weekly" thread was a yearly thread then my reaction would probably be an excited "wow, here comes the fight again!" rather than an apprehensive "is anyone going to wade into the fight again or has everyone been exhausted to apathy now?"

If you have a suggestion that isn't "ban certain topics/arguments," let's hear it.

Isolate topic in some containment thread? (subvariant of topic ban)

Yeah, I don't really have a suggestion either. The same reason I like this place is the same reason it shows up.

It's just frustrating when you can't work from a somewhat similar base understanding of the world. It would be like if we had a really annoying Flat Earther who insists that we have to prove that the Earth is round from first principles every work. Would be a lot easier if we didn't have to do this.

Maybe I should write a post about this kind of narrow skepticism. It's an interesting phenomenon where people will just aggressively narrow down on one specific thing that they're at odds with the entire rest of the world with, even though they take no issue with the same processes and methodologies that produced everything else

I think perhaps you're conflating the uncommonness/offensiveness of a belief with how disruptive the belief is to sharing a common understanding of the world with other interlocutors who don't share the belief.

Believing in a flat earth makes it difficult to have conversations that rely on the shared assumptions about air travel, time zones, gravity, the scientific community, and probably dozens of other things.

Believing the Holocaust killed an order of magnitude fewer people and/or wasn't a top-down intentional extermination makes it difficult to have conversations about... what, exactly, besides the Holocaust itself?

I'm not seeing much to convince me that your lamentations are much beyond the outrage that people like SecureSignals believe something false and perhaps even reprehensible and are "getting away with it" more than you'd like. Which isn't nothing! I have to step away from The Motte when I see people getting away with bad arguments I don't have the patience to deal with, too. But let's not pretend that the other party is some sort of alien you can't have other conversations with just fine.

If you have a solution to the Internet's Eternal September, we're all ears. The standard approach here is something like this. Most other forums simply engage in topic bans, but a big part of this space's history was that the userbase routed around a topic ban in the SSC subreddit by just calling HBD Voldemort (inspired, I think, by this comment).

The only way to ensure that we don't have to re-litigate an issue is to ban it, but (1) we're against that because it undermines the foundation and (2) our experience with the userbase is that it doesn't work, anyway. Like brushing your teeth or sweeping your floors, cultural maintenance can be a repetitive and thankless chore! But refusing to do it on grounds that some issue is "settled" ignores the fact that there are always wise people dying, and always ignorant people showing up to take their place.

Offtopic but does anyone have a link to Kirkegaards OKCupid dump?

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