In Paul Fussell’s book on class (I think), he says that people are really worried about differentiating themselves from the class immediately below them, but largely ignorant of the customs and sometimes even existence of the classes above them. When I found SSC, and then The Motte, and stuff like TLP, I was astonished to find a tier of the internet I had had no idea even existed. The quality of discourse here is . . . usually . . . of the kind that “high brow” (by internet standards) websites THINK they are having, but when you see the best stuff here you realize that those clowns are just flattering themselves. My question is, who is rightly saying the same thing about us? Of what intellectual internet class am I ignorant now? Or does onlineness impose some kind of ceiling on things, and the real galaxy brains are at the equivalent of Davos somewhere?
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
TM - The Motte
You are probably not selecting the smartest people on generalist online forums. You are selecting people who have online discussions, to begin with, then you further stratify those people into more groups based on discussion quality, and so on. You are also somewhat biased towards the discourse norms that are the most pleasant to you. Not to mention community vision, TM wants to talk, Sneerclub wants to sneer, not the same objective.
Mottes Strengths
The Motte in my experience does seem to be the strongest generalist contender of all online forums I have come across. Not in terms of sheer intelligence; but discourse norms, clarity of thought/argument, good faith, generality, and breadth of topics.
Discourse norms. Deserves repetition.
Mottes Weaknesses
Depth is the most apparent weakness of TM, I do sometimes have my Gell Mann Amnesia broken when I read about something I know a fair bit about.
Another weakness of TM is that I think a lot of people here are your typical "nerds", some of the things you see being said are only things that someone who never stepped foot outside of a classroom or lives in an extremely affluent bubble would say. Intelligent people with a working-class or non-academic background are obviously underrepresented. This is a weakness because if you are going to discuss the CW, you will end up discussing the real world and most of the people in it, it would serve you well knowing how THEY think.
Strong American tunnel vision as well on part of some of the posters (a lot of things don't make sense if you are only aware of the American talking points; see Urban planning, political correctness/ wokeism, the political spectrum, and its dimensions).
It is kind of ironic that for a community of programmers, TM settled for a fork of rDrama. This might be a passion issue but raises some questions nonetheless. TM isn't hackernews but TM isn't /r/redscarepod either. This point is probably not worth thinking much about, I am sure the alternatives/tradeoffs were considered. Ultimately it's an optics thing.
Skews older. Culture is moving too fast to not have enough smart young people taking part in the CULTURE war discussions. I am surprised at the number of people who don't use social media in this blog or have no idea of the current memespace developments even though social media is the defining feature of our times culture. Yes, I am aware that the discourse norms are discriminating against them heavily.
Passion Issue
One of my smartest friends (restricting anecdotes to peers because I know of their habits, can't really tell you if my Math Professor uses Reddit) is doing a Ph.D. in CS at a top university in Canada and had 8 relatively well-cited publications by the time he was done with his master's. He does not discuss any abstract topics, let alone highly contentious CW ones at a high level, his opinions are normie opinions at best. Likewise for all the other "smart" people I know.
I am yet to meet anyone who holds opinions that are as well-defended and coherent as those you would find on the motte. So there is a strong confounder of "people who actually put in the effort to think and form opinions on a certain set of topics, and then write about them to strangers online!" that you need to be aware of when making that judgment. That tendency might correlate with intelligence, but I wouldn't posit that correlation is strong. Intelligence is more of a precondition than a corollary.
So be sure you know exactly WHAT you are looking for.
Just as an anecdotal data point: the most social-media addicted people that I know are all older than forty (amongst them, a 76-year old lady hooked on Tik Tok), whereas I know quite a few people under 30 who have quit all social media.
I'm near-30 and I might be one of the most plugged-in to recent meme culture here.
More options
Context Copy link
It makes sense. For those who use it, it's just the statu quo, whereas those who don't are very aware that they are swimming upstream.
More options
Context Copy link
Twitter is hardly social media. Or more specifically rarely is anyone from GenZ following people they know on Twitter. Instagram > TikTok > Twitter, as far as how "social" the website is. TikTok is the big cultural force, and Instagram is the sociocultural force. Twitter is more media than social, It has sway in some circles (western urban millenials) but the veracity/volume doesn't compare relative to the other two.
By my count, if you're following people not topics, it's social media.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Clarity? Not really. Huge walls of text that can be succinctly spelled out in a few sentences is not clarity. Smart, yeah. Motte posters are pretty smart.
Social media is too hard to get momentum, too much based on luck and connections, too much noise. Posting on The Motte means you have an audience right here. Twitter is known to censor for using certain words or tone, which isn't the case here.
It reduces the chance of being misunderstood, lowers inferential distance to everyone. I'm not claiming it's universally good ofc.
More options
Context Copy link
Nobody's perfect at this, but I think we do pretty well for what we discuss.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is spot on. All of my smartest friends go to their lab/startup-wework at 8am and come back home at 1am in the night. They barely have time wipe their own butts, let alone waste time on the internet. The most well rounded ones find time to work out, eat well & to pursue 1 hobby (or children) to the same unhealthy (but healthy?) levels as their careers. If I had to really stretch it, there are some who find time to socialize, party & maybe watch Joe Rogan / Huberman.
My observation is that thinking about the world & your own place in it throws people into deep crises of meaning. The top 0.01% of productive people simply do not have the time to throw themselves into such a crisis. So, they hold onto whatever ideas they inherit unquestioningly, and keep trudging along in the area of focus.
There are 2 exceptions to the rule.
Unmedicated ADHD types who can summon hyper-focus semi-reliably : Motte is the distraction they engage in, and somehow make up for it by hyper focusing into meeting impossible deadlines. I like to think I semi-fall into this category. This cycle is very prone to burn-out though. So, the entire group has periodic crash-and-burns every couple of years. (Yes, I am projecting)
The types who had an early-life crisis of meaning : This includes the Huberman types. How does a skater boy become a Stanford professor ? These people aren't necessarily as online. But, at some point they had a early-life crisis, and went through a lot of the same motte-esque emotions and meaning-finding exercises. The outcome was them finding something they could truly laser focus on, which them led to a meteoric rise into becoming part of the elite. I love this group of people. You can sometimes find them at a party suddenly zoning out with that thousand yard stare. Sometimes it is the hidden tattoos. But these people are a treasure trove of wisdom. Find a person like this to mentor you, man does it help you mature super fast.
Happy to see it mentioned.
Note however that i have unmedicated ADD and the few times I tried amphetamines it enhanced my hyperfocusing obsessive ability instead of decreasing it.
An effect that seems logical, since it give me more energy (which I chronically lack) and make thinking/reading even more pleasant.
More options
Context Copy link
Whenever I read stuff like this I wonder how someone can possibly know enough people to come up with such specific categories of people. If I know anyone who matches any of the types you've described, I don't know them well enough to know that they do. Are there just a lot of people who are social to a level that I have difficulty imagining?
Not exactly, but the style of being social is different. I make sure that the relationships I do form are intimate (even platonically) and not just surface level. I am the kind of person who catches up with a friend once in 6 months, but when we do, we talk for 2-3 hours. A lot comes out.
I have always lived with a lot of roommates, and seeing anyone day-in-and-day-out is a great way of getting to know them well enough. I have also been very open about my experiences in therapy, unconventional career change struggles & my past of being brutally bullied. So, people will often open up to me because they see me as having opened myself up to them. Lastly, I mentor a lot of younger early-in-career types. There are at least 6 people I am directly mentoring, and half-a-dozen who I will offer an ear to every once in a while. These kids will usually come to me with very specific problems & circumstances that they or their peers are facing. The whole thing is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because my immediate network naturally ends up including people who themselves have huge intimate networks. So, I end up 2 degrees of separation from a lot of specific stories & theories of people's lives.
I guess my history with bullying forces me to try and get a read on a person within my first few minutes of meeting them. I am not very successful, but there is a reflexive observation of a person that I need to do before engaging which might play a role in me bucketizing people. I am not social in the traditional sense at all. I didn't start drinking until I was 27, and even then only have a beer. I don't dance, I still can't pick up on cues as well and I rarely do truly reckless things.
Hubris. At some point, I am projecting my own read on them from limited interactions with that person. I am also notorious for confidently stating models of the world that I come up on the fly. Ask me again tomorrow and I might give you a different answer.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I was around the development group more when the choice was made to settle on rDrama. There are indeed a lot of other forum systems out there, some of which are using more sophisticated technology. But if you really dig into them, virtually all of them are one-person projects that have never had any significant contributions from anyone other than the original creator, have never been proven on a high-traffic site, particularly with mega-threads like we do and probably at least a few active attackers, and have basically no thought put into proper moderator tools or anti-spam. At least a few of them are also actively hostile to anything non-woke - see the Lemmy slur filter scandal.
rDrama may not be the best designed system out there, but it's at least okay, is open-source in the form that actually serves production traffic, is reasonably well-supported, has some decent mod tools that were straightforward to expand, and has been cooperative with us.
my god the lemmy thing was pathetic. Hadn't seen it before.
"We have made our policy clear on this topic, and we are not going to change it. So there is no point arguing about it, fuck off nazibigot!"
"we have changed our policy on this topic, the slur filter is now entirely optional"
Yup. Even though they did eventually make it directly configurable by the forum admins after all, would you really want to be downstream of a team that says things like that? Who knows what they're gonna do next?
More options
Context Copy link
Two of the maintainers got Fidel Castro profile pictures.. on Github! You can't make this shit up.
Also, it's so frustrating reading all these texts about why a hardcoded filter doesn't make technical sense when all you really want to say is "motherfucker you don't decide what I can or can't say! technical considerations be damned". It's suffocating really.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I guess I’m just asking “what is the next tier of discourse above this one.”
The next tier doesn't exist in online forums although it can happen in some 1 to 1 private DMs.
The reason is simple, it's not even about the lack of geniuses.
It is that mental energy is an extremely scarce resource.
People are universally fucking lazy and have a budget of only a few minutes per comments.
On the rare instances where someone does lengthy researched comments, like I sometimes do, the person will systematically face disappointment as the probability that the community will engage with as much knowledge as passion and him are close to zero. Not even in the same order of magnitude.
Online communities are extremely poor, extremely scarce in energy.
I'm constantly seeing people stop at the same layer of the discourse, repeat the same shit they seem to systematically never learn from, until they die.
As usual, it is a tragedy to see what I see, and to this problem, there is almost no remedy.
More options
Context Copy link
hyper-focused subject-matter communities, usually by invite only or knowing certain people. Special Discord groups, etc.
More options
Context Copy link
The next tier of discourse is gated off, because it requires a very high level depth in a field to engage in that of discourse.
After-work research-lab dinners with a little bit of alcohol and out of earshot of your PI
long-form podcasts (think some of the stuff Razib/Huberman do...less so Rogan/Lex)
(pre-covid) certain meetups in areas of very-very high academic + economic activity (Basically Berkeley, Boston & Palo Alto)
(post-covid) very closed off private discord groups
If your question is, where do where the smart kids of smart millionaires hang out, then the unfortunate answer is in exclusive frats of ivy league universities. The quality of discourse is low, but damn does a shit ton of money flow through the naïve hands of these 20yr old brats.
Nope. I attend a lot of them and none of them come close to a good discussion on TM.
More options
Context Copy link
I beg to differ I think the motte can be disrupted, I intend to write a blog about it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link