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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4403 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 30, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Are we becoming a circle jerk?

I don't ask this facetiously--and for me to use the preposition we here is laughable, not because I do not wish to be included, but because my own contributions are so flimsy that I can scarcely be called a participant, though I am a great lurker.

Rather, I have a concern, perhaps misguided, that themotte.org has become a kind of Athenaeum where (we) sit around in our plush chairs (if that's what they do in The Athenaeum) and bandy opinions that everyone shares anyway, but (we) re-word them at times for cleverness' sake, and, at other times, simply bask in our smugness, content that we are correct and that anyone else who disagrees with us isn't. And don't get me wrong--I often find myself nodding in agreement at certain posts, particularly in the "The Motte Needs You" Janitor section, and wondering if I think they're good because I agree with them out of context, or if I truly think they hold high what I would consider the extremely rare and valuable banner of the Motte.

Of course this group consensus posting people do is in violation of one of the main rules of the Motte: Steelman your opposition. Assume that whoever your interlocutor is (or, put another way, whoever reads your post) may well disagree with you.

I am not suggesting that no one disagrees on any of the posts made here. A few well-known combatants go at it from time to time, usually respectfully, sometimes not.

Still, as a daily browser-not-poster, I feel as if I see a lot of posts that make what I would consider wild, self-assured generalizations without pushback. And very often I either don't have the time or inclination to do a proper pushback or I am, frankly, intimated intimidated by the horsepower some people seem to have on making effortposts as counterpoint. Today is a rare day: I have world enough, and time. I usually don't.

The question "Are we a circlejerk" is probably rhetorical, but feel free to answer however you will. I hope at least people will give the question some thought. As always I am happy to mingle at the party, nameless and unknown, eating the hors d'oeuvres and sampling the champagne.

Regardless of the answer, I think this site is a success beyond expectation, despite the bullshit dismissal of us on reddit.

Still, as a daily browser-not-poster, I feel as if I see a lot of posts that make what I would consider wild, self-assured generalizations without pushback.

I always find these critiques strange. Those things are the ripe low hanging fruit to respond to that makes this place fun as a frequent poster. One thing that I think more people need to internalize because it's not easy or obvious is that just because a point was made and not responded to does not really mean that there is consensus on its correctness. This place is not ground to be won or lost, it's the opportunity to take part or watch arguments about the culture war that would be hard to have elsewhere. An undressed argument is at worst a lost opportunity.

An undressed argument is at worst a lost opportunity.

Addressing an argument, especially if you do so from a socially progressive viewpoint, gets you nothing but headaches. People aren't very kind to them.

We perhaps have the problem understanding each other that men and women have with the amount of opposite sex attention women get. I would be thrilled to get a response on more than ~15% of my comments although I can intellectually understand the discomfort with a dogpile. The places I'd be dogpiled on have banned me.

If you or any other folks have a topic you want to post about, go for it!

On the other hand, I’d like it if we could have some sort of anonymous pool where lurkers could put in topics they want to see in the CW thread. Then posters like me who love writing longform bs but don’t always have an idea can write things the lurkers want.

@ZorbaTHut any thoughts on doing something like this?

Or just a lower-effort CW thread/BLR lol

Does it have to be anonymous?

A weekly “post ideas that you want to have a deeper discussion about, but haven’t actually gone through the trouble of writing an effortpost” thread might be a nice idea.

That's a neat idea, I like it.

I'm not sure there's enough demand for it to make it a regularly posted thing. But you are absolutely welcome to make your own post, either top-level or in the CW thread, whichever you think would be better. If it turns out I'm wrong then, hey, maybe we'll make it a regularly posted thing!

The mainstream response to a witch is burning. The contrarian response is effusive praise. Both are closing ranks to defend the ingroup. I’m proud that the motte is more likely to point out witch trickery and provide evidence for and against. Sometimes that devolves into arguing whether curse victims were crisis actors.

The motte is overly credulous when it comes to contrarianism and overly critical when it comes to the mainstream. I don’t think that’s enough to count as a circlejerk.

Some of you have the worst opinions I’ve seen discussed on the internet. That’s because you’re actually discussing them, rather than taking them as axioms. I have to respect that.

We are kind of a circlejerk but it's not nearly as bad as it could be. Any time one of the main issues comes up - race and immigration, trans, women, AI - there are always people arguing for multiple competing viewpoints. There's never total unanimity.

Every political forum will have a certain slant, it's unavoidable. I don't know of any community that's a true 50/50 split.

The motte is not contrarian enough or only on few or surface topics. I continuously see ad-nauseam people here be blind to many mainstream mental attractors that trap their mind and either distort their thinking process or even make them incousiously abandon the thinking process altogether, like a brain deactivation.

Besides the level of effort, caring, cognitive flexibility and most importantly intellectual genuine curiosity is appaling, I once wished this website to be the only place on the internet where I could meet my peers but alas I am long past this delusion.

Which mainstream mental attractors would those be?

Any time one of the main issues comes up - race and immigration, trans, women, AI - there are always people arguing for multiple competing viewpoints. There's never total unanimity.

The Trans Question has 2 camps on this site, and the dominant one is "trans bad". There's a smaller camp of "trans not necessarily bad, but I don't agree with X, Y, or Z".

Ok the opinions on the TQ are pretty unanimous. I know we have at least one trans person here who takes up the opposing side. I feel like there were at least one or two others who were pro-trans but maybe I'm misremembering.

There are a number of pro-bodily-autonomy-including-trans people on this site, myself included. There are a lot more people here who hold the position "body dysmorphia is bad" than "body dysmorphia is good", but that's because "body dysmorphia is good" is the straw "pro-trans" position [1]. I actually suspect that the following is a scissor statement here:

If medical technology advanced to the point that it was possible to functionally and reversibly change your sex, that would be a good thing. People changing their sex in that situation would be perfectly fine.

[1] Yes, I know that it is possible to find people who say something that approximates this. This is because, for any position, particularly about something political, it is possible to find at least one person who will support that position.

This was discussed a few weeks back. Myself and a couple other folks agreed even though we are generally not pro trans at the moment.

I put it in the same realm as “if women could have a fetus of any age moved from her womb to an artificial womb, and it has little to no negative effect on the child, I’d be fine with that kind of abortion.”

Are you referring to this giant 300 comment thread, or was there a more specific one?

Yep I believe that’s the one. It has come up multiple times since the move offsite though.

I tend to find it interesting to get down to irreconcilable value differences, and to me the question you posed is a great way to get there on trans issues.

I'm one of the pro-trans people on this site, along with a few others. We generally try to push back on the bad arguments even if we agree with the conclusion. At least, that's what I try to do, but I'm bad about being consistent on this site. It's just boring after a while.

I think the site is a circlejerk, but less than almost any other political space. I think /r/politicalcompasshumour has a wider variety of common beliefs(although the modal belief is probably pretty similar to the modal themotte belief, just with more anti-elite populism), but that's the only space that comes to mind that's less of a circlejerk.

I think themotte would need some sort of "change my mind" contest where a mod presents a topic and people can write effort posts about original opinions to get some new variety. Preferably about new topics, not just about race or transgenders like it feels 90% of threads here are about. Something like "Is violent revolution are a viable solution or a stupid idea? Elaborate" or "Will China overtake the US in the near term?" I think would be interesting and fun.

Don't wait for the Mods, do it yourself. My first effort produced some fairly interesting content, but was just a topic I was thinking about at random and not something CW-y. The only part that disappointed me was the voting at the end, where I wished we had gotten more votes in the survey. I didn't even end up counting my vote in it, because it felt unfair with so few votes in the list.

I got tired of the Culture War Threads’ thinly-veiled rants against the same handful of topics that are phrased as questions even though most of us agree on the answers and the poster knows that. Think it’s a shame that so many smart, relatively independent thinkers choose to post about that as opposed to their more unique areas of expertise and interests. I asked a question a few weeks ago in the Sunday thread that was “how did NW Europe become the world’s dominant civilization” and got a lot of great responses that seemed free of the demands of political correctness I might have gotten on Reddit. Would like to see more of that.

Even just more freeform takes on “hey here’s an idea/analysis I have that I want to share” would be preferable to the Culture War Thread imo.

I think you have a point, but it's also natural to talk about the big issues of the day. Culture war issues are aggravated by unnecessary polarisation and politics generally, but they are pretty big issues that we should all have a view on, eg abortion, the shift to gender ideology, shifts in attitudes to free speech, the rise of AI (not a culture war issue, but hugely important). The let's talk about stuff that matters less seems a bit apathetic to me. We should talk about global warming and the environment more, but that's plagued by so much scientific detail.

Are we becoming a circle jerk?

...becoming? I like your optimism!

Three years ago, @TracingWoodgrains took a demographics poll that was delightful to read despite containing no surprises. The modal mottizen then was

a 29-year-old, right-handed straight white man with a Bachelor's degree, a US citizen who lives in California. He has finished his formal education and now earns around $65000 a year, though his net worth remains under $10000. He is single with no kids for now, but he plans on having 2 kids eventually. He is not affiliated with any political party. He was raised Catholic, but now considers himself an atheistic humanist. He considers himself a capitalist, a libertarian, and a classical liberal. He got 800s in both SAT-math and SAT-verbal, but despite this scored only a 1500 overall. He scored a 33 on his ACT. Per the MBTI, he's on the border between INTJ and INTP, which breaks out more clearly in the OCEAN model with very high openness to experience, average agreeableness and conscientiousness, slightly below average extraversion, and low negative emotionality.

He's worn glasses since childhood, had a hundred books or so in his childhood home, and mostly read for pleasure as a kid, though he also enjoyed video games, TV, and playing outside. He went to public school, but didn't like it. Now, he spends 8-12 hours in front of a screen daily, reads hours of longform text each day, and generally also watches videos and plays games. He sleeps about seven and a half hours nightly, and has not had the pleasure of a lucid dream. He lives in a city, but hasn't yet been convinced of the joys of living in a cyberpunk dystopia and prefers outdoor activities to city ones.

Now, this is of course aggregated data. There are women who post here, multiple people with doctoral degrees, many from outside the United States; we have posters who are older and younger, richer and poorer, and so on and so forth. But compared to the world, compared to any given nation, compared to a city, compared to a university... there is definitely a degree of homogeneity in our userbase. At minimum, basically everyone here is open to discussing culture war topics, and sufficiently comfortable in our own views and positions to do so. At that level of self-selection, it would be hard to make an extremely convincing argument that this place is not a "circle jerk," as you've defined it.

Sure enough--if you look at the Quality Contributions Reports over the last few months, you'll see a lot of discussion on transsexuality and transhumanism and artificial intelligence and other recurrent themes. Of course, by the definition you've offered, every Internet community everywhere will inescapably be a "circle jerk," certainly if the community lasts more than five minutes. Even reddit, taken as a whole, is basically a circle jerk, unless you limit yourself to certain subreddits which are themselves circle jerks. (So it turns out most people prefer circle jerks to lonely masturbation...? Perhaps the metaphor is unwieldy...)

This is not an excuse; most of those places are explicitly circle jerks that will ban you on sight for interrupting everyone's fun. Since we aspire to be "a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases," we do want to limit the, uh, circlejerkness! But we only have so many tools in our toolbox--though, as you observe, @ZorbaTHut is actively developing more.

But all of that said--I have almost never posted something here that did not meet with some disagreement. One of the upshots of the relative homogeneity we've got going here, is that a lot of us are pretty contrarian! And we have a lot of actually extremely rare arguments, here. After all--

He dislikes Black Lives Matter, the trans rights movement, gender-critical feminism, gun control, the pro-life movement, the furry fandom, and open borders. He can't stand intersectional feminism, white identitarianism, antinatalism, or social justice. He is ambivalent about animal rights and ambivalent leaning towards positive about the gay rights movement, second-wave feminism, and the pro-choice movement. He kind of likes the religious freedom movement and likes gun rights. He strongly supports Effective Altruism and would march in Hong Kong with the protesters there if he could.

Many of these topics are just outright banned elsewhere. If nothing else, our openness to discussions of this nature makes us much less of a circle jerk than, well, basically everywhere else on the internet, and certainly everywhere else with comparable civility standards.

So while "are we a circle jerk" need not be entirely a rhetorical question, and is certainly worth reflecting on from time to time, my inclination is ultimately to answer it with my own question:

Compared to what?

I mean, any modal read literally cannot do anything but describe a circlejerk. I genuinely have no idea what you expected to demonstrate with that. A 100% random sample would be exactly as specific on whatever the plurality of the population sampled is.

I genuinely have no idea what you expected to demonstrate with that.

Really?

I mean, any modal read literally cannot do anything but describe a circlejerk.

You seem to actually have a pretty good idea what I expected to demonstrate with that.

I guess I expected too much.

Compared to the best version of what this site could be, and sometimes is.

(I did post a long autobiographical bit here but am deleting it.) I appreciate your response.

I can’t help but see that likes/dislikes section as a Dwarf Fortress list of preferences. Our median dwarf is probably chronically depressed and alcoholic, but at least he recently admired a finely-crafted firearm.

There are guns in DF now?

Not unless you count minecart railgun installations.

But all of that said--I have almost never posted something here that did not meet with some disagreement.

We may be a circle-jerk, but at least we are a contrarian circle-jerk, dammit!

No, we aren’t!

Per the MBTI, he's on the border between INTJ and INTP

Unsurprising. If only we had more INFJs...

I think any community of 'witches' tends to end up being less of a circlejerk than normie communities. Firstly, most 'witches' are highly motivated to value freedom of expression, because it benefits them. Secondly, it's more likely for normies to wander into witch communities than the other way around, because there are more normies. And thirdly, witches tend to value agreement and consensus a lot less, and therefore are more likely to voice their disagreement.

Of course, all communities must be circlejerks to some extent - people need to agree, if nothing else, on what subjects are interesting and worth talking about, even if they end up saying different things.

I think any community of 'witches' tends to end up being less of a circlejerk than normie communities. Firstly, most 'witches' are highly motivated to value freedom of expression, because it benefits them.

The witch analogy included a very small number of principled civil libertarians, that's who values freedom of expression.

Witches are not any more interested in freedom of expression as a terminal principle. They'd be just as willing to engage in censorship if they had power.

That's why I said that witches like freedom of expression because it benefits them (rather than on principle).

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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