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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?

...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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