So the move has been made. Potential shut down by Reddit has been avoided. Huzzah!
But people are still worrying about where new members are going to come from. And things are still being organized in the same terrible way as /r/ssc when they were trying to quarantine the culture war from the rest of the sub. And sprinkles around you have a few small threads for other weekly topics or talking about the new site.
A dedicated site deserves a nu start. Rather than purposely making quality writing harder to find, it should be highlighted. (I know the quality contributions roundup exists, but it certainly isn't exhaustive.) Seriously, have you ever gone back and tried to read an old weekly culture war thread with its thousands, potentially tens of thousands of comments? It is an unnecessary slog if you are looking for something and don't have a link. And sometimes you 'continue reading' and go back only to find that you've lost your place. It just makes you say, "I blue myself."
I do have some suggestions on some of the changes I'd like to see more that there is a dedicated website. First, I'd like to see a webpage highlighting quality contributions and other content from the forum. Something that I can easily link a friend to rather than a nested comment in response to some insane person ranting "There's a man inside me!" Or whatever.
Secondly, I think some editorial prompts for content for the sure would be good. Adversarial collaborations and whatever else. Just easier ways to find good writing from the site.
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Notes -
I just want to let you know that I have joined the forum. I never joined reddit and virtually never use or post on any platform (we are talking 3-4 times in 15 years)... Nor have I ever commented on a substack page or the old slatestarcodex site.
Thank you for doing this and thank you to everyone that moves over to themotte.org. The forum functions as an experiment of ideas where dozens of different scenarios can be run. When I go back to read news or popular science articles it is appalling how narrow and uninformed the information is. You don't even need to read reddit for news or politics anymore. The conclusions are prepackaged like a refrozen microwave dinners.
The single most destructive cultural change on the internet was removal of comments sections from news sites. A large fraction of current culture war issues are downstream of this. It completely eliminated accountability, openness, and perspective from modern media. And, even more destructive was the loss of dialog between people (I remember places like NPR used to have excellent comment sections). The only thing worse than having assholes disagree with you is having no one disagree. Question the assumptions! Question my assumptions!
I will point out one culture blind spot I have often read in themotte. Not to say this point is always missed of course, just *often missed.
Many of the people around you are not going to understand the details, many people outside this forum. You will meet people less keen, less knowledgeable, and less experienced. But what does it really say? If someone lacks the metacognition or general information do they always lack explanation? What of the wisdom of the elders? If people of an older era believed there were ship destroying monsters in the ocean, did it matter that they were wrong? Or was it not an emotionally succinct way to convey the danger and helplessness of a ship in a storm?
In a dichotomous way... seeing things from a more modern perspective... We know the moon goes around the earth 12 times each time the earth goes around the sun. And all the other planets also go around the sun. and earth is a sphere and the moon has mountains and NASA says the tallest mountain on Titan is 10,948 feet and... and... and ... But at that point we no longer feel what these things mean. Maybe the full moon could have meant walking on wet tottering rocks collecting clams as a coastal villager with the neap tide. Or maybe the stars told stories of greater beings or beings of the past you could never meant and only imagine.
So if someone says "these people are completely wrong" because... this is the information and its correct and clear and logical and science... I often like to ask... Are the emotions behind that belief also wrong? Or is there a reason such an emotion has formed in someone else? Even if we know what is true I am sometimes scared of not seeing the forest for the trees. More and more I am filled with dread. When our natural human instincts and emotions were trained by the natural world the feedback was always real. Today our emotions are often trained by the virtual so even if the facts are right, have we lost touch with something more?
Regardless, thank you to all the posters here who made open discussions possible.
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