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Having charity and kindness being rules here was a mistake. Our great enemy has no concept of truth as we'd understand it. I'd accuse them of being habitual liars, but the dichotomy of truth and lies simply is not in their world view. In this environment where you are required to take their truth-void statements "charitably", it's impossible to grapple with them. Think of Darwin.
Furthermore, they have hacked our empathy to such an extend that our truth is offensive to them and cannot be spoken under rules dictated by "kindness". We are constantly forced into using their terminology. It's not mutilating and sterilizing children, it's "Trans health care".
If this place in an experiment, it's failed.
If you want this place but without the charity and kindness rule, then what's that supposed to be?
Oopen discussion without charity and kindness rules? You'll get shouted down by the more numerous party.
Bilious contrarians heaping abuse upon absent bien-pensants? 4chan still exists, enjoy.
Supposedly very intelligent contrarians organizing to topple woke orthodoxy? Ask yourself why that is not happening already.
I disagree with kindness, charity is worthwhile though something of a hopeless cause. Someone else said it here but kindness is an insidious term that has been weaponised politically, eg COVID and trans issues.
The term I favour is civility. Civility is a form, so isn't as loaded, and doesn't require people to hide any of their views or fail to call people out, it just requires that it's done with style, panache even. As in a debate where someone says someone is stupid but with a witty retort.
I thought kindness meant kindness towards debate opponents, not the kindness towards the entire world that modern orthodoxy demands. But sure enough, civility should be sufficient in its stead.
I'm sure it does mean the narrower definition but even then I think for certain people it might encourage a certain holding back. Any term has the problem of where the agreed threshold is and they also overlap, the duty of civility derives from some consideration that is a kindness.
But kindness is deeper and sometimes it's not clear what is kind, ie giving a streetperson money that you are sure they will buy drugs with, or the tradition of fierce wisdom-telling people what they might need to hear even if they will find it unkind. Now, we're not in a spiritual or personal community here so I don't advocate for fierce wisdom, there should be protocols that understand the nature of the space. But this fits better with the less loaded term of civility in my view.
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Who is "our great enemy", here? Personally, I'd say that my great enemy are people unwilling or unable to extend charity and kindness to those holding viewpoints or values they disagree with.
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Not sure what you mean by this. Charity and kindness in debate have been norms that have been useful for far longer than wokeism, even if wokeism is taking those rules to the extreme. Baby and the bathwater, and all that.
Charity is one of those things where some people need more, some people need less, and you can't aim the advice at the people who need it. And the reason we've come up with the quokka idea is that rationalists have a habit of not understanding that attacks are attacks and treating them with excess charity, like Scott not thinking that Cade Metz was malicious from the very start and if he had only been nicer to Metz, Metz would have written a completely fair article, or like this post.
It's not always bad to be a quokka.
Scott's star has never shined brighter. How many billionaires read his writing? I think I remember he's making 600k/year from Substack. Probably more now.
Scott may be a quokka but it's working for him.
Meanwhile nobody cares about this Cade Metz creature except that he wrote about Scott. That will probably be his epitaph: "Wrote a hit piece on a beloved and respected public intellectual". Writing that just now makes me feel sorry for the guy. Scott crushed him like a bug without even meaning to.
What does 'quokka' even mean here? Scott intentionally hides his belief in [thing about race] while still hinting at it once in a while (e.g. in the Galton Erlich Buck post). I don't think he has any illusions about the media being good and nice on that topic.
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At what cost?
When was the last time he wrote anything people here bother quoting anymore? Besides "Scott wrote a thing which is a good opportunity for my more interesting post on the topic" type deals.
I think there's something to this, but >80% of scott's old posts that I like the most aren't about the culture war. Control Group Is Out Of Control, Different Worlds, etc. Those seemed to have slowed down too (probably?) so I'm not sure if that's the cause.
I thought Radicalising the Romanceless was some of his best work to be perfectly honest, and I think that gets incredibly culture-warry. But to continue being honest I haven't been reading Astral Codex Ten nearly as much as Slatestarcodex and the writing seems less compelling when I do.
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Scott Alexander went from being one of the best writers in the world writing the most interesting articles with a comment section of gold attracting the best thinkers in the world getting to the naked causes of many problems we now face to Scott Siskind, a forgettable content producer who makes good money on substack.
If Cade Metz is a forgettable nobody, it makes this story all the more tragic. I think in a couple decades, people will still talk about Scott Alexander and some of the articles he wrote. I do not think the same is true of Scott Siskind.
Maybe I'm being harsh, but watching Scott cower and slink away to come back different was such a disappointment to me.
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We're in a bubble. Scott seems important only because of that. And Metz is a Times writer. This inherently means that a lot of people care about what he says.
Plenty of people told similar lies about Gamergate. It's pretty obvious by now that none of them will be chiefly remembered for those lies. We don't control the discourse, and in most places where it's relevant you can't even suggest that anything said about Gamergate was a lie. And yes, it still gets brought up every so often.
And this pattern extends back in time. "White Flight", the history of race relations generally, erasure of the anti-suffragettes, and so on. The control has existed for much of the last three hundred years; what changed is that some few people have become aware of it.
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His star shone brighter when he was, briefly, one of the best writers in the world, looking directly at the nature and causes of the core problem eating our society.
I'm sure he's making more money now, but then he had a solid shot at making a difference. Not many draw that hand, and he folded.
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I think charity is fine, but it must be in service to telling the truth. That’s where the liberals have weaponized kindness and charity. In the hierarchy of speech values, truth must weigh much higher than charity. You can insist that people not be antagonistic about the way they tell truth as they understand it, but the truth is often unkind and makes people uncomfortable. It’s not kind perhaps, to suggest that jumping off the roof won’t result in flight, but it’s absolutely true that gravity will pull the roof jumper back to earth. There can even be a sort of backhanded cruelty in withholding truths in the name of kindness. Telling a middling student with a C- average who doesn’t read on grade level to go to university and major in whatever they want is absolutely not kind, because the truth is that such a student is unlikely to be gainfully employed in white collar work. You don’t have to call them stupid, but if telling them that maybe they won’t make it as a lit major is unkind, well, letting them face the consequences without a warning is cruel.
But you aren't describing the kind of "kindness" we enforce here. This is why periodic complaints like @WhiningCoil's annoy me. They complain that they aren't allowed to "tell the truth." The fuck? We have Holocaust deniers here. We have white nationalists here. We have hard HBDers here. People openly talk about dumb people not being fit for university educations, trans women being men, and all kinds of other unkind "truths" here. None of that gets people modded. Going annoyingly on and on and on about the same thing over and over (like our resident Joo-poster), yes. Snarling insults, yes. Strawmanning your enemies as zombies, yes. But you are mischaracterizing what "charity" means the same way Whining does.
My comment was more based on the general concept of the kind of kindness that pervades much of the rest of the internet. It’s always felt a bit patronizing to me to kindly pat people on the head and tell them exactly what they want to hear and that they’re wonderful even if they’re terribly flawed and refusing to work on those flaws. Such things are not only lies, but unkind in more ways than one. It’s patronizing to assume that a person is so weak that they’ll crumble at the first hint of challenge to things they believe in. It’s flawed because allowing untruths to continue often hurts the very people that it’s intended to help. And I think just society-wise, it prevents us from dealing with problems straight on.
I don’t believe for a minute that happens here. I’m sure you like every other human have biases. But I think an honest person would see that we’re at least trying to get it right. Other places aren’t like that. Even if you’re being nice, saying something other people don’t like is going to get modded.
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I absolutely agree. Postmodernism and the idea that there is no objective Truth is probably the most pernicious thing that has happened to our society. It's difficult to stop however, precisely because the postermodernists define the entire battlefield.
I think that something like Jordan Peterson's view is the right way to fight back, although I also believe we can build a lot further on his basic ideas. He claims that even if we can't tell there's objective good, most people aren't willing to bite the bullet and will call the Nazis, or Japan's rape of Nanking, or other horror stories objectively evil. From there, even if we can't necessarily agree on what's good, we at least have an idea of what not to do.
And if you take evil being a real force seriously, that means that every time you tell a lie, even to yourself, you contribute to the downfall of us all. You push us back towards the concentration camps, the torture, madness, and genocide. Truth is what keeps us from those things, and as you say charity cannot become an end in itself. Like rationality, it's an excellent tool but a malevolent master.
The Nazis and invading Japanese would likely strenuously agree with you that objective good exists, and furthermore, that their actions are objectively good. Pushing ethical relativism to the point that you're reserving judgment on genocide is a recipe for disaster, but having such conviction in the objective righteousness of your cause that you're willing to commit atrocities in the name of the greater good is just the mirror image failure mode. See the people in this thread ranting about our Great Enemy - do you think that attitude is any more conducive to a thriving society than the people they loathe?
Planting a flag wholly in the objectivist or relativist camps is fraught for different reasons, in my opinion. Perhaps planting a flag wholly in any camp is fraught, and everything in moderation (except for moderation) remains the wisest course.
Well, they're wrong. Part of moral objectivism is that people can be deluded, yes, but their opinions are wrong. And the world came together and agreed that they were wrong.
You see my moral objectivism is more like: "committing atrocities in general is wrong, for any ends whatsoever, whoever uses those means is evil."
The people ranting in this thread about a Great Enemy are hopefully not evil, but I'm sure some of them are. I'm not sure we understand each other very well - can you clarify your arguments against moral objectivism?
I apologize that personal circumstances don't allow me to get back to this promptly, or as extensively as I'd like.
So what then, a Kantian categorical imperative against 'atrocities?'
Oh, I doubt very much that they are. The person in question (if memory serves) posts fairly regular wholesome updates about their woodworking, book reading and other hobbies. If they didn't realize I was a Great Enemy we could likely share a few beers without issue.
1 - I'd likely agree that an objective 'truth' exists, I'm just pessimistic that it is knowable by you/I/anyone short of God. Some cases are egregious enough that it doesn't take much beyond a fifth grader, let alone God, to label something as wrong, but the vast majority of the issues we wrangle don't fall into this bucket. We've built such horribly complex social, economic and political structures that understanding them in a meaningful way to influence policy is virtually impossible. What is the objective truth of the CHIPS act? Even beyond that, should we compete with China at all or give them their sphere of influence? I could list a hundred other policy questions from the last decade that I lack the answer to, and I'd argue anyone trying to sell you an 'objective' answer is lying.
You might argue that I'm agreeing with you and simply think that most moral questions are hard, but my rejoinder would be that if we're making all our decisions based on vibes, values and feelings isn't that a lot of subjective bullshit that exists in relation to our cultural norms?
To be clear - this doesn't mean I think we should throw up our hands and abandon trying to base our decisions on evidence. I'm just mighty suspicious of the folks who claim to be doing so objectively, and doubly so of people who have strong convictions when it comes to complex issues.
2 - The moral relativists have strong arguments of their own without having to lean too much on criticisms of objectivism. A decade or so ago, some areas of Canada were debating banning burqas. I read an op-ed written by an immigrant from the middle east who'd worn a burqa her whole life and argued she felt naked and vulnerable without one even when given the choice. The public wasn't particularly swayed, and Quebec ended up banning public servants from wearing certain clothes.
On the flip side, I had a friend tell me about her experience in the Peace Corps. She was stationed in a country where women weren't allowed to wear shirts or bras and felt profoundly uncomfortable for the entirety of her stay. Not to mention her pale skin did really poorly with the tropical climate.
As an objectivist, what's your judgment here? Are Middle Easterners brutal oppressors, or are we? Is the objective truth that everyone should be free to choose their own garb without judgment from their peers? But how would you enforce the latter without some brutally oppressive state banning wrongthink/speech?
3 - I'm running very short on time, so this won't be particularly well fleshed out. Many, including our resident theocratic fascist, argue that people are happier with these social norms and restrictions on their behavior. And while I don't share his utopian vision where the gays get thrown in prison, it is clear that there is something to the idea that people require these social structures to be happy, and furthermore, that they are often built in such a way that not everyone can be happy. I also wonder how much of this is biologically hardwired.
What would your prescription be in that scenario?
I take your point about complexity, and I would actually say that yes our feelings are related to our cultural norms. Unlike you I don't believe it's all 'subjective bullshit,' I think our feelings are finely tuned systems that have been honed over countless millenia, and largely encoded in/propped up by religious and cultural traditions. That wisdom is unfortunately often looked over and scoffed at today, but if we want to have any hope of learning to live with each other in an increasingly complex world, we need to go back and look at how our ancestors managed to cohabitate the world without killing each other, and try to learn from their example.
My thoughts on this are complex, and to be clear as a moral objectivist I agree that it's extremely difficult to parse out good or evil from these complex scenarios. Part of the positive vision I see for humanity is that we are hopefully on the cusp of enough material wealth that we can afford to have large swathes of people work to start answering these questions in earnest.
As to my judgment in this scenario, I'll bite the bullet and say yes, Middle Easterners are generally morally worse than Westerners. I'd say that we should withdraw any real support from countries that won't accept at least the basics of our civil norms. (Although I'd also argue that we need to move back from the bleeding edge of progressive norms right now.)
I think I get what you're pointing at here, and I'll quote Jung:
I think that humans are very nuanced beings, and the major error we moderns have made is trying to have all people, in all stages of life, live by one moral code regardless of context or nuance. For people who are, say, less morally evolved and have spent less time pondering the nature of their own being perhaps, they may need these strict guidelines in order to be happy. We should generally try to limit the temptation these poor souls are exposed to, a la @Hoffmeister25's discussion about driving loveless young men into monastic societies.
Ultimately what we need is more adults who have truly cultivated wisdom via their religious or moral traditions, that's step one. The cultivation of true wisdom is sorely lacking, largely due to the Western response to Christianity and the idea that reason can be the only guide to a good life. I reject that entirely.
Luckily we have recently re-discovered at the societal level a whole crop of plants and drugs, namely psychedelics, that massively aid in the cultivation of wisdom, and facing our inner demons. I'm optimistic that if we take the blessing of these substances seriously and work to help people with them, we can instill wisdom in far more people than most suspect would be possible nowadays.
Once we have raised the water level of wisdom and nuance, ideally we put wise people in charge in local communities, and give them much more autonomy and decision making power on the local level. This not only leads to better outcomes, but also helps train people to make moral decisions at higher levels of government and leadership.
I know this is a bit of a convoluted answer to your question, but the moral progress of the human race has been and always will be a difficult and complicated task. I'm working to outline a vision that can help us move past the morass we seem to be stuck in today. I'm very open to feedback if you have it.
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I kind of tend toward the Kantian view of ethics most of the time. I recognize the limits of course, but I agree that without firm limits on what may and may not be done — regardless of the reasons given — you really can’t prevent bad things from happening. It’s like a person who doesn’t set boundaries for themselves, it ultimately comes down to the other person choosing the right words to make that hesitation go away.
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Ironically, you are the mirror image of your "enemies." When I hear leftists say "Punch Nazis," my initial reaction is "Sure, fuck Nazis." Except we know that their definition has ever-expanded until now "Nazis" is basically "anyone who's not a leftist."
You whine here all the time about how you're "not allowed to speak your truth." That's because your truth is "Everyone not politically aligned with me is an Orwellian monster" and you think our charity rules are bad because we allow people not politically aligned with you to talk too, and we don't allow you to shit on them just because you really want to.
You just want to war, war, war. Your praise of KiwiFarms is very revealing. Yeah, KiwiFarms is fun for what it is, but it's not some shining beacon of Truth and Realness from "the old Internet," it's a collection of people who really like watching trainwrecks, pointing and laughing, mocking, bullying, and driving people into a rage. It appeals to the basest impulses. I don't say this judgmentally - I like reading the lolcow threads too. But if your complaint is that the Motte failed because we're not more like KiwiFarms, well, you misunderstand and apparently have always misunderstood what this place is and isn't.
People forget that being a goon would get you kicked out of much of the old internet because of places like helldump.
I never knew helldump was a thing back in the day but the circles I hanged out in mostly mocked them for being Lowtax's paypigs.
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My reaction to "punch Nazis" is "please don't empower the Nazis."
Without the brownshirts squabbling with the communists people would have been less welcoming for someone, anyone, to step in and provide order. Unchecked political violence is good for the people that want to destabilize the status quo and put authoritarians in power.
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Maybe. Or maybe I understand perfectly well, and it's still failed. When I think about what this place was supposed to be, the phrase that most comes to mind is "Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came". It was this utopian vision of curating a rationalist garden of eden where nice people were nice to each other and came up with solutions to problems rationally, and promoted pro-social norms of continuing to be nice and solve problems rationally.
This has clearly failed, and the rules have become the boot on the neck of people trying to find actual workable solutions, because people have weaponized our empathy against finding solutions. The most fragile perspective dictates what is "charitable" or "kind", and the most dysfunctional deeply felt priorities prevents any solutions.
Turns out it's even worse when they start a war and nobody shows up.
Maybe that was Scott Alexander's vision, but as far as I know that was never TheMotte's vision. For the most part, the mods here do not censor people for being not-nice, they just censor people for writing in a not-nice way (and even there, the mods give a lot of leeway). Which makes sense, because without some kind of standards for effort-posting, posting in good faith, and being civil this place would just turn into 4chan or, at best, rdrama. Both of which are places that I enjoy, but they already exist and we are free to go post there as well as here. It's not like you have to pick just one. If you want to go post with almost no rules, you have other options.
"But," you might object, "I want both! The effortposting and at least pretense of intellectual standards that TheMotte has, and the freedom of 4chan."
Ah, that is an understandable desire. Who of us here wouldn't? The problem is that in practice it is probably not possible. If you allow the freedom of 4chan, it then follows according to what one might almost call an iron social law that, in the current world political context, your site will become just like 4chan, a place that is shaped by Darwinian competition over who can get the most (You)s by crafting the most juicy bait and forcing stale memes, where every other thread devolves into people just unimaginatively trying to insult each other, and where the politics discussion is a stale echo chamber (just right-wing, not left-wing).
Not that I hate 4chan. Like I said, I enjoy it. But I would not want to spend all my time there, it can get tiring to wade through the 90% of repetitive shit over there to find the 10% of content that is interesting plus it also gets tiring to be somewhere where so many people have a fundamentally loser, defeatist, and constantly angry attitude about reality (which TheMotte also kinda has, but not nearly to the same extent).
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There's a famous invocation of the line (though a misquote) which follows up with Why then, the war would come to you.
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No. I don't think that's what Zorba or anyone else ever envisioned this place being. That's purely a projection by you. Funny, you and Hlynka are sounding awfully alike lately.
There is no boot on your neck. There are rules like in almost every forum about not just slagging people off and shitting the place up with low-effort hot takes.
Seriously, what "workable solutions" have you ever proposed? Raging about how much you hate your enemies is not a solution. If you were proposing solutions, you would not be modded (unless your "workable solution" is something like "treat my enemies like the zombies they are, with headshots").
You are trying to characterize us as letting wokes and snowflakes dictate the norms of discourse here? Bullshit. Give me specific examples.
As someone who does run against the rules fairly often for being too spicy, it isn't something I have any complaints about. I just sometimes forget which ruleset I am under.
My only complaints are what would happen when new mods come up, but that hasn't happened yet.
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This is definitely not true, and if you had those inflated expectations then clearly you haven't been paying attention to the history of the Motte. This place has always been a haven for witches, and the mods and long term folks have been very clear eyed and open about that.
You're being extremely dramatic here. Sure the Motte could be bigger, have better discourse, etc etc. But you're still here aren't you? Where else on the internet can you have the same quality of conversations, be able to tell the truth without worrying about being banned immediately?
I'm sure there are other pockets of free speech and truth-seeking on the internet, but the Motte is still one, and an important one. What we're doing here is worth it, and again if you truly felt like this whole endeavor has failed then I don't think you would be here.
Are the list of bans still publicly available? You should see my name their amply. Sometimes justified. Too often not IMHO.
That's the answer to your question. Not here.
You have a ton of warnings, and two bans here. I defy you or anyone else to defend those as being anything other than low-quality shit-takes. You have never been banned because you were speaking truths that we can't handle. You've been banned because you want to do exactly the same thing that raging wokes do everywhere else - scream and spit venom.
I stand by my thoughts that the first ban was absolutely unjustified, and my response was perfectly valid and called for. After that I stopped giving a shit and the second was on purpose.
So what is your expectation for how "I was trying to get banned" is going to work out?
Like... assuming the mods are hostile to your presence outright stating "I am no longer participating in the forum in good faith but to get a rise out of people" in a public call out post is pretty much giving them an out for permabanning you.
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I'm sure you do.
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