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Notes -
The average level of discourse in Astral Codex Ten comment sections is intellectually more advanced when it comes to the writers' areas of competence than it is here, at the cost of being more constrained by the Overton window.
The Motte commentary is dominated by a certain type of personality and political stance: "blue tribe person who is also a mild-to-moderate social conservative, and is highly online, and has a large level of anxiety about the threat posed by wokeism". The voting isn't necessarily dominated by that kind of personality. I note that posts of mine which mostly get responses that disagree heavily with me often still get highly upvoted. I hope this means that Motteizens are just really good at upvoting for quality rather than because of agreement, but I am not sure about that.
In any case, the typical Motteizen personality and political stance tends to funnel conversation here into the same few well-worn channels.
It would be nice to get more people here who have significant disagreements with the average Motte poster, yet are willing to post here instead of running away because this is a place where it is ok to openly advocate for political positions that are significantly outside of the Overton window.
Off the top of my head, I don't know how to attract those people here, though.
no way. the comments here are a definite step-up in terms of IQ compared to astralcodexten comments. Not just in terms of technical expertise , but also the engagement and incisiveness. most of the comments there are people talking past each other, and not even fully engaged with each other or the topic at hand. People there make pithy arguments that are ignored or weakly rebutted.
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I disagree. Scott’s comments are better for Inside Silicon Valley gossip or technical discussions about AI models, sure, but not more generally. The regulars are probably smarter there (on the whole); then again likely so are many people on the Harvard Law Review, but they also likely have far fewer interesting opinions. And his audience is probably more American and otherwise more homogenous than ours.
ACX10 is just dull at this point. SSC was headed in that direction before the switch to Substack. Scott was at his best when he was discussing Culture War stuff or at least stuff somewhat related to the culture war. When he gave that up (presumably to avoid causing any friction with the judgmental Bay-Area types he hangs out with) he gave up most of what made his writing interesting. I still check it from time to time but I don't read every article and certainly wouldn't pay for the content. The best part of the current site is the book reviews, and most of those are guest reviews.
I actually found this year's guest reviews to be worse than in the past, especially Jane Jacobs, The Educated Mind, Man's Search for Meaning. A few of the other ones were good. I haven't reduced my consumption of Scott content at all, but I find the 'dull' posts about AI, gay younger brothers, pharmacology, etc interesting in itself though, so that might be the difference.
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