I've always liked the idea of starting a community that has two rules in its discussion threads: no cynicism/fatalism and no snark. It's just a silly thought exercise and probably wouldn't work, but it's fun to think about. It seems like both of those get in the way of good discussion.
I agree in regards to cynicism/fatalism, but I fear everyone's cynicism is someone else's obvious ill-that-must-be-named.
For example, I consider the relentless attacks on "mainstream journalism" coming from tech people to be repetitive, superficial, ignorant of history (journalism today is leagues ahead of the past), and misguided (phonebook-style "just the facts" neutrality is neither possible nor has it ever been the goal).
The same goes for "every politician is corrupt", etc.
But I can sort-off see that, to someone with the unfortunate flaw to wrongly entertain believes different from mine, my insistence to criticise every new low of the current US administration, might, in a certain light, also subjectively feel like tired, repetitive cynicism.
That's a logical paradox and it has its roots in our discourse no longer being grounded in a shared, objective reality.
> misguided (phonebook-style "just the facts" neutrality is neither possible nor has it ever been the goal)
> That's a logical paradox and it has its roots in our discourse no longer being grounded in a shared, objective reality.
Don't you contradict yourself?
(Nb. I don't know anything about SSC. But I also think some kind of curated discussion is doomed to failure; although it may be interesting to its subscribers, it will never make a dent what is generally read and contributed to. Even if it is moderately successful, those who say "social media discussions are terrible" will continue to say "social media discussions are terrible", since those who want to use Twitter will continue to use Twitter, and that will always be more than those who use Curato. Just for the simple reason that people want to contribute. Probably split agreement/quality moderation is desirable and then crafting individual feeds so that you see quality posts you will probably disagree with more so than low-quality posts that you will probably disagree with. Threaded forums like HN also seem to get better contributions than person-based social media.)
I'm a participant on a political discussion forum that enforces strong civility norms (eg anti-snark), and it very much works. It's very popular these days to say that civility norms are a Trojan horse for enforcing conformity. But the breadth of viewpoints I've seen expressed there is 10x as high as anywhere else, and conversations are consistently polite, insightful, and intellectually honest. It turns out that filtering out stupidity and emotional incontinence leads to adult conversation.
More importantly, the norms make any given person feel safe acting like an adult, even if they'd otherwise be inclined not to. This is a big problem with much Internet discourse: putting thought and nuance into a comment and taking your interlocutor seriously is easily deflated with mockery and disdain for "tryhards" or "effortposting". The natural equilibrium is obviously going to be that even people inclined towards intellectual honesty end up in the mud flinging shit at others. Consistent, high-quality moderation around civility prevents the temperature from rising and allows you to actually learn something from every exchange. (It doesn't hurt that the filter effect of these norms mean that the average commenter ends up pretty intelligent: even when someone is wrong, I tend to learn something)
Tldr: the norms you're describing work very well IME
It's not just that. They're killing any contraction to a very very narrow narrative. Voat had a lot of bad design decisions that made it as bad as it is today (https://battlepenguin.com/tech/voat-what-went-wrong/).
Reddit is turning into Voat. A lot of centrists and moderates that leaned a little right are leaving, and they're not going to come back this time to view one or two subs. Where Voat is a hard right cesspool of monothink, Reddit is soon going to be a hard left cesspool of monothink.
If centrists and right-leaning moderates are leaving because outright racism is banned, I would hesitate to say the people leaving are centrists and right-leaning moderates.
So leaning right = racist.
A certain candidate won a majority of white women and men voters and while it might be fun to write them all off as “outright” racists there is that little problem of the Electoral College.
So might not be prudent to moderate with blow torches, at least until the new order is electorally established.
It sounds like that's not what the person to whom you're replying is saying. But your general point, shifted slightly, is correct: right wing is racist. I feel like I examine all sides and "lean right" or am moderate, and used to vote for people like Bush and McCain and Romney, but the right wing has become to polluted with racism and outright greed that I voted for Hillary last election and am spending considerable resources fighting the Republican party outright this election.
Personally, I don’t think the right has changed one bit since Reagan went to Philadelphia Mississippi. They’re just simply more comfortable saying what they couldn’t say in public before and they finally have a candidate who is their real deal.
But I would not be closing what channels are left for those who might be confused or naive. There are more important things than purity, and 2000 and 2016 prove that.
There is a regular issue where once a particular forum tips beyond a certain point in either direction, you steadily start to lose people from the 'other side' who are well worth keeping but increasingly feel unwelcome.
The SSC comments section suffered this in terms of tipping to the right, and Scott ended up stepping up enforcement of borderline-against-the-rules right wing posts and stepping down enforcement of borderline-against-the-rules left wing posts to try and avoid the discussion becoming completely one sided.
It seems we aren't going to found out how well that would've worked in the long run, sadly.
Calling the hatred, gleeful love of violence, racism, and misogyny that characterises Voat "hard right" is a disservice to the right. And implying there is an equally awful and opposite thing on the left, and that Reddit will become it, is unrealistic. So their content rules are too strict - that's not an abominable evil.
> And implying there is an equally awful and opposite thing on the left, and that Reddit will become it, is unrealistic.
It isn't an opposite ideology, it's just the same violence and hatred but against the opposite tribe. It's tribalism.
Whether reddit becomes it remains to be seen, but censorship has a strong tendency to produce extremism, because it's a ratchet. It shifts the composition of the population, which shifts what's considered extreme enough to be censored, which shifts the composition of the population, and so on.
I hesitate to post this because it's almost a cliche at this point, and because in the original context the method of censorship was obviously different, but it still seems relevant enough to the point.
We are so used to viewing the world in binary that we need to find binary systems even when they don't exist. GP is one example of this - Voat is a cesspool of hate, the users mostly lean right. Therefore there has to be a counterpart on the left.
Second example - Even though non-partisan metrics show that the Republican party have become more extreme with time, the need to be "neutral" makes it impossible to recognise that. Our need for binary means that we have to consider both sides as mirror images of each other even if they might not be. This video explains more - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mICxKmCjF-4
Even though non-partisan metrics show that the
Republican party have become more extreme with time,
the need to be "neutral" makes it impossible to
recognise that.
Yes. Most of us generally have some sort of impulse to build consensus and seek some sort of middle ground. It's just a foundational aspect of social animals in general, I believe.
That breaks down when you throw bad actors -- either because they are intentionally behaving in antisocial ways, or because they are profoundly detached from reality -- into the mix.
For an example of the former, our impulse for consensus-building and compromise doesn't work if your buddy says "let's go murder ten people for no reason." It would not be a sane compromise to murder five people, or perhaps find ten people and beat them precisely halfway to death.
For an example of the latter, there can be no compromise with certain pseudoscience beliefs. We can't compromise with flat-earthers and agree that the earth maybe is sort of an oblong, oval shape halfway between a sphere and a disk.
But we can in fact have a conversation about whether we should murder 10 people for no reason, it might even make an interesting discussion on ethics and moral philosophy.
We can agree to conduct adversarial studies with flat-earthers and examine the evidence together.
All of this is possible as long as everyone is discussing in good faith and open to the possibility that they might be wrong. That should be the only requirement, rather than fixed boundaries for what's acceptable to discuss.
>we can in fact have a conversation about whether we should murder 10 people for no reason
>interesting discussion on ethics and moral philosophy
>as long as everyone is discussing in good faith
The parent didn't mean "as a hypothetical", e.g. in a "would you rather" way. They are referring to somebody who is actually a proponent of the killing, in which case it is impossible, or at least moot, for that person to be arguing "in good faith". This seems obvious to me, so maybe I'm missing something else you're trying to say.
> They are referring to somebody who is actually a proponent of the killing, in which case it is impossible, or at least moot, for that person to be arguing "in good faith". This seems obvious to me, so maybe I'm missing something else you're trying to say.
What you're missing is that that isn't impossible.
The actual premise is impossible, because nobody ever wants to do anything "for no reason" -- there is always some reason. Which is why you need to have the discussion, instead of assuming there is no reason. To figure out what their reason is.
Because it could be a good reason. Maybe you're stranded on a mountain with 30 people but only enough provisions for 20 and if you try to share then everyone will die instead of a third of everyone. And then killing 10 people isn't actually beyond the pale, and even if you decide against it you still need to have the discussion because you need to do something.
Or maybe it's because your friend just really hates short people and wants to kill them, which is a stupid reason that isn't going to convince you, but at least now you know what it is and can dismiss it out of knowledge rather than ignorance.
I feel I'm too wordy to begin with; it's always a challenge deciding what to leave out for the sake of (some semblance of) brevity.
There are certainly situations where it might make sense to kill a small number of people for some greater good. The "Trolley problem," and all that.
The situation I meant to describe in my post is one where your friend has no remotely defensible or rational reason for their desire to murder ten people. Surely we can imagine many such scenarios.
I interpreted the parent to that assume his hypothetical individual is advocating for the murder of some people for what they believes to be good reasons, since nobody short of the mentally ill will actually ask for random people to be killed for literally no reason.
I can list 10 people that the world would be better without — the likes of Kim Jong-un and Ayman al-Zawahiri. That's not too different from wishing for their death. Plausibly we can discuss whether it's a good idea for them to be assassinated, and whether the power vacuum would just cause another worse despot to replace them.
So it seems quite conceivable to me that a discussion could be had about the reasons, feasibility, ethics or geopolitical implications, or about why they believe that someone does or does not deserve killing.
There could certainly be many scenarios where killing somebody might make ethical sense - self defense, the "Trolley problem", etc.
I meant to describe a situation decidedly not of that nature.
Imagine our friend wants to kill ten people for no remotely defensible reason. Perhaps our hypothetically murderous friend is high on hypothetical PCP and is clearly suffering some kind of psychotic breakdown.
...then it's great that at least they're talking about it on some forum, giving us a chance to persuade them otherwise and to call the police. If we didn't have such a forum, they might already have started their murder spree.
> We can't compromise with flat-earthers and agree that the earth maybe is sort of an oblong, oval shape halfway between a sphere and a disk.
This is kind of amusing, as "an oblong, oval shape" describes a more accurate model of the Earth: an ellipsoid. The Earth is ~1/300th of the way between a sphere and a disk.
Yes. It's going to be hard-right misogynists and racists vs
... "hardcore not-hating-women and generally not caring too much about skin color, with extreme passion"?
Less sarcastic: You're equating "conservatism" with "racism and misogyny". And while I tend to agree with that, the reverse does not work: not hating women, for example, does not make one a communist.
The people who only talk about skin colour and have brought it to the forefront of our collective thought, even for people who genuinely didn't think about skin colour.
The following is an un-nuanced, sarcastic, flippant dismissal of left-wing arguments about racism. You can even guess from the URL what it's going to look like.
It isn't a particularly reasonable criticism of honest intellectuals on the left.
It's a completely accurate depiction of low-brow populist left-wing extremists, because they disregard the nuance of their own side's positions and just do the thing in the picture, and then use the conclusion to rationalize vicious hostility and censorship.
The mirror image of irrationally hating members of the Blue Tribe isn't rationally hating no one, it's irrationally hating members of the Red Tribe.
I've thought about a related idea, for a forum where only positive posts are allowed. I imagined it as something like a subreddit where a SentimentAnalyzer is a mod, and it deletes any insufficiently positive comments and bans any sufficiently negative users.
Thanks for illustrating a potential hurdle we might have to hop! I'm sure that, either, together we would be able to overcome it by inventing a new solution, or we'd have fun living with it. :)
