Ask HN: After Slate Star Codex, where are the nuanced discussions?
We see a lot of nuance in Hacker News discussions, thanks to how the community has shaped up and to the tireless efforts of our moderators. And I want that level of discussion elsewhere, too. (Hacker News isn't the right place for every discussion, given its focus on tech.)
In particular, the recent takedown of Slate Star Codex has me thinking about nuance and truth, and how little space there is for it in online discussions today.
Without getting into any specific politics here, which platforms do you go to for nuanced, rational discussions? And, more broadly, how can we (as technologists) foster that sort of collegiate culture online, given the global scope of the Internet, the permanence of anything we post, and the inherent anonymity of the Internet stack.
I have a strong desire right now to 1) be a part of and reinforce existing communities with this ethos and 2) advocate for technology and culture that could make this the norm.
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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.
So might not be prudent to moderate with blow torches, at least until the new order is electorally established.
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.
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.
... "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.
That made me laugh - hard.
https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/8etk0w/this...
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.
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
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
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.
> 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.)
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
IMO all good communities will continue to exist in small niche zones like HN, small subreddits, and in whatever future forum/Reddit alternatives are being created.
I don't see that changing, especially as the internet goes more and more mainstream, and converges on the lowest-common denominator.
Have nuanced discussions.
It could be human psychology forces us to pick one.
There are lists of Reddit and YouTube alternatives that are worth visiting. But they’ll only have a chance if we all try them out, evangelize them to friends, and post content (rather than just consuming it). The big issues are lack of content or early swarming from one political group (which then deters the “other side” from joining). Parler, a Twitter alternative, has this issue. I’m nevertheless trying it out just to give it a shot. But we might need a tool to manage the process of achieving quorum on what platform interested people move to. If we fragment across all of available choices, they’ll all wither and die.
Here are some starter sources of Reddit and YouTube alternatives: https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/hi97fz/.... Also see https://www.reddit.com/r/YoutubeAlternatives/, which is newer and less developed.
Kialo is an interesting platform for debate - https://www.kialo.com/. But it is a complex interface and certainly doesn’t have the reach and accessibility of the biggest (and worst) platforms like Twitter. Apart from Kialo I think developing one’s own nuanced perspective is easiest to achieve by reading many different news sources and having respectful real life conversations. But only a few in my social circle are up for such discussions - I suppose it is better than none.
PS I feel your pain on the loss of Slate Star Codex. I had many bookmarked articles that I now can’t read :(
It’s this kind of suppression of free speech (by ostracizing and libeling the speakers) that’s causing so much damage to our national discourse.
That's exactly what drove me to build my own vision for a discussion site! I wanted a place where people could have rigorous discussion about news or other topics with no hassle. I didn't use SSC, and from what I've gathered it was focused on long-form blogging(?), but for sqwok the aim is low-friction, open, simple, live discussion. Definitely open for feedback! https://sqwok.im
Maybe it would be better to focus on protocols rather than platforms. If you use a platform, you will always be at the mercy of the people who own or control it.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/slatestarcodex.com
One thing I've been thinking about lately is a discussion forum that is highly curated, featuring only comments from a whitelisted group of approved posters. Essentially a hybrid between journalism and the best of online commenting.
It's intriguing, because it would still suffer from bias (like any platform) but maybe the diversity of moderators would neutralize that a bit, and maybe you'd see more cross-pollination between groups because of the quality of the discussion.
Given 1) how hard it is to bootstrap a new social media platform and 2) the resurgence of independent blogging, I'm wondering if a prototype could come in the form of a pluggable comment system, but where you hand curate the comments that show up (or could even feature them in a subsequent blog post)? Something as easy to set up as Disqus, but OSS and designed to de-escalate rather than escalate conversations.
One thing I'm doing from the start is removing voting entirely. The site is "conversation-first" meaning I plan to develop it entirely around the conversation, only adding new features if they enhance the conversation in some way.
I'm wondering if a site could be highly curated but not heavily moderated? Maybe a site that's open for anyone to post wouldn't necessarily attract the same crowd as one that was a curated collection from a known source?
Originally I started thinking about this when I worked in news media some years ago and witnessed the state of online commenting back then! Fun stuff.
Cheers!
I agree that reddit-style voting systems are problematic. In particular, I think there needs to be a way to separate votes that mean "I agree/disagree" from votes that mean "this is high/low quality". Old slashdot had something like this.
I'm not sure what you mean by "highly curated but not heavily moderated". I see curation as an extreme form of moderation, essentially operating from a whitelist model as opposed to a blacklist model like most/all sites have now.
Ok yeah that's how I see it as well... I was curious if you meant that you'd like a heavily curated site while accepting heavy moderation..
Full-disclosure I don't have the magic bullet for the best solution to the problem of moderation, but it's something I'm constantly thinking about as I build sqwok. I'm not really a fan of heavy-handed moderation on the current large sites, and the sort of echo-chambers that form around them, but I also realize that there will always be a subset of bad actors/trolls that try to ruin the experience for everyone else.
That said I _do_ like the idea of curated content as a feature for showcasing content.
Thanks for checking it out! (I'm in p/QVK5_vIww8lrGw now if you want to chat)
What makes you think this is a good approach? I strongly suspect that voting (as it clumsily currently exists) was essential for HN to get to where it is. Are there examples of other communities that have accomplished what you want without voting?
Failing that, I wish comment votes were rendered with 'sparklines' instead of numbers alone. I find it surprisingly interesting to watch my comment scores go up and down over timeframes corresponding to daylight hours in various parts of the world. It would be very cool to see voting trends presented in graphical form. And it should be fairly obvious that posts that oscillate between high and low scores tend to be more thought-provoking than those that shoot to +4 or -4 and stay there.
That's interesting, and I agree with the idea that there should be _some_ requirement to contribute more than just an opaque vote.
In another comment I mentioned using "activity" as a metric for relevance, but another thing I've thought about is perhaps in the same vein as your thought here, where instead of voting, you could write certain phrases that would match a sentiment. That way the people in the conversation could engage with the message and it would further the discussion. Voting is hidden and doesn't match how conversations happen in real life.
The result is similar to voting. Things people are interested in discussing on stay on the front page, things they're not fall off. But then you don't need "gravity" to downrank old posts with many votes, because when people lose interest they stop commenting. Which also means something stays visible as long as people stay interested in it. Whereas "gravity" encourages discussions to be cut short because it's almost impossible for any post to remain visible for more than a day or two, even it was still actively being discussed.
I like this. So currently on the homepage, and individual user (nest) pages the list of content has two sort options, "hot", and "new". The "hot" sort takes into account the message activity of the post similar to what you described. The effect is that active posts bubble to the top, and even old posts can become current again (anti-gravity) if the activity picks up once more. I think about how humans interact in real-life group discussions, where there is no "voting" on a discussion happening. The "voting" in real-life is in the form of the size of the discussion and how many people it attracts. If you put 100 ppl in a room and gave out a topic, the most interesting discussions would naturally form and people would be attracted to those.
This raises the barrier to entry already, and the money raised can go towards paying full time moderators / curators.
What is really being objected to here? Being noticed by a wider audience? Does the SSC community not believe that it can stand up to wider scrutiny?
His twitter bio:
Scott Alexander
@slatestarcodex
54.5K Followers
I have a place where I say complicated things about philosophy and science. That place is my blog. This is where I make terrible puns.
https://twitter.com/slatestarcodex
The Times could address this directly, or not. In either case, the Times's outing of SA is made a major focus of the story. And to that degree, SA's action strikes me as exceptionally well considered, as it turns the Times's own strength and public status and reputation against itself. Far more so than any possible argument or appeal might.
And in terms of strategy and tactics, I have to admire the move regardless of the merits or insensitivity of the Times or its identification policy.
I think the questions surrounding identity really need deeper exploration, and that there isn't a simple pat answer.
There are cases where pseudonymity or anonymity is valid and justified, cases in which they are not. Cases in which at least some self-labelling is reasonable, others in which it's clearly not. Names and labels are powerful tools. As with all tools, it's how they're used and to what ends which ultimately determines morality.
I also agree that protecting his patients and his business is something he should have seen to, but it is a problem he should have addressed six years ago, not after building a minor media ecosystem around himself, including books, published articles, and con appearances.
"strongly linked" is doing a lot of work. They're linked in that if you're a tech professional, you can figure out his last name with five minutes of dedicated digging. A casual searcher would not make the connection without knowing it beforehand.
> I also agree that protecting his patients and his business is something he should have seen to, but it is a problem he should have addressed six years ago, not after building a minor media ecosystem around himself, including books, published articles, and con appearances.
Kind of victim-blaming, but yeah, he should have used better opsec six years ago. That boat has sailed. But what's the public benefit of the NYT outing his real name? The public costs are clear: primarily hurting a provider of healthcare services and secondarily making it more dangerous to entertain even slightly heterodox ideas in public.
By those lights, the only thing he's a victim of is his own success. I suspect we'd be getting the same reaction from SA regardless of any so-called "doxing," the trail of breadcrumbs leafing back to his identity would still have been present. And at least the article was planned to be positive
As far a the goofle-fu needed to find that specific information, well, I think you're overestimating the difficulty of that particular feat.
It's not.
I've been following the development of the drama for a while. And even though I know a thing or two about OSINT, I still don't know Scott Alexander's real full name.
The NY Times was willing to use pseudonyms for the subjects of articles in the past. I didn't see Banksy exposed for instance.
So if the article was in fact sympathetic why use the real name, when it has no relevancy to the subject?
Unless, the article was actually not sympathetic, but meant as a zesty piece to "expose" Scott Alexander as a reactionary/eugenist/sexist in the current hot climate of "cancel-culture".
Which surely would generate lots of clicks for the NY Times, but would also destroy the subject of their story at the hands of SJW/twitter mob, then allowing for more stories about the drama and generate more clicks.
Exposing SA's real name is a win only for the NY Times.
You can also set up another RSS reader and just import a couple of those "Awesome blog" lists on Github. That way you have a collection of random shit you can browse through and sometimes you get an interesting title.
Get on an ActivityPub server (Mastodon, Pleroma, MissKey) or set one up yourself. You can find a couple of threads on here and Lobste.rs where people post their Fediverse accounts and you can follow some of those and then branch out and find other people.
[1]: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/rss-the-original-federated-so...
- Reeder for macOS, which pulls from miniflux
- Fiery Feeds for iOS, which pulls from miniflux
real life, at least for many topics
"With the right norms" is the tricky part. There are some fora a couple degrees of separation from SSC that I've had good luck with, but it's really tough to find places like that
https://www.lesswrong.com/
Well I guess someone could just create a new one. Everyone is always waiting for someone else to fix these communities and online discourse.
This would be a good time to organize something new.
To say nothing of the burgeoning portion of the left for whom the existence of open-mindedness anywhere is an affront and actively seek to change fora that don't conform to their narrow worldview.
(It seems that in a high quality forum, a person on the right should only be able to make generalisations about people on the right, and a person on the left should only be able to make generalisations about people on the left, unless the post has been moderated and approved as high quality. Not that such terms hold much content in any case, and they're far better avoided entirely. It is trivial to be a racist, misogynist, anti-glbt, protectionist, anti-business, anti-monarchist, anti-"their religion" communist.)
Without comment on any other substantive point, I think the simpler explanation is that people want high-quality discussion but don't necessarily know how to produce it. Even though they know quality discussion when they see it, there's no clear path to achieve that goal. (Hence all of the conflicting comments in this very discussion about the value of moderation policies!)
It's much like the idea of starting a restaurant with "my friends and I know what great food tastes like, so we should have no problem making it!"
I'm setting the bar _very_ low here. There are a lot of people out there firmly ensconced in their bubbles, unable to conceive of anyone with different beliefs as anything but entirely alien (and/or evil). An enormously common approach to conversation, in my experience, is to take someone's claim, extract the buzzwords, map it to something you've already heard, and argue against that strawman. This is, by definition, completely nuance-killing. My definition of "wants high-quality conversation" doesn't consist of much more than the ability to avoid this. The only other requirement I'd add is a bit of emotional continence, which prevents immediately raising the temperature of every conversation, and thus lowering the chance of two people with different beliefs finding common ground.
> On the other hand, it seems that insulting generalisations about huge swathes of people with whom you disagree is very cheap and easy, but it's there as the conclusion to a post apparently wanting high-quality discussion
Presumably this is a reference to the last sentence of my comment? This is a common mistake. I'm describing people who behave a certain way; by definition, those people behave that way. I'm decidedly _not_ claiming that this is a quality of everyone on the left, or most of the left, or anything like that, and I'm personally firmly on the left. It's just an inevitable tendency of the side of the spectrum that gets cultural power: Conservatives in the '50s had roughly the same tendency. There's always a narrow-minded contingent that uses that power to define more and more beliefs as heretical and thus "dangerous", and decides that those beliefs should be hunted down and rooted out of every forum they can, starting with the most legitimate fora and moving on down to the least.
I'm not strawmanning their views either: this tendency is accompanied by openly-expressed beliefs that giving bad thoughts exposure or a platform anywhere is dangerous. Of course, the definition of "bad thoughts" is handed down by fiat from those institutions with said cultural power.
> Not that such terms hold much content in any case, and they're far better avoided entirely. It is trivial to be a racist, misogynist, anti-glbt, protectionist, anti-business, anti-monarchist, anti-"their religion" communist.)
I agree, and have found this to be the case in the fora I'm talking about, where these labels tend not to be as useful, since their predictive power is limited beyond broad sweeps of fundamental beliefs. But for the majority of people that I mention above, the labels are predictive because they're _causal_; people swallow their package of beliefs wholesale.
Data Secrets Lox is set up as a replacement for the SSC open threads, and is run on actual forum software, which means there are topic-specific threads for easier navigation. As membership increases, I expect we'll add subforums, also.
https://www.navalgazing.net/
https://datasecretslox.obormot.net/
https://www.datasecretslox.com/
The old link will continue to work for a while.
r/EnterTheGungeon and r/AceCombat were two great ones. I say "were" only because they (naturally) become sort of semi-dormant because those games haven't seen major releases in a while, so discussion has petered out. r/Xcom is pretty strong!
It's hit or miss, but a lot of "niche" hobbies have really good subreddits. I recently got into watches and subreddits like r/Casio and r/Seiko are fun and supportive. Not exactly deep discussion, because there's only so much you can say about a watch, but they are fun.
There are some decent audio-related subreddits. I'm a mod at r/budgetaudiophile and we try to be as helpful as possible who are dipping their toes into the hobby, though I'm not too active over there these days.
I haven't found any solid tech-related subreddits, ever. Though, I haven't looked too hard I suppose.
So, for example, I could make an anticapitalist statement, or say something about how I don't think Paul Graham (or some other HN prophet) has ever uttered a philosophically novel or interesting idea, and I'd be downvoted to hell because dissent on those topics is verboten.
If the mods banned you for saying those things, maybe I would agree with you, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
It sounds like you are looking for a forum without a voting mechanism.
It's somewhat better here than say, on an average subreddit.
Also the moderation model for slashdot is golden. I strongly suggested anyone interested in online forum design to take a look at the source code. The idea of rating comments based on a few categories, allowing readers to assign different weight to each categories, and forcing voters (moderators) to abstain from commenting when voting, works really well and solve problems that are impossible here or on reddit/facebook/etc.
EDIT: [because the above might seem vague]. I’m not talking about opinions that I found worthless because I disagreed with them. I’m talking about 500-word essays about how red speaker wires give you better stereo separation because of quantum mechanics, modded up to +5. That kind of thing.
Slashdot also allows you to mark the few people that make those (and political) comments that are often upvoted as friend or foe. That is the ultimate fix if scrolling past one or another comment bothers you. I personally only Friend people there to bump their comments, as i find scrolling past the bad one easier.
I think you are right that HN is not the right venue. A lot of what has kept it functional for over a decade is the focus on tech. It's not followed to the letter, but an attempt to make HN into SSC would probably destroy it. It's valuable enough as it is, so let's not take the chance.
The bright part is that (so far as I can tell) if one could attract the core community, SSC should be fairly portable. Scott's top posts were sometimes really good, but I don't think they were essential. I'm tempted that the right approach may be just to create a new space, advertise it, and try to attract enough of the core community to jump start it.
I picture it to be like capturing a swarm of bees: put a large cardboard box under the tree limb that they are hanging from, give it a sharp shake, seal up the box, take it to a new location, and install in a new hive. If you managed to capture a viable queen in the transfer, you are done! If not, you need to get the swarm to accept a new queen, with a process that involves exposure to the new queen's pheremones (and sometimes marshmallows --- I'm a little fuzzy on the details).
If one was to take that approach (metaphorically) where would you begin? And technologically, is there some better tool for the job than a Wordpress blog?
Exactly this, because tech discussion doesn’t usually split audience 50/50 and audience is usually more scientific.
When I am outlier with my comments, I can see maybe I am missing something. I am learning something useful everyday.
I'll have you know that vim is best, tabs are better than spaces, Vue is better than React, Microsoft - on balance - made the (tech) world a better place, everything should be full-stack js SPA's with server-side rendering, Prototype.js was better than jQuery, AI is only true AI when it is conscious, CSS-in-JS is an abomination, json needs to allow for comments and trailing commas, static typing is superior, Linus Torvalds should be nicer, microservices are the future, and significant whitespace is a good idea.
Like if you show me some examples from top 100 today, that is splitting audience 50/50, I think would be better.
And very often the resulting discussion doesn't really fare much better in finding agreement than non-tech discussions do. At least that's been my experience.
Its subject matter is somewhat different to the rationalist theme of SSC, but there is some crossover.
RW explores what they term the “crisis of meaning” in the modern world, the decay of institutions and social cohesion, and the challenges individuals face through trauma, mental illness and alienation.
Their forums on Discord and Google Groups host ongoing discussions about ways of overcoming these issues and finding a path to a better world.
It has a less materialistic and more spiritual ethos than SSC, so it won’t be every SSC exile’s cup of tea, but some may find it appealing.
They’ve done some excellent interviews with a broad range of folks including Gabor Mate, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jordan Hall, Eric Weinstein, Brett Weinstein, Heather Heying, Douglas Rushkoff, Stanislav Grof, Diana Fleischmann, Ken Wilbur, Iain McGilchrist, John Vervaeke and Charles Einsenstein.
https://www.rebelwisdom.co.uk
https://discord.gg/RK4MeYW
The two who coined "intellectual dark web"?
At time of writing the top left article is https://www.rebelwisdom.co.uk/8-posts/164-david-icke-london-... which points to a video that appears to have been taken down off vimeo, probably because of Holocaust denier David Icke.
This isn't "spiritual" and it certainly isn't "nuanced", it's just the standard contrarianism in a new hat.
The David Icke content was an investigation into what the hell was going on behind the scenes with that whole fiasco, which turned out to be a largely-fraudulent grab for money and eyeballs by the big-but-failing London Real company, evidently an attempt to save itself by cashing in on the Infowars market. Rebel Wisdom founder David Fuller has a background as an investigative news journalist at BBC and Channel 4, and went deeper on this story than anybody else I've seen. When many others were fuelling the whole thing with hysterical rants about 5G and lizard people conspiracies, Fuller was soberly asking, as he does, "what's really going on here?".
On Eric Weinstein and the IDW, RW/Fuller has been about the only reporter to both treat it with the seriousness that its scale and influence warrants, whilst also subjecting it to scrutiny and criticism. The most recent interview with Eric Weinstein and other recent productions focused very heavily on the IDW's failings and the character flaws of several of its leading identities.
The full list of people they've interviewed who have solid backgrounds either as spirtualists or deep researchers on psychology, psychiatry, consciousness, psychedelics or counter-culture is long, and includes: Peter Levine, Iain McGilchrist, Stan Grof, Tim Lott, Rupert Sheldrake, Gabor Maté, Tim Freke, Douglas Rushkoff, Charles Eisenstein, Richard Tarnas, Ken Wilber, Doshin Roshi, Jamie Wheal, John Vervaeke, Ros Watts, Stephen Porges, Guy Sengstock, Bonnitta Roy, Terry Patten and Rafia Morgan.
Several of these figures have decades of work behind them, and most have nothing to do with the IDW, beyond observing from afar and asking "what's going on here?", often very critically.
Sure, they've also covered some IDW-linked figures - Jordan Peterson early on, and then others like the "Sokal Squared" hoaxers, Douglas Murray, Claire Lehmann and Cassie Jaye, because, like it or not, they've attracted attention that warrants scrutiny. But people from that world make up a decreasing share of the content; they've left most of that stuff behind in the past 12+ months.
As for Jordan Hall and Daniel Schmachtenberger, along with Wheal and Eisenstein; they have appeared more than just about anyone on the channel, they've had no major involvement with the IDW, and are wholly interested in deeply understanding the direction of the world and figuring out workable new forms of government and economics that are equitable and sustainable. From what I've seen in my own social networks, the people who are the most committed to "woke" causes are highly engaged with what these guys are doing.
Personally, one aspect that most appeals to me about this community is that, unlike communities like SSC, Quillette and LessWrong, there is zero discussion about creepy topics like race science and genetic determinism. That, along with the real nuance they bring to the topics they cover, is why I've taken little-to-no interest in those other communities, but an increasing amount of interest in Rebel Wisdom.
It seems that in your attempt to dismiss this platform as lacking nuance, you've made about the most nuance-free assessment imaginable.
As RW explains in this video [1], as an experienced news reporter he took all necessary steps to ensure he adhered to the legal framework for fair use, but YouTube (and evidently Vimeo) pulled it down anyway, which raises important questions about the treatment of traditional investigative journalism and copyright law on the new media platforms.
[1] http://youtu.be/fPqX9WIthPY
The fact is that nuanced discussion doesn't scale. It requires a small core of dedicated users that can't get drowned out by dross (e.g. rabid Twitter users that collectively gish gallop). Broadcasting the existence of any of these communities is an almost guaranteed path to destroying the essence of what makes them successful communities in the first place.
I think you'd want a comment ranking system that rewarded people for voting according to the thought that went into a comment rather than whether you happen to agree with the comment.
Maybe a two dimensional voting system, one for "quality" and one for "agreement" (literally a 2D voting arrow widget? up-right means "high quality and I agree", down-right means "low quality but I agree", etc).
It would then be pretty simple to see who's "quality" and "agreement" votes don't strongly correlate, as well as who writes quality comments, and weight their votes more heavily.
If you only had 1 dimension voting like everywhere else, then I'm not sure how to do it, but maybe it's possible.
There are users who don't care about the voting system the same way the designer of the voting system intended. The only way to enforce this would be by appointing a team of moderators that read every comment and rate it themselves. Obviously this is problematic because users might perceive the moderators to be authoritarian and the potential for abuse is pretty high. However, this could definitively increase the maximum size of a high quality community to something like 10000 users but it's still far away from 1 million or more users.
Even if the majority of new users don't use the voting system correctly the system could be weighted more heavily to the group of existing and new users who agree on what quality is, even if it ends up being a minority of users.
Now, if you had a majority of users who all voted the same but were not correlated with "agreement" (e.x. "vote according to the day of the week" or something), or if only very few users were voting correctly, then it might be difficult to distinguish, but that seems unlikely.
Although the site is pretty dead now -- it doesn't have HN's advantage of a wealthy benefactor keeping it ad-free -- its original incarnation had some good ideas.
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1q0d9/the_bush_...
It turns out that you really can't have both community and scale. The attempts end up aging differently, but inevitably, to something that the core membership doesn't want to be a part of and thus the predicates that enabled its existence stop. Its A people move on and the B people move in. This is true of every human group, subculture, or social phenomena really.
I strongly recommend reading Clay Shirky's commentary on the nascent phenomena of "social software" back in 2003:
https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisit...
Or consider C2's conception of it, particularly the end of it:
http://wiki.c2.com/?CommunityLifeCycle
The Decline, the formation of cliques and factions, incidents of abuse, of intellectual violence and namecalling. The software becomes encrusted with patches and extensions, the unwritten rules are flouted regularly and the meta-rules all but forgotten. It is a time of either shrinking membership, or overwhelming growth.
The Fall, an incident, whether social or technical that makes everybody realize that things aren't like they used to be. It usually leads to a revision or addition to the software as this is the easiest thing to fix.
Or is it more that once a community gets to a certain size, it's subject to a kind of broadcast storm?
I wonder if a technical solution could mitigate against those risks. You could limit the number of public access tokens that can be issued at any one time, and have strategies in place to allow more long-lived tokens and registration for regular visitors.
Quality decreased as numbers increased. Pg spent much time worrying about this.
Ultimately bookface is where the interesting discussions are now, I would imagine. Not that HN isn’t interesting — it is — but it’s different than it was. I think few people would argue the opposite (partly because there are few people left from those early days).
It’s no coincidence that you have to be a founder to access bookface. One YC founder commented with surprise when he saw me on HN, saying it looked exactly like bookface. Presumably he spends his time there and not here.
Small core group founds a community about X
-> people who like X a lot join
-> people with no prior experience with X join (X is cool now and they want to learn)
-> people who care more about the community than about X join
The problem is that the lowest common denominator keeps getting lower as you increase the size of the community. If you want a tight knit community then you need some kind of entrance criteria or at least ensure that new users are moderated (basically impossible with open registration).
1. Group has an average quality. 2. People who have a much higher quality tend to avoid the group (e.g. that discussion is fallacious) 3. People who have lower quality are incentivized to join the group. 4. Eventually, the best performers of the group have less incentive to stay in that community
It's almost like, ironically, the best way forward would be to create a moderated community that slowly gets a user base of a diverse set of people, and then slowly pull back the moderation over time. Allowing something like subreddits with communities to self-select their own moderation levels is also great, imo. Reddit was perfect until the platform itself stopped being neutral.
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong
Have moderators cover only a few subforums, so they don't get stretched too thin, have the moderators/admins confer internally on cross-forum issues and bans.
It does require a competent moderator team that knows when to let discussions run, when to gently nudge people towards more reasoned debate, and when to swing the ban hammer.
Reddit was absolutely not perfect at any point in time. There were countless cases of power hungry mods in their own little kingdoms, doxxing, inter-subreddit fights and exceedingly virulent hate subreddits that specifically did their best to hurt other people. That's not debate, that's bullying and in many cases criminal.
You could add simple features to enhance discussion such as an option to quote academic sources.
https://unstuckpolitics.com/
https://unstuckpolitics.com/
Just went to the first entry in section "poltics&news" and immediately closed the site. This is the same cancer as reddit only with more blinking animated gifs. "unHINGEDpolitics.com" would be a better fitting name IMO.
It’s quite interesting, albeit more of an argument mapping site than a forum. I found participation a bit harder, as they have a “no duplicate arguments” rule, which probably makes sense for their setup.
A couple of diagrams that I found quite interesting:
https://www.kialo.com/general-ai-should-have-fundamental-rig... https://www.kialo.com/artificial-intelligence-ai-should-an-a... https://www.kialo.com/is-gender-a-social-construct-1570
Fwiw, I contributed what I consider pretty heterodox claims to one of the debates and was surprised when the debate creator made me a mod and asked me to work with them. Not sure it’s a blessing though, as now I find myself having to respond to others that personal experience isn’t a good source to back up their claims.
I'm one of the founders. Happy to answer any questions.
Are you aware of any kind of backlash, where non-parties to a letter exchange harshly criticize one or both participants, or your platform, for engaging in the exchange at all?
One thing that I notice in your platform somehow is a sort of I-Thou dynamic (maybe just because people are addressing each other cordially, or even affectionately, in the second person?) and not an I-It ("look at that losery loser over there with the super-dumb beliefs!"). Surely that militates against tribalism -- and surely some people are mad that some of the conversations are happening at all? ("Why is this person/platform legitimizing this terrible person by having this letter exchange?" or something.)
Are you afraid that you'll be tempted to refuse certain letter exchanges because their topics are too intense or too taboo somehow, or because you're not sure the participants are interacting in good faith? Are you sort of at peace with the prospect of having to make that judgment?
How are people finding the platform and finding each other? Are you reaching out to them based on their prior reputations? Is someone suggesting your site to pairs of people who've been in social media fights, or seemed to be on the verge of them? Are people finding it themselves by word of mouth?
How many of the participants do you think have some kind of celebrity or substantial following outside of your site? Do you think that makes things better or worse in some way?
How do these exchanges compare to, say, a podcast video interview? (I did an SSC adversarial collaboration last year and my collaborator, and now friend, later interviewed me for his podcast, which felt like a pretty nice format too.)
Are you aware of any kind of backlash, where non-parties to a letter exchange harshly criticize one or both participants, or your platform, for engaging in the exchange at all?
Yes, on rare occasions. Helen Pluckrose and Kathleen Stock both experience a backlash on Twitter for participating in their dialogue on trans/gender issues. Interestingly, they both reported that the backlash was predominantly from their own audience/tribe. Neither of them were particularly bothered by it.
A criticism I’ve heard with regards to the platform is that it appears to be aligned or associated with the Intellectual Dark Web. This is true to the extent that we strongly value free speech and good faith dialectic, but we don’t have loyalties to any particular group, and we welcome (and are actively trying to host) conversations with people from all sides of the ideological and political spectrum.
One thing that I notice in your platform somehow is a sort of I-Thou dynamic… Surely that militates against tribalism”
Thanks for noticing. We’ve put a lot of effort into nudging writers to engage in good faith. Little things seem to have a big effect. For example, the default text on the letter writing page is “Dear NAME,”.
surely some people are mad that some of the conversations are happening at all? ("Why is this person/platform legitimizing this terrible person by having this letter exchange?"
This hasn’t been a significant issue, but I’m sure we’ll see more of this as we grow. It’s not something we’re particularly worried about; my co-founders and I are happy to defend the primacy of free speech and the importance of dialogue.
Are you afraid that you'll be tempted to refuse certain letter exchanges because their topics are too intense or too taboo somehow,
No. In fact, we’ve actively worked to foster difficult conversations - https://www.impossibleconversations.info
...or because you're not sure the participants are interacting in good faith? Are you sort of at peace with the prospect of having to make that judgment?
We fully support writers' freedom of speech, and we do not censor content or ban users unless legally or ethically necessary (child porn, doxxing, fraud, and direct & credible threats of violence). If we’re convinced that a writer is acting in bad faith we’ll flag their account, and their content will only appear on their own profile.
How are people finding the platform and finding each other? Are you reaching out to them based on their prior reputations? Is someone suggesting your site to pairs of people who've been in social media fights, or seemed to be on the verge of them? Are people finding it themselves by word of mouth?
It’s a mix of all of these. When we launched, a little over a year ago, all of the conversations were initiated by me or someone on my team reaching out to writers. Now, the vast majority of our conversations happen organically: writers typically discover Letter via conversations shared to Twitter, and they invite other writers by starting conversations with them. We still do outreach, but limit our attention to high status writers.
How many of the participants do you think have some kind of celebrity or substantial following outside of your site? Do you think that makes things better or worse in some way?
The majority of our most popular writers have a following on Twitter, but our average writer doesn’t. Popular writers help with distribution, and the quality of their writing tends to be higher. As you might guess, there’s a strong correlation between the quality and expertise of a writer, and their popularity.
How do these exchanges compare to, say, a podcast video interview?
Good question. There are pros and cons to both formats. Audio is great because a lot of meaning is conveye...
Anonymity has a bad rep, so we could just consider it the Chatham house rule online - you could require a real name account but only show letters under pseudonym.
The "gender critical" discussion, for example, contains Helen Pluckrose, one of the originators of the "grievance studies" paper, and Kathleen Stock, who got fired from being a philosophy professor for being anti-trans. Both of them take the anti-trans position.
I'm not going to link any of the vitriol because it's mindless and horrible, but she gets called "a traitor to women" and told she wants her daughter to be raped on a fairly regular basis by such people.
To understand Helen's actual position, I recommend people read this:
https://areomagazine.com/2017/09/27/an-argument-for-a-libera...
It's somewhat long and somewhat nuanced, which means most extreme activists at both ends of the argument hate it, but I'd claim that it is, overall, very much more pro-trans than otherwise and the majority of trans people I'm aware of who've read it came away with the same impression.
Thank you for confirming that Pluckrose is in fact deeply transphobic. If you think that is "nuanced" you are seriously mistaken. Consider re-evaluating your priors, in SSC speak.
I stand by my estimate that it gets a lot more right than it gets wrong, however.
My priors are based on conversations with a bunch of trans people; a mere assertion of "shocking ignorance" and "transphobia" largely leaves me thinking that you're so certain of your correctness you don't believe arguments need to even be made, which is not a position I can really rebut.
However, I shared the article, unfortunate parts and all, such that people can draw their own conclusions, and I'd continue to invite people to read and decide for themselves.
A lot of the more polite bigots will be comfortable making concessions to the trans people who conform to patriarchal roles (and hey, good on Pluckrose for being slightly less bad than charlatans like Stock) but will have knives out for anyone whose existence challenges them. This is a problem.
The only way to true gender liberation is through abolishing the patriarchy.
Helen is hardly gender role essentialist and in fact quite substantially non-conforming to many female gender norms and visibly proud to be her.
To assume that her failure (as of the time of writing, at least) to comprehend non-binary identities "betrays" anything except a lack of comprehension is ... unfounded, at best.
There was a stupendous amount of circular firing squad style stupidity to go around back in those days.
Despite the bad ideas of a subset of trans people (morphological liberation is very important to me), the idea of "transtrenders" is bogus and oppressive.
Successful activism generally requires forming as large a coalition as possible, and insta dismissing somebody as a bigot for not getting everything right first time is not an effective way to do that.
"Rather than coming off as a legitimate attempt to help legitimate problems, then, this form of gender activism appears to many like an unappealing combination of ideologizing and attention-seeking and raises the question of whether everybody who says they are trans is sincere or correct. It seems likely that some people have jumped on the train due to an ideological commitment to gender non-conformity and many trans people themselves have complained of this and coined the term “transtrender” to describe it."
This is pretty clearly "gender-conforming trans good, icky weird attention-seeking trans bad". The thing about "many trans people" is mentioned without any evidence and probably refers to people like Debbie Hayton and Buck Angel.
My demigirl friend microdoses on testosterone for the facial hair and voice deepening effects, though she would rather be read as a woman than a man. I know cis men who take the standard spironolactone and estradiol HRT combination.
Sorry, forming coalitions with people that seek to divide a marginalized community rather than work towards unity and solidarity is not a good idea.
That's a reductive view and doesn't fit with my understanding of their position.
> Sorry, forming coalitions with people that seek to divide a marginalized community rather than work towards unity and solidarity is not a good idea.
I'm the one suggesting unity and solidarity here.
You're the one suggesting dividing people based on your guesses as to their motivations.
But, whatever. I'm going to keep working towards a world where "trans people choosing bathrooms most suitable for the gender they are commonly perceived to be and everybody else accepting that trans people just need to pee" is just an obvious and comfortable thing and nobody gets beaten up for doing that.
You keep doing ... whatever it is you're doing. If you ever decide that trans people not getting the shit kicked out of them matters more to you than ideological purity, we can pick the conversation up again then, I guess.
The conversation in question was, in fact, an expansion of an extended disagreement on twitter that got derailed by a bunch of gendercrits deciding to scream at Helen until she had to lock her account.
If you're curious as to the actual conversation, I'd suggest reading it on letter for yourself.
How seriously this crowd takes her says a lot about its own values and methods.
edit: as a parody of the sort of meta-level discussion that is more concerned with intellectually bogus, self-absorbed notions of "truth" and "nuance" than the lives of actual human beings, the response is peerless. Well done!
Edit: it’s a shame you decided to edit your post after I responded. The new version is not quite as successful.
They certainly aren't "pro" trans either, though. The point wasn't whether or not they were extremists, it's whether they were representative speakers for ALL the relevant perspectives. And they clearly aren't.
However I feel that this particular policy is going to discourage some reasonable and informed people from discussing topics which may get them fired or mobbed on social media, etc.
That you have contributors who will take that risk is not the same as opening the opportunity to everybody including those who will not.
Your take on anonymity is opinion but stated as fact; obviously there are negatives of the abusive "keyboard warrior" type, but it also enables people who might have unpopular or "incorrect" opinions to voice them fearlessly and honestly.
In supposedly liberal democracies it is not clear how to claim "political dissident" status - what are the criteria?
The emphasis should be on civility and good faith, not whether or not they are confident to use their real name in a public space.
I will consider signing up, but I strongly resist using my own image as avatar, despite using my real name. Is there nuance to your policy there?
Lastly, your site is not well mobile optimized (iphone SE). The left menu should be collapsed or wrapped vertically inline.