This is a comment that says a lot of things I felt (though I don’t think the time I spent there was a waste more than anywhere else). I also felt, though, that I ended up having to write more and more. It just took up a lot of time because someone would write one or two not very well thought through sentences, and then writing a response to those sentences would take several paragraphs. And the new people who were joining seemed to be getting ruder and ruder, and seemed to have less interesting challenges to what I believe and more and more predictable arguments. It felt like a duty to reply, rather than a chance to learn from a different view point and work on my own thinking. One thing that might have helped, I wish that the rules against “waging the culture war” and comments having to be at least two out of the three of *true, necessary, and kind* were more rigidly enforced. Anything like “leftists are leaving because this is a place where they have to rationally justify their ideas. (+9)” seems to me to be explicitly waging the culture war, rather than discussing it. Some of the New Testament uses fantastic imagery sticks even in my Jewish brain. One of the best is Matthew 7:3. In the archetypal glory of the KJV, it’s: >And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? And in the more modern scholarly NRSV, it’s: >Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Obviously, I have opinions on who has specks and who has logs, but it was eventually shocking the lack of self-criticism and self-reflection that many of the most prominent posters had. One of the SSC blog posts that bothered me the most was “Yes, We Have Noticed the Skulls” because, well, I left feeling a lot of skulls went unnoticed in the community. On the subject of “muggle realism”, one skull obviously missed is that literally all previous systems which insisted on “natural, innate” hierarchies have just proven to be very wrong, whether we’re talking nobles over commoners, men over women (when women were essentially denied higher education), whites over everyone else, English over Irish, WASPs over Catholics, toilers over kulaks, Germans over Slavs, Japanese over co-prosperous East Asians, peasants over people who wear glasses, what have you. All of these hierarchies were considered scientific to the degree that science existed, ordained to the degree that religion ruled, but everywhere certainly natural and obvious by their proponents. There’s no sense in the scene that these historical hierarchies were entirely wrong (or at least mostly wrong) and certainly, *certainly* underestimated the capacities and abilities of the lower group by a considerable margin in every single case. This time is different? There was no sense of history, and how can you see the skulls if you have no sense of history? Not having a sense of history is itself skull. Scott said institutions are Conservative or Neutral, while that’s an interesting argument for America since the rise of Fox News *maybe*, but that just wasn’t the case in the 1950’s, when there were basically two major Conservative institutions: the National Review and Human Affairs (and the crazy John Birch Society). In the 60’s, the new non-neutral institutions were all on the left (in media, alt weeklies are an obvious example, but also all the new political organizations with vibrant energy seemed to have been on the left as well). I felt like whenever someone did make an interesting point, one that changed my mind, there’d be this tendency to go, “And that’s the way it’s always been! It’s natural and innate for things to be this way.” No, actually, this maybe the current equilibrium, but like most such things in the social world, it’s a historically contingent and I can think of several periods when there were different equilibria. But it all goes back to just the like, lack of intellectual modesty, the decline of the “well I might be wrong here, let me see,” that I think attracted me to the place in the first place, the failure to think that there might be specks and logs “on many sides, on many sides”. I think a lot of the users (liberal and conservative) who posted frequently when I first got there were interested in the culture war not as a place to bash the other side but a place to discuss things and maybe be able to pluck out some blinding beams and motes. As time went on, a lower proportion of new comers seemed interested in the same. And a higher portion of them seemed interested in discussing out and out reactionary things. One last common beam, one last thing that bothered me was also a lot about individualism and individual rights and how dare people on our side be treated as anything but individuals.... but those *groups* on the other side are awful. And again, this wasn’t everyone there. I probably even say the real problem was a very active minority. There are still people who post there who I think are interesting. But overall it just seemed like wading through all these things took more time than I could justify based on what I was getting out of it. I don’t know, I'm sure there are also other things that bothered me, I’m sure on a different day I might list different things, but I thought you articulated that particularly well and I wanted to add on to it.

>Tribalism is the mind-killer. >Greeting, humanoid. I hail from the gray tribe.

Having to re-litigate whether or not Jim Crow was bad every five minutes is fucking exhausting.

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Like most right-wingers who don't understand the left, I'm pretty sure your issue is that you think there is a coherent thing that can reasonably be called the left. There *absolutely* is not. Liberals hate social democrats hate communists hate anarchists hate liberals, and so on. Without the existence of a common enemy, the conflicts on the left would be every bit as vicious as those between the left and right. So when you try to find out what leftists believe, of course you're going to get a schizophrenic mess from which you can read anything you like, just like you would if you tried to figure out what Americans believed.

If you're hoping we can all charitably steelman Charles Murray together, I don't think it's going to go well. Most people here, I believe, are sick of the SSC style of debate over far-right idols and other subjects that have been rehashed hundreds of times.

I think a pretty big part is divergent hidden assumptions / priors about the world. If two persons with such divergent viewpoints want to have a discussion, this is possible but a lot of work. In context of large groups, people who are disinterested in playing edgelord but have a divergent viewpoint from the majority will have a hard time: "not edgelord" means that you have a very limited interest to re-litigate things you consider long settled, and if a strong majority disagrees... well, not productive. The way I see /r/slatestarcodex now, we sneerers would need to have fun re-litigating long-made points with people who have very divergent priors on the world, and who are not even aware of their biases. I mean, we have our own biases and it is very cool when we figure one of them out, that's a way of learning. But deep discussions can only happen when inferential distance is low; hearing the same people make the same (eg HBD) points again and again is just not interesting, and my budget for "charitably engaging scientific racism" is "once in a lifetime" and already spent. In other words: Either the quality needs to go way up (comments that fail to take into account shared background knowledge get ruthlessly downvoted / moderated, like on lesswrong[*]), or we need to self-segregate the community along low-inferential-distance lines, and only meet each other on special occasions. I think this is what happened. Long-term, my favorite state of affairs would be for most of /r/slatestarcodex to move to /r/hardcorerationality, and have the community split three-ways: /r/slatestarcodex as a more neutral ground with much, much fewer and higher quality comments, plus the two spinoffs. Because we are the sneerclub and are mean: That way most /r/slatestarcodex commenters can finally get the moderators they deserve. [*] lesswrong has different problems that are best summarized as "doomsday cult".

Maybe? Depending on what you mean by "this". I think you've characterized the norms on /r/slatestarcodex adequately (or at least, what they aspire to). I just think the inference you've drawn (these norms cause leftists to leave) is incorrect. Especially in light of posts by actual people who left, laying out their reasons for leaving.

What they actually mean is location-relative to Silicon Valley, tech sector, academia, etc. They don't see most of these problems because they don't have to deal with them, but what they do see is tech companies funneling bribes toward Democrats, increasing pressure from HR departments to be more woke, tumblr liberals yelling at them on the internet, the rise of commodified pop social justice culture, and micro-targeted advertising at minority populations. From this, they infer that the cultural Marxists have captured everything and are turning even our good traditional capitalist institutions into Goolags. This is how you get the bizarro world of the right wing where the script is always flipped -- Jews control the media; Obama is using healthcare reform as stealth reparations; Louis Farrakhan's under your bed with a shotgun; the lavender mafia is coming to turn your kids gay; feminists are taking all your shit through family court; taxes are wiping you out because too many bums are buying lobsters and t-bones with food stamps; Muslims are plotting stealth jihad in Dearborn, Michigan, etc. If they are young enough, they won't even be aware of how unoriginal their "forbidden knowledge" is -- Buckley obsessing over the Kampus Krazies 50 years ago, George Lincoln Rockwell trolling college campuses, Andrew Dice Clay's edgy anti-PC comedy routines, Birchers and Goldwater supporters raging against the cuckservative Rockefeller Republicans, Rush Limbaugh owning talk radio the same way youtube has been clogged up with alt-right videos, Phyllis Schlafly taking down the ERA, etc.

> I doubt that anybody on /r/ssc is deliberately trying to be a dick, but it's really hard to not see them that way when they're being willfully ignorant. Anybody? I comment there, and I sometimes see value in it, but I also see value in explicitly making some/all distinctions. (Maybe I'm just a pedantic nerd, though.) In a group of thousands, there's a big difference between "there exists someone who is trying to be a dick" and "everyone is trying to be a dick." I do not doubt that there exist some people who comment on r/ssc and are trying to be a dick, and that accounts for some of the bad comments there. There also exist people who are oblivious, people who are contrarian, people who value free speech per se above all else (or at least think they do, because no one's speech has been too directly threatening to them), and people who have any number of reasons for tolerating bad comments or thoughtlessly making a few themselves. The results are not good, for any motive; but there are a lot of motives I'd support ascribing to some, not to all. (This some/all stuff might be relevant to stuff like #notallmen -- sure, not literally all men are guilty of [this particular bad thing], but nor is defending the honor of men as a class, the most helpful response. IMO making the some/all distinction more salient could help counteract defensiveness. Some members of a group do bad things with impunity, but this is not an attack on all members of the group. All, say, white males have privilege as such, but this is not an attack on the specific white males present.)

"I would have voted for Obama three times!"

Did Friedrich Schelling build the fence found by Chesterton?

When did Scott Adams become so prominent here, anyway? I came here to sneer at silicon valley, mostly, and then I left reddit for a while and suddenly ssc is a major thing.

You're kinda one-note, but I like that.