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Ainoha Sistek

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May 23, 2024, 2:26:51 PM5/23/24

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Unexpectedly, the restriction to one thread kick-started the culture war discussions rather than toning them down. The thread started getting thousands of comments per week, some from people who had never even heard of this blog and had just wandered in from elsewhere on Reddit. It became its own community, with different norms and different members from the rest of the board.

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I expected this to go badly. It kind of did; no politics discussion area ever goes really well. There were some of the usual flame wars, point-scoring, and fanatics. I will be honest and admit I rarely read the thread myself.

The Culture War Thread aimed to be a place where people with all sorts of different views could come together to talk to and learn from one another. I think this mostly succeeded. On the last SSC survey, I asked who participated in the thread, and used that to get a pretty good idea of its userbase. Here are some statistics:

There was less parity in party identification, with a bit under two Democrats to every Republican. But this, too, reflects the national picture. The latest Gallup poll found that 34% of Americans identified as Democrat, compared to only 25% Republican. Since presidential elections are usually very close, it looks like left-of-center people are more willing to openly identify with the Democratic Party than right-of-center people are with the Republicans; the CW demographics show a similar picture.

Whatever its biases and whatever its flaws, the Culture War thread was a place where very strange people from all parts of the political spectrum were able to engage with each other, treat each other respectfully, and sometimes even change their minds about some things. I am less interested in re-opening the debate about exactly which side of the spectrum the average person was on compared to celebrating the rarity of having a place where people of very different views came together to speak at all.

Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppression and this makes them valid targets for violence. Some people think immigrants are destroying the cultural cohesion necessary for a free and prosperous country. Some people think transwomen are a tool of the patriarchy trying to appropriate female spaces. Some people think Charles Murray and The Bell Curve were right about everything. Some people think Islam represents an existential threat to the West. Some people think women are biologically less likely to be good at or interested in technology. Some people think men are biologically more violent and dangerous to children. Some people just really worry a lot about the Freemasons.

Some people started an article about me on a left-wing wiki that listed the most offensive things I have ever said, and the most offensive things that have ever been said by anyone on the SSC subreddit and CW thread over its three years of activity, all presented in the most damning context possible; it started steadily rising in the Google search results for my name. A subreddit devoted to insulting and mocking me personally and Culture War thread participants in general got started; it now has over 2,000 readers. People started threatening to use my bad reputation to discredit the communities I was in and the causes I cared about most.

Some people found my real name and started posting it on Twitter. Some people made entire accounts devoted to doxxing me in Twitter discussions whenever an opportunity came up. A few people just messaged me letting me know they knew my real name and reminding me that they could do this if they wanted to.

Some people started messaging my real-life friends, telling them to stop being friends with me because I supported racists and sexists and Nazis. Somebody posted a monetary reward for information that could be used to discredit me.

So around October, I talked to some subreddit mods and asked them what they thought about spinning off the Culture Wars thread to its own forum, one not affiliated with the Slate Star Codex brand or the r/slatestarcodex subreddit. The first few I approached were positive; some had similar experiences to mine; one admitted that even though he personally was not involved with the CW thread and only dealt with other parts of the subreddit, he taught at a college and felt like his job would not be safe so long as the subreddit and CW thread were affiliated. Apparently the problem was bigger than just me, and other people had been dealing with it in silence.

Yes, they were. Both of those institutions were seen as seething cauldrons of unrest which threatened society in their own time, it is only in hindsight that we have romanticized them as hotspots of social progress.

My view is that society tends to embody the public morality it can afford. If the world eventually changed in ways that the coffee house patrons would have approved, I think it would be a mistake to attribute causality to mere correlation.

And then after a few years, around a critical point where the average voter is actually thinking about the issue, everyone suddenly converges on the answer that actually is more just and right and in line with the fundamental principles of our society, and then that becomes the new norm?

And then after a few years, around a critical point where the average voter is actually thinking about the issue, everyone suddenly converges on the answer that actually is more just and right and in line with the fundamental principles of our society, and then that becomes the new norm?

As an unrelated example, worrying about superhuman AI is silly when Eliezer Yudkowsky is doing it, but becomes a serious topic overnight when Elon Musk says something similar. It is not because people started thinking about the topic seriously and decided it was legitimate. Rather, people decided that the topic is legitimate if Elon Musk talks about it, and that allowed a few of them to start thinking seriously about it.

Men are seen as competent and expendable (if they suffer or die, it means they were not as competent as they should have been, therefore they kinda deserved it), women are considered precious and incompetent (we should protect them and help them all the time, but if they achieve something, it is assumed that only happened as a result of the protection and help they received, not their own skills).

In the modern world these assumptions seem to be on much shakier ground, and we can afford to experiment a little bit with them. But because humans are irrational, social, and bipedal apes, we cant express it that way. We need to wrap this up in flowery language about human rights, female liberation, and patriarchy.

Im not part of the rationalist community and my only exposure to it is from this blog. But I would expect the rationalist community to rise above this sort of talk and view these kind of problems from an engineering perspective as to how to build a prosperous and long-lasting society. It seems to me such an approach would remove much heat to CW topics and add some light, because it shows that the conservative is not a hateful misogynist who takes perverse pleasure at oppressing women, but instead someone who clings to the view that brought about the modern world, and the liberal is not an irresponsible hedonistic idiot, but someone who wishes to see how life can be improved when certain constraints are removed.

Both perspectives are needed if we have any chance of building a good society. Any effort to shut down conversations between liberals and conservatives, as described in this post, should be seen in this light.

Usenet in the 80s and 90s managed to sustain a wider range of tolerable opinions and comparatively civil exchanges (though certainly with trolls of all flavors and lots of healthy exercise for the killfile).

Occasionally there was targeted action aimed at intimidating people by drawing the attention of the (usually academic or government) institution to the terrible views their money was helping to spread, but it was relatively rare and there were strong norms against it.

Maybe it was just that it was too small to matter. But while the numbers were tiny compared to the modern net, by the 90s they were still pretty large compared with any number of premodern cities that might support coffee shops or agoras or the occasional brutal civil conflict.

Also, while there may have been more usenet users than 19th century coffee house patrons in absolute terms, as a percentage of political society usenet was a fragment of a fragment. Once the tidal wave of general public broke into the internet commenting space they brought a very different culture that swamped any existing founder effect.

Not once was anything Scott describing ever a problem. The forum ran with pretty much total free speech rules. No spam, no illegal content, NSFW work content had to be labeled NSFW. That was it. The forum itself had no shortage of less than PC content and posters.

I think about this xkcd from 2006 a lot. Just a few years later it could never have been made. The attitude was immature, probably wrong even at the time, and obviously in this day and age no responsible adult can endorse it. But I miss it.

The point of a honor culture, with duels or just ritualized fist fights, is to disincentivize interpersonal conflict by creating a credible threat of escalation to physical violence. The drawback is that people who are better at physical violence, or just less risk averse, will be able to get away with more bad stuff, while people who are bad at violence or more risk averse will be the target of abuse (although somebody could gain honor by defending them, or they could just hire a champion, actual honor cultures were complicated).

So, in this respect, things would have to get worse (more fighting) before they can get better (fair fighting). And that may happen whether we want it to or not, but I expect most people here would not favor that first step even if it might facilitate the second.