To quote the Slate Star Codex article, "Neutral vs Conservative: The Eternal Struggle," now offline due to the NYT trying to dox the liberal author for refusing to be a progressive foot soldier:
Look. I read Twitter. I know the sorts of complaints people have about this blog. I’m some kind of crypto-conservative, I’m a traitor to liberalism, I’m too quick to sell out under the guise of “compromise”. And I understand the sentiment. I write a lot about how we shouldn’t get our enemies fired lest they try to fire us, how we shouldn’t get our enemies’ campus speakers disinvited lest they try to disinvite ours, how we shouldn’t use deceit and hyperbole to push our policies lest our enemies try to push theirs the same way. And people very reasonably ask – hey, I notice my side kind of controls all of this stuff, the situation is actually asymmetrical, they have no way of retaliating, maybe we should just grind our enemies beneath our boots this one time.
And then when it turns out that the enemies can just leave and start their own institutions, with horrendous results for everybody, the cry goes up “Wait, that’s unfair! Nobody ever said you could do that! Come back so we can grind you beneath our boots some more!”
Conservatives aren’t stuck in here with us. We’re stuck in here with them. And so far it’s not going so well. I’m not sure if any of this can be reversed. But I think maybe we should consider to what degree we are in a hole, and if so, to what degree we want to stop digging.
It was one of the (very) few places where you could actually hold discourse, and could actually disagree with one another.
One interesting measure of a site is how far of an outlier your views can visibly be while still being welcomed and discussed, and SSC was the winner on that metric. By far.
There's a strong distinction between "no-one can say another person's view is incorrect" and remaining calm while holding rational discourse in the face of disagreements. They are both "welcoming" in some sense; the latter is what I'm looking for.
SSC is/was the latter; the subreddits were both leaning toward the former from what I saw before I left.
I'd like somewhere where someone can go "yes, given these axioms that's valid logic from there" (or "no, that's invalid reasoning given this value-set and here's why") without going "I don't hold these axioms so these axioms are WRONG, end of story". If that makes sense.
To quote the Slate Star Codex article, "Neutral vs Conservative: The Eternal Struggle," now offline due to the NYT trying to dox the liberal author for refusing to be a progressive foot soldier:
https://archive.vn/trFCU
Wow those quotes are gold. Thanks for the link!
SSC is/was golden.
It was one of the (very) few places where you could actually hold discourse, and could actually disagree with one another.
One interesting measure of a site is how far of an outlier your views can visibly be while still being welcomed and discussed, and SSC was the winner on that metric. By far.
I'm suffering from SSC withdrawal already.
They do have two subreddits, but I have no idea how welcoming they are. The_motte and SlateStarCodex.
I already know about those, but thank you.
There's a strong distinction between "no-one can say another person's view is incorrect" and remaining calm while holding rational discourse in the face of disagreements. They are both "welcoming" in some sense; the latter is what I'm looking for.
SSC is/was the latter; the subreddits were both leaning toward the former from what I saw before I left.
I'd like somewhere where someone can go "yes, given these axioms that's valid logic from there" (or "no, that's invalid reasoning given this value-set and here's why") without going "I don't hold these axioms so these axioms are WRONG, end of story". If that makes sense.