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461 points GavinAnderegg | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.642s | source
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PaulHoule ◴[] No.42151244[source]
My take is that Bluesky is a nicer place than Mastodon.

Personally I think politics are terrible on microblogging platforms for the reason that you can't say very much in 140 characters or even 1400 characters.

A common kind of profile on that kind of platform is: "There are good people and bad people and I'm one of the good people"

It is very easy to other people and share memes that build group cohesion while driving other people away. Really making progress requires in politics a lot of "I agree with you about 90% but there is 10% that I don't" or "Well, I negotiated something in the backroom that you'd really hate but headed off a situation you would have thought was catastrophic but you won't appreciate that I did it so you and I are both better off if I don't tell you" and other sorts of nuance, you don't want to see how the sausage is made, etc.

To stand Mastodon (where you would have thought fascists were taking over the world a year ago if you believed what you read) I have to have about 20 or so block rules.

I see some people with the same kind of profiles on Bluesky but see a lot less othering in my feed because the "Discover" feed on Bluesky filters out a lot of angry content. My rough estimate is that it removes about 75% of the divisive political junk. That

(1) Immediately improves my feed, but also

(2) Reduces the amount of re-posted angry political content (it's like adding some boron to the coolant in a nuclear reactor) and

(3) Since angry political memes don't work anymore people find a different game to play

My guess is the X-odus folks are less agreeable than average for the same reason why people who "left California" to go to Colorado or someplace else are less agreeable. Those who go are less agreeable than those who stay. On the other hand, a certain amount of suppression of negativity could stop it from spreading and might not even be noticed as "censorship".

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calf ◴[] No.42155823[source]
That just sounds like Mastodon users, many who are academics, are more to the left than you are, and you are cleverly framing their culture as more "divisive", "performative", and/or "tribal" compared to your own arguments which arguably are also just as tribal and performative.
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ernst_klim ◴[] No.42156068[source]
I would argue that people in academia or other tightly coupled bubbles where your career and thus well-being are far more reliant on how your peers evaluate you (especially in humanities where peer reviews are nearly the sole factor of success) is far more tribalist than a typical blue-collar or office environment.

https://www.robkhenderson.com/p/how-dumb-ideas-capture-smart...

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1. calf ◴[] No.42169801[source]
That's just a lot of words to dismiss academia as an ivory tower, and to ad hominem leftism as being part of the ivory tower, which is a bad argument.

It is true that the academic clerisy is a problem and a few leftists actually argue that this social class is a block on social progress. However, sometimes their ideas are right, ranging from the sciences to social justice issues, such as racism and sexism and so on.

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2. z3ncyberpunk ◴[] No.42174484[source]
Sometimes their ideas may be right, but it is no less of an elitist, pretentious, ego-inflated ivory tower.
3. DirkH ◴[] No.42210261[source]
Nothing they said dismisses academia as an ivory tower anymore than anyone pointing out how ridiculously pervasive the replication crisis is dismisses academia or ad hominems leftism as untrustworthy.

There is no need to be defensive when how perverse the incentive structure for academia is, is pointed out. You can be a diehard leftist and also hate the present day institutions of academia.

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4. calf ◴[] No.42313769[source]
Disagree, previous commenter specifically said - paraphrase - "Academia (researchers) is MORE tribal (≈ incentive structured) than companies (office and blue-collar workers)".

This specific, comparative argument is used by industry and conservatives to undermine academics and progressives, it is very prevalent on Hacker News when they shit on academics. It has zero to do with the replication crisis which you mentioned, or "publish-or-perish", or the neoliberalization of academia - which as an ex-academic leftist I am very well aware of and have been materially harmed by it.

There is a nuanced distinction between the two forms of argument. The former is a prevalent bad take on Hacker News by folks who unilaterally shit on academia, saying things like "industry is actually more innovative" and other half-baked nonsense like that.