The other aspect to consider is that to have deep conversations, you essentially need 95% reading 5% actual discussing because the depth can be pretty high on most topics.
To give a practical example: you can have a deep and touchy convo about the place of religion in life, but in all likelihood every argument you will come up with will have already been written about in far more depth elsewhere. By the very nature of the medium and its history you are only going to have the illusion of depth if you only seek to have conversations as you are describing.
It would also be a good idea to carefully consider what you consider touchy. Chances are, it's just normal things to think about for your demographic. For instance, HN readers like to talk about controlling the masses, large future trends, and revel in the forbidden aspect of discussing this sort of thing. But in reality, population control and an 'architect' view of their place in the world has been a normal feature of the well-to-do classes for pretty much forever.
You are right about most arguments about most topics that have been accessible for people for at least a few generations.
However, it's also surprisingly easy to come up with completely new takes, once you veer off the beaten path a bit.
Your new thoughts will likely not be as good as John von Neumann's thoughts, of course.
Have a loot at eg 'Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity' https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=735
It many novel and good ideas on classic problems.
Of course, I'm cheating a bit here by bringing up something by a genius like Scott Aaronson. But my general point is that combining previously disconnected fields can yield new insights or at least new questions.
Another example, it's from religion, but hopefully silly enough not to ruffle any feathers:
As far as I know Catholic doctrine says that all humans have one soul and free will. Also, ensoulment happens at conception. The problem is identical twins come from the same fertilized egg.
Does the fertilized egg start with two souls, or does the soul split later? Normally, whether identical twins happen is sort-of random. But we also have enough technology that for in-vitro-fertilisation a human lab worker can use their own free will to spontaneously decide whether to produce identical twins or triplets long after conception has occurred.
Similar issues occur when you clone a human from an adult's cells. (But it's somewhat easier to deny that clones have souls than to deny souls to identical twins.)
Honestly, I don't think anyone is losing sleep over this conundrum.
The Catholic egg question is pretty fascinating to me. I am not religious at all but I would be curious to ask theologians for their take on it.
In any case, from what I remember when I last looked into this topic the Vatican's official position on this is issue is that they don't have an official position. (Disappointing, I know.)
OTOH, my experience as a not-quite-yacht-class person myself is that few such people remember much of anything from their college years or spend any time at all continuing their own education. Pursuing money in one of a few narrow fields, plus leisure, is usually the sum total of what they have to offer in conversation. Many of the best educated people I've known, and most of the best conversationalists, have not been affluent. The breadth of lived experience they can bring to bear, both in their many professions and in their personal lives, generally makes the yacht-club crowd look like a bunch of boring clones. The lack of pretension is also a plus.
Which makes me wonder why I'm trying to discuss this here. ;)
Academics are much better educated , but they have molded the academic system in a way that it is dangerous to talk about certain things. I dont think rich people are particularly educated or smart, but their wealth attracts smart and educated people, while being relatively shielded from demonetization.
The confounder is not education, but being rich
Maybe you need to recalibrate what "not well educated" means. Rich people might not all have advanced degrees, but the vast majority have at least some college (even if they dropped out). Compare that to the approximately 1/3 who have never attended even a community college, some barely or not even making it through high school. Thinking that a bachelor's doesn't qualify as "well educated" is exactly the kind of bubble I was talking about.
In my experience, listening to conversations among wealthy people or high status people are far more interesting because as a group they have the ability to execute on a larger scale, and they can influence each other far more easily because of the credibility their wealth or status confers. I have been in many rooms before listening to people you would not believe, I was able to get there by simply playing the respected role of a modern day wizard: a software engineer of vast intellect with ability to generate new revenues from code.
When I have listened to poorer people or low status “hustler” types talking to each other about big things, it mostly just comes off as myopic philosophizing or bullshit and puffery. Just a bunch of wannabes talking about things too big for the britches I’m afraid. If you spend too much time around these people you’ll get sucked into their delusions and waste years perpetuating terribly misguided thoughts.
I talk to poor people when I want to learn about micro scale things: the plight of a gig worker, the struggles of a single mother, the hellish existence of a drug addict, depression, etc.
I talk to wealthy people when I want to learn about macro scale things: the logistics of vaccine transport, alternative supply chains, subliminal eugenics initiatives, bureaucratic shortcuts, laundering, etc.
And I’m not saying only listen to wealthy people wow how shallow, I’m saying go where wealthy people are and just open your mind and ears. Don’t try to stand out too much and your presence will not be a problem.
Tautologically, a wealthy or high status person will know quite a bit about how wealth and power affects life. They will have insights on parts of human nature that poorer people might not encounter. There's clearly value in listening to this with an open mind.
However, even for those involved in high-level industries, that does not mean they do not have their own brand of myopic philosophizing and puffery. A large portion of their views on life is just as predictable as that of the small time hustler, and just as informed by their material conditions and cultural sphere, even if richer people have more of an opportunity to exist as individuals. There is this semi-aware understanding that wealthy people have to talk about Big Things, and the way they talk about Big Things inevitably leads to the 'architect' viewpoint and controlling the poor. I cracked a smile at the 'subliminal eugenics initiatives' because it's so representative of this mindset.
Every once in a while, you get a reminder of this. A high-level fund might fail all of a sudden, a billionaire might make a lethal decision that clearly lacks perspective or understanding of reality, or it can be something as innocuous as releasing a fairly pedestrian reading list. All sorts of hints that they are not superhuman but merely boosted along by snowballing feedback effects.
But since there is a culture of speaking in hushed tones about this, a range of complex emotions and fantasies when it comes to wealth and power, a nuclear grade sense of the halo effect, that we end up with OP thinking that yachts are filled with incredible insights 24/7 compared to the otherwise intellectually empty world of the non-elite, or yourself portraying the wealthy as divine enough that merely being in their presence is already an achievement on its own that must be accompanied with extra submissiveness and humility.
You get a minor taste of this on HN itself. Since the atmosphere is a mixture of wealthy, wealth-adjacent, and normal, the HN reader will not just look at the specific brand of articles that do well here but will also be self-aware in doing so: that they are supposed to talk and make connections about history, art, science, politics in a certain way, and cultivate this sense of being above the fray of the masses.
>But in reality, population control and an 'architect' view of their place in the world has been a normal feature of the well-to-do classes for pretty much forever.
?
In depth conversations about touchy subjects (in a broad sense) can happen in many contexts, and it's important to drop the halo effect around the wealthy. In this case, not even just the wealthy in general but also the specific type of wealthy person OP is alluding to.
Based on their choice of words, my intuition also tells me that OP's definition of touchy inevitably has to do with shepherding the broader population in response to long-term trends. Which is basically the default mindset past a certain class, and not some revolutionary secret idea that people aren't discussing anymore.
Because wealthy people don't have a dayjob to lose.
> in all likelihood every argument you will come up with will have already been written about in far more depth elsewhere.
Yeah, that's the point of discussion, bringing up things and ideas, original or otherwise. However, even bringing up what has been written in recent centuries is a no-go (a mild example, Huxley). The hope is that by stopping making these points, they will be forgotten
> what you consider touchy.
Any of the subjects in this essay https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/
Losing your dayjob is far from a guarantee just on that basis. This is what I wanted to illustrate, that many of the ideas we think are forbidden are just ideas that are natural for our material circumstances.
The irony is that even if we are discussing anti-totalitarian measures as in this essay, we are still adopting the 'architect' mindset towards the rest of the population.
People like to look back with rose tinted glasses at the "good old days" of free expression online, but choose to forget that such conversations with strangers inevitably led to misunderstandings and bad faith assumptions, degenerating into smug superiority fests at best or flame wars at worst.
I post occasionally on HN because it's a lot better than other places I've posted to in the past (Usenet, Slashdot, Reddit etc), but even this is but a pale shadow of the conversations I have in person over drinks.
I think what has happened is that people cannot filter their conversations by age anymore. This is pretty unique actually - I can’t think of any situation in real life where I’d engage seriously with a teenager. Perhaps family, or maybe if I was a teacher.
And yet, any conversation online is guaranteed to have the full range of age groups.
Just as a chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link, a conversation can only be as mature as it’s least mature participant.
It’s not fair to say that all teenagers are immature, but they are all inexperienced. And what has happened is that online conversations tend to resemble high school gossip, rather than serious discussions of important topics.
I think what made it different was that we were a tight-knit group that was invested in our pre-existing relationship: we started as a clan in a very cooperative video game and we had each other's backs every day in-game. The political and religious discussions occurred in our private forum in the off-topic section.
So I suspect you're half right: the conversations have to occur with people you trust and respect. But at least in the early 2000s, they didn't have to occur in-person.
What matters seems to be not that they be in-person but that they be private and that all involved cherish their relationships with each other. A lot of what happened in the last decade is that people have left the private spaces and moved into public spaces, where such conversations really do become toxic quickly. Even on Facebook with posts set to friends-only, the system encourages adding so many "friends" that it may as well be public. By the time most people get to friend #300, neither of them really cares about the relationship, so meaningful discussion about touchy topics becomes impossible.
I'm curious what happened to that forum?
It’s too bad they’ve gone extinct. The few old style forums that are still hanging on do so by way of sheer momentum (huge numbers of posters) or by having become fringe echo chambers and are just as bad or worse than social media.
Then Eternal September happened, binaries and spam flooded the network, and users looking for good discussions moved on.
Reddit went through a similar change more rapidly, and even today, despite of the shitposting, bots and Reddit Inc.'s disregard of its userbase, there are niche communities where well-intentioned discussion takes place.
There are also even more niche old school forums or IRC communities where people can take refuge from the rest of the internet.
But I do agree that HN is still a surprisingly respectful forum. Not necessarily because of Y Combinator's shepherding or a small team of herculean moderators, but because the community is self-moderated. I do think this will change and become more difficult, as more new users join the site. Longtime users have surely noticed the change already.
> You do it in person, with people you trust and respect. It's always been this way, even during the heyday of the free internet.
Sure, that would be the preferred way. But the reason we communicate online is because it's often easier to find communities of people with similar interests, than doing the same locally. Anonimity also has a positive aspect, in that it makes interaction easier for getting points across, as we don't let our human biases influence the discussion, and the merit of any point is weighed on its own. Discussions in person, especially around hot topics, often devolve into shouting matches and personal insults. Not that online ones don't, but typing text is often enough to assemble our thoughts in a calmer way.
OTOH, there's the obvious lack of human connection missing from online and text-only discussions. But then again, once a community is well established, in person meetups can happen. :)
There were BBS-era networks that also had meaningful conversations. The Well (The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, ‘85), Citadel networks (‘81), Fidonet (‘83), and many others.
The assumption of bad faith is a recent phenomenon, i remember when the internet did not a priori assume that everyone was speaking in bad faith. I dont think it s rose tinted glasses, it's just that that thing did not scale
It's a far wider, more interesting range of discussions at one of those events than I've found on the internet, and I'm trying to figure out ways to have them more frequently as opposed to the once or twice a month that's been standard for the past few years in my social circles.
There are some shadows of that in some Signal groups and Matrix rooms on private homeservers, but mostly those are spawning things to discuss next time we get together in person.
I don't know anyone who "posts a full range of their thoughts" online anymore, except in fairly well secured private encrypted chat locations, because of just how toxic the whole place has become.
It's a blog section on a non-English website about Linux, but the blogs are about anything - current events, niche engineering topics, etc. The discussions are threaded, with no comment voting. It seems like people there have much more distinct and varied personalities compared to HN or Reddit, where comments sometimes seem like written by a single person. The quality has degraded over time though.
Public discourse is a performance. Not that it is fake, but it is the refined product of practice you can't see unless you have practiced it yourself. When you go see an orchestra and wonder why you can't get up on stage and just jam with them, is it censorship, or is being a part of that performance the effect of something that takes a lot of effort to be welcome in? Start your own punk orchestra or get good enough to be welcome in an officially sanctioned one.
My conversations have been on signal groups, slack, pints with fraternal bros, meeting people while travelling and motorcycle camping, drinking at family bbqs, are typically with other men, and an less on boats these days. What they all have in common is they have a bar to entry of not being a sad sack. I agree that there are legitimately lame orchestra admission rules on official social media, but think about what being open, funny and welcome really means, and I guarantee you will get invited everywhere.
...that wasn't a answer. Here's an answer.
Although their flaws are numerous and well-documented, including their often distasteful beliefs, and although their communities have tons of structural ideological bias, you should check out the "rationalist" community. They can be found on various forums. The discussions on touchy issues have largely moved to forums that are smaller but still public, which can be found with a bit of effort.
One issue with them, and at least one other community I know of with a lot of the "learn it yourself" mentality, is their relationship with subject-matter expertise and authority. It's bloody exhausting to defend oneself against a bunch of ignoramuses in a debate in a tree-style forum, so there's a lot of weird crap ideas floating around. But, at least it's vaguely what you're looking for.
> late-night dinners with VCs or yacht rides with rich people
Wat? Where are you coming from?
> conversations that are deep about touchy issues
Everybody does this, all the time. Maybe your friends are too shallow for you?
> Where are the places to start (and continue) conversations about important issues without self-censoring and walking on eggshells?
Go ahead and have them, right here on Hacker News.
If you're "self-censoring and walking on eggshells" and you're NOT just an asshole, then you just need to study rhetoric. It's an ancient art, thousands of years old, there's plenty of material to work with.
If you're well-spoken (and your opinions or ideas are not simply odious) then who cares if people get mad at you? It's on them to reply in kind or they're the assholes, eh?
I have to point out that you're being defensive and taking an uncharitable view of what I said.
Your friends may be shallow relative to you, I don't say anything about their absolute level of shallowness/depth. I'm a pretty shallow person myself (once you get away from the minutia of computer programming, and even there there are a lot of people who are much deeper than I am.) Nevertheless, it happens sometimes that you find yourself with a circle of friends that you are no longer satisfied with, maybe that's personal growth, or maybe you're just becoming a cranky old man. I'm just speculating, there's no need to take any of this personally. (I'm using the pronoun "you" in the general sense, not about you seydor specifically, okay?)
I never called you an asshole. Without knowing more about you, it's a possibility, but I'm trying to discount that. It's like saying, "You're not a flying purple people eater, so it must be something else" is not calling you a "flying purple people eater", right?
As for "ignorant of rhetoric and not being well-spoken" you seem determined to be offended. I'm just trying to help. If you're not an asshole,, if you don't entertain odious opinions, if you have good rhetorical skills and are well-spoken, and you still feel you have to walk on eggshells, then I would say that the problem must be that you're just looking in the wrong places? I.e. you're not going to get good debate on Imgur.
In any event, I hope this find you well, and offer it in the spirit of open and civil discussion. Have a good day.
And there is everybody else. The vast majority. The "normies"
Everybody talks to everybody on the internet. Therefore every stranger is surrounded by normies.
At best the stranger is ignored. At worst he is shouted down.
This creates a ubiquitous field of strange idea suppression.
One must find a private club. That's hard.
There is a weird absence of private clubs on the internet. Or at least they are hard to find.
I guess any private club that advertises its existence immediately gets stuffed with normies.
Do you have any examples of specific ideas that are actually strange and shouted-down? Not to be too cynical, but sometimes what people qualify as strange is just controversial but classic opinions such as "restricting the poor or another group" or stuff relating to IQ, or a "what they don't want you to know about" type deal
Here's an example. Meditation discussion in a context free of conventional models. It's nigh impossible to find such conversation without getting knocked over the head with citations of Buddhist/etc dogma. On the internet anyway.
(Also, I said "ignored or shouted down". Not just "shouted down". See, you have chosen to focus on the extreme, easier to refute, case. In fact, twice striving immediately for the refutation.)
My personal hypothesis is that these gradations of normie-to-strange are important in that they point to a range of similar behavior between people of the same gradation that goes beyond just intellectual conformity or non-conformity. Perhaps one issue with binary classification is that makes it easier for us to overrate our own ideas on account of placing ourselves automatically in the "good" half since the barrier to entry then becomes so low (i.e. just don't be a normie and you're done)
The meditation example is a great one actually. The only discussions I've seen about it that don't cover the Buddhism-for-Westerners angle have to do with CBT/repackaged stoicism or people who enjoy nootropics/LessWrong/split-toe shoes etc. I did have one unusual conversation once with a person who described to me a sort of self-induced bad trip they got from meditation practice (based on what I could find online, that is a known phenomenon).
Regarding that last part, I agree I came on a bit strong there in my post, and it was unwarranted. I did that because of past experience and familiarity with the discursive style.
The OP said 'ignored'. Here's one idea that gets ignored or dismissed without thought:
Fiction, apart from make-believe, is a net negative for society.
It's not classic either because we're supposed to be in an enlightened era and more advanced than our primitive ancestors yet it seems people, now more than ever, look to fiction for answers (and often it's not even shared at the group level). Ironically, probably the same people who dismiss religious texts as fiction are its biggest fans.
If you don't mind me asking, what is the distinction you are making between fiction and make-believe?
The first question that comes to mind is how we can live without fiction, because it seems even ignoring religion, commercial fiction or other "obvious" ideologies we still have quite a few stories about our lives to justify living them. A life without fiction would sound like it would run on some sort of incredible willpower independent of any goal.
(Well I said it's a net negative, because there might be things I have overlooked.) Even when you look for 'anti-fiction', you'll just get more fiction.
> If you don't mind me asking, what is the distinction you are making between fiction and make-believe?
'make-believe' is probably not the best label, maybe 'internal fiction' is better, but I mean the processes of imagination that you go through personally and engage with verbally, that are not grounded in truth yet are probably an unavoidable part of creativity. Something akin to thought experiments. What matters is that you are doing the creative effort. (I guess novels are not so bad because the reader still has to do something.)
> ... we still have quite a few stories about our lives to justify living them. A life without fiction would sound like it would run on some sort of incredible willpower independent of any goal.
You seem to be referring to what I referred to as make-believe. As far as external fiction goes, why do we have to put layers and layers of arbitrary meanings and labels on top of direct experience? Why do we have to add sugar to everything? Can you find one documentary without background music added to tell you how to feel? Does everything have to come prepackaged? Where is the place of raw unprocessed reality? Boredom is not a bottomless pit. Our bodies come preprogrammed with goals. We do not need to justify curiosity or our will to live, so we can strip everything back without becoming nihilistic, as we are not passive receivers.
Anyway, back to the original subject: there are people who refuse to even consider such arguments. I think you know what they call me, and I think you know what I call them.
A long, long time ago, I ran a BBS: now I run a Mattermost server. Feels like about the same level of quality to me. The conversations there run the gamut from lower (more vulgar, less mature) to higher (more in-depth, lengthier, more thoughtful, taking place over a longer time frame) than, say, Twitter, Reddit, or HN.
It's not hard to set up an invite-only, hosted chat server. It is somewhat harder to convince people to use it, because a lot of people don't want to run another app.
If I had to choose today, I would go with a Matrix-based solution rather than Mattermost, but it wasn't available at the time. Most solutions, including Mattermost, lock you in by not letting you export the (full, including DMs) conversation archive, so you have to choose something you want to stick with for a while.
Online discourse is certainly not safe anymore, so yes we do self censor, and because of that we get out of the habit of expressing raw thought or trying to challenge the status quo for fear of being reported or banned.
It's a real shame. The internet was supposed to be this great opportunity to unify people and help push through a new way of collaboration and debating, yet it's become an albatross around all our necks.
Without healthy debate with controversial or opposing opinions we are never exposed to any viewpoints that differ from our own, so we all just end up swimming in our own echo chamber fishbowls, and the field of intellectual thinking just dies.
I'd like to wax on further about this, but I'm typing (badly) on my phone which is in itself to blame for the brevity of online conversation.
But if you have an established friendship with someone, and have a baseline of trust and respect, then you can have those challenging discussions. But make sure you are really open to being wrong. Most people are not.
Interesting discussion between people who disagree about important issues never really existed online. As someone who has been online since the 80s, you can take my word. The internet is mostly good at matching up people who agree due to the effect I mentioned above.
I've been having these types of conversations with my brother nearly every day of the week for the past two decades.
There are no barriers to what we can discuss. No eggshells needed. He's a rational, intelligent person. I certainly wouldn't put our conversations on Twitter (or Reddit or xyz), who has time or care to deal with explaining to morons/irrational people/mentally ill people/partisans/whatever why their feelings/emotions/politics/opinions aren't the center of the universe - and who cares what strangers and anons think anyway in most circumstances; their opinions, their thoughts, their feedback, it's all overwhelmingly worthless.
I have a couple of friends I can do this with as well. They're out there, find them.
What are the touchy conversations on yacht rides with rich people - how to avoid the mistakes Jeffrey Epstein made with his private jet private island child sex trafficking operation?
Definitely a chicken and egg problem to attract users, but I've got some ideas in the works...
It's not the 'where' that matters, it's the 'who'. It's the people having the conversation. I've had meaningful conversations on Disqus more than once, which normally you would not think would be a place you could have such conversations.
Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31210680
Deep substantive discourse requires good faith argument not propaganda techniques, straw men, and trolling. It also requires maturity.
Popper's paradox of tolerance plays out every day on social media. If you take a strong free-speech no-moderation approach, your forum will sooner or later be destroyed by propagandists and trolls. If you try stronger moderation, you might keep those at bay but you also lose many of the true free thinkers so the creeps still win.
Jerks have an innate advantage on the internet, which makes conversations "across the divide" almost impossible; those are best left for RL environments where trust and physical presence can keep those impulses from manifesting. The best one can do online is choose which side of any relevant divide you're going to be on and limit participation to those who share some core beliefs. (Comparisons to women's colleges and HBCUs should come naturally at this point.) Sometimes this allows interesting (if somewhat bland) discussions. Other times it just leads to ever more tightly defined factions - e.g. genuine socialists vs. social democrats - turning on each other.
I've been actively involved in online discussions for 40 years, and I was even a moderator on a political forum through millions of posts. I wish that experience had left me with better solutions, but sadly I have to report that it hasn't. "Leave the sensitive stuff to RL" seems to be the only real answer, with "reduce use/prominence of social media" as a corollary.
But how do you advertise and vet?
Or maybe a better forum-management technology. A smarter software design.
In context of modern social media, the main stake is emotional involvement. Which is often a sign of a shallow understanding of a subject.
Take reddit conversations on controversial subjects. There would be loud statements with many upvotes and counterpoints with many downvotes. And downvotes discourage debating for regular people. So you are left with homogenous opinions and trolls.
I think interesting conversations may happen with individuals that you stumble upon by chance. Easiest way to get lucky is to be involved in some community that fits your interests.
edit: but on the other hand, it's quite easy to get in touch with famous and brilliant people if that's what you like, so... if you have something interesting to say, maybe you'll get somewhere that way.
Why? because there's many of them and each of them may attract different groups of people, thus different discussions groups, forums, etc.
I have a few questions:
1) What is an interesting conversation even? Seriously. In my experience there's endless 'interesting' conversation happening on the big site aggregates, even if you have to do a little work to do it. Most of it doesn't just happen to you though.
2) Was there ever a time when deep conversations were happening on the internet? Really, truly. I wouldn't consider stumbling on a thread and reading it unique to old internet.
3) Deep and touchy? You're going to have to define Deep. Because, pick your interest. The depth of information to be found and conversations to be had about... picking a random interest of mine - Visual Art. I can go on Youtube or Twitter and see any number of threads about: NFTs and their place in the wider space, same with AI Generated Art. I can find videos on technique that are deep and technical. There's any number of discord servers to join that if you engage in good faith, people will respond in kind. (One trick is to simply ignore folks who make 'derailing' comments. Here's a secret I thought everyone knew: Trolls and the ironic posters want attention, if you don't give it to them they simply go away; Their biggest fear is being boring, use that against them lol)
I'd be interested in what examples you have of 'self-censoring' and 'walking on eggshells'. Seriously. Even the most 'Touchy' subjects I can think of, take your pick of culture war nonsense, if you engage earnestly, deeply, intellectually, there's open discussion to be had.
Not on HN, as far as I've seen. That's okay, because despite what some people say, not everything is political.
But it seems you have to bring your own audience to Twitter. At least that is what I witness. Everyone who got a conversation going over there was a celebrity outside of Twitter already.
I have my suspicions, but I hate being that cynical…
Philosophical discussions may be worthwhile and produce nothing other than an examined life.
The cool gamerz all hang out on discord apparently. Facebook is for parents and other boring old people. Instagram is for narcissists and attention seekers.
Etc, etc. And Twitter is for .. pretentious twits.
I thought we all agreed that Facebook was for boomers, Gen xers, and millennials who are boring a few years back.