More Anglo prevalence than I would have expected for a site like this.
Are there any English-language discussion sites that aren’t very Anglo-centric? The more troubling thing for me is the feel that we’re just bouncing around ideas that flow out of Silicon Valley instead of having multiple cultural centers generating new ideas with their own slant on stuff and having a back-and-forth. There could be interesting communities that are in Russian, Chinese, German, French or Spanish which are producing interesting ideas and could be aligned with LW if someone would bother to translate stuff, or then we could just be in a situation where the interesting new stuff that’s roughly compatible with the LW meme cluster just happens to emerge mostly from the Anglosphere.
The split between analytic philosophy done in English and continental philosophy done in French and German is a bit similar. And that seems to have led into mutual unintelligibility at some conceptual level, not because of language. As far as I can tell, the two schools of philosophy don’t have much use or appreciation for each others’ stuff even when it gets translated. There seems to be some weird deep intertwining going on with language, culture and the sort of philosophy that gets produced, and LW stuff might be subject to it as well.
It’s odd in general that I feel like I have a much better idea about what’s going on in the US than in most of Europe since the primary language of most Americans is one I can understand and the primary language of most Europeans is one I can’t.
Are there any English-language discussion sites that aren’t very Anglo-centric? The more troubling thing for me is the feel that we’re just bouncing around ideas that flow out of Silicon Valley instead of having multiple cultural centers generating new ideas with their own slant on stuff and having a back-and-forth. There could be interesting communities that are in Russian, Chinese, German, French or Spanish which are producing interesting ideas and could be aligned with LW if someone would bother to translate stuff, or then we could just be in a situation where the interesting new stuff that’s roughly compatible with the LW meme cluster just happens to emerge mostly from the Anglosphere.
The split between analytic philosophy done in English and continental philosophy done in French and German is a bit similar. And that seems to have led into mutual unintelligibility at some conceptual level, not because of language. As far as I can tell, the two schools of philosophy don’t have much use or appreciation for each others’ stuff even when it gets translated. There seems to be some weird deep intertwining going on with language, culture and the sort of philosophy that gets produced, and LW stuff might be subject to it as well.
It’s odd in general that I feel like I have a much better idea about what’s going on in the US than in most of Europe since the primary language of most Americans is one I can understand and the primary language of most Europeans is one I can’t.