Benji's right. It actually doesn't even matter what moderation policy Reset has, because due to the intentional transfer of every prominent GAF community, Reset's retained almost exactly the same user base and will slowly lose whatever other kinds of posters might have slipped in while mistakingly thinking the forum would be different. It's just a inevitable attrition because nobody wants to walk in a room and be ganged up on by every other poster. The worst thing I've seen recently is everyone claiming a poster (typically right leaning) is being "disingenuous", which is really just a stalking horse for enforcing groupthink since no, it's impossible for everyone to be perfectly informed. As soon as the user uses a slightly suspect line of reasoning, a moderator jumps in and hammers someone for arguing in bad faith or whatever the fuck they want to call it when really they were just looking for a reason to ban the poor shmuck.
The fact that bishop even got a tag that says The Vigilant or whatever is proof that he still has institutional support and fans all over the forum, which should really fucking scare everyone who even thinks of posting there, but hey they got 100,000 shitposts in under 36 hours, time to blow each other and post eggplant memes because everything's going to be better now!
Yeah. The truth is we're naturally biased creatures. Everyone is susceptible to bias. The thing is, you need to acknowledge you own susceptability to it before you have any chance of minimising it. Not necessarily eradicating it, but at least minimising it. The problem with many members on GAF was they simply didn't know how to think.
I am sure a lot of you have seen that now infamous Stephen Fry interview with Dave Rubin. In it they discuss the importance of 'clear thinking'. Stephen Fry declares that he is not a rationalist, he is an empiricist. Basically what they were discussing was simply methods of thinking that minimise our own inclination to bias.
A lot of members on GAF subscribe to a progressive social justice worldview. It is more than just a belief to many of these people, it is very much an identity. When you have people attacking everything they stand for, it is only natural that they react to it. That is what was really going on. It's really hard to listen to people whose views you are fundementally opposed to. Instead what you tend to do is look for something in their argument, or them as a person, to latch on to so that you can dismiss them rather than attempt to properly understnd what their argument actually is. Once you find what you are looking for, nothing else matters. Of course this is something that really isn't beneficial to your own intellectual development. . This is why members on GAF, and elsewhere, consistently misrepresent their opponents views (like Sam Harris for instance). Why everyone is a Nazi or a member of the Alt-Right.
Steven Pinker's 'Mystical Left Pole' comes to mind. Just as when you're at the North Pole all directions are South, there is the Mystical Left Pole where all directions are Right.
