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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   32785 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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  1. The American working class is materially richer than the working class in every other developed country bar a handful of microstates (many of them beneficiaries of extreme commodity wealth coupled with a low population). Even those countries often have lower consumption per capita than the US. America is not poor, the average working American is not poor. The things that are expensive in America, like healthcare and education, are in substantial part expensive because of protectionism, regulation or extremely high domestic salaries.

  2. The problems America faces compared to those countries - a feral, mentally ill violent homeless population, disgusting and unusable public transport, high crime rates, a ridiculously inefficient and expensive healthcare system, mass illegal immigration across the southern border, and an inability to build almost anything - are not the consequence of a free-trade-based economic policy. Many countries trade relatively freely (certainly with lower tariffs on the entire world than those just implemented) without them. Many are very civilized places and have service-based economies.

  3. Downtown Philadelphia isn’t a dump because of trade policy. The Tenderloin in SF isn’t a dump because of trade policy. People don’t choose to avoid the LA subway because of trade policy. (In fact big coastal American cities are some of the most prosperous places in the entire world). New railroads aren’t not being built because of trade policy. Wokeness wasn’t imported to America but exported by it. The problem isn’t the policy, but the people and their incentives. People don’t overdose in tiny midwestern towns because the factory jobs went (in fact, speak to many factory owners still there and they’ll tell you they struggle to find workers who will show up, pass a drug test and work a normal 8 hour shift even for wages that are the envy of the world).

Let’s just be honest. This is happening because Donald Trump read or learned about trade deficits sometime in the 1970s and decided, personally, that any imbalance is a “bad deal”, and this is a man who sees everything in life in terms of deals. Over the last 8 years he went from outsider to king of the GOP and is now surrounded by advisors who know that the only consequence of disagreeing with him on this is getting replaced by someone who knows when to stay quiet. On abortion, on immigration, on tax, on trans rights, Trump is malleable. On trade, he’s not. This is what he really believes, and he will stake his presidency on it.

There is likely some level of economic damage that would cause Trump to rethink this, but it’s much worse than a lot of people think.

I think that the decline of blue collar work has caused or at least exacerbated many of our social problems. The reason that jobs you can get right out of college suck for a lot of people (tech is at the moment, an exception) is the absolute glut of college graduates. But why? Why did 80% of Americans decide that they needed to spend $60,000 to get a degree? What other options are there? So off we go to college and unless you are super talented, you don’t get much for it except the loan you’re paying off. Why is there so much homelessness? The good paying jobs aren’t there. Blacks in Detroit can’t get jobs at ford anymore, so they deal drugs and form gangs. Basically our economy only works if you’re one of the elite who can manage to get a STEM degree, do all of the unpaid internships and build a good GitHub. The rest will probably struggle to reach such milestones as “paying for rent and groceries on one paycheck without 6 roommates”.

Whether tariffs will fix it, I don’t know. But the economy is hollowed out and importing more workers when those at home can’t afford food and rent, so why not try it?

Blacks in Detroit can’t get jobs at ford anymore, so they deal drugs and form gangs

Given IQ differentials what could they do at these auto plants? Arent cars today way more advanced with a lot of automation already taken place?

I don't know about cars but if pharmaceuticals and medical devices (I used to work at a place in Ireland making drug eluding stents) are of similar complexity then no you don't need to have much brains to be a line worker even if the final product is complex.

You perform one or two sets of movements 800 times a day and need to remember if you saw anything strange in a batch from an hour ago. There's a hierarchy of inspectors, technicians, quality control workers and engineers who worry about the complicated stuff.

Sounds like something they automated awhile ago then (or will be automated soon)

Automation had already been going on for 30 years by the time I was working there, the workers just get moved to another part of the process where relying on fine motor skills is cheaper than designing and building a new machine. A few technician jobs are created too as they need manual maintenance multiple times per day.

This can't go on forever but it doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon. Checking the local news they're still announcing new expansions and jobs (although that was before these recent tariffs).

AI might cause some disruption on the lower levels of the quality control side as a lot of that just involves looking through a microscope and identifying faults.

I have a degree, but in History. I'm completely self-taught in IT and software dev and am currently a senior dev at a highly dysfunctional megacorp (not a FAANG type, more of an old school megacorp but I guarantee every single poster here is familiar with the company). Simply having the degree (in an irrelevant , unrelated field) helped me immensely with getting through pointless application filters early on in my career. I'm sure it still does but now my experience counts for more.

I'm just annoyed because a lot of advancement for me seems to be blocked by my not having a degree in CS or a related field, even though the incompetent Pajeets that make up 90% of my coworkers have CS degrees from India but couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. In fact the technical debt they've piled up over the last decade or so in my subdivision of the company finally came to a head last week. Performance and stability issues with our software finally pissed off enough of our large customers that all new development has been frozen and our sales teams are no longer selling our products (instead some similar software made by a separate recently-acquired-by-us company will be getting pushed by sales).

After we do some work to stabilize and improve performance is done in the next year or two I expect our products to be kept on life support with a skeleton crew for security updates etc. As a result I'm strongly considering getting my masters in CS because the job market (and all of the retarded filtering done by HR and hiring managers) makes it so much harder for someone like me without a relevant degree to even get considered.

Tech internships are paid, and people don’t really care about your github in my experience. Having a good one never helped me, and I’ve never been told to look at the githubs for candidates when evaluating them or seen anyone else bring it up in hiring committees.

Honestly the entire tech hiring process is fucked and looks at the entirely wrong things. If I were doing hiring, my interview process would involve things like:

"Take a look at this (terrible) database schema. What would you change about the design and why?" If the dev knows what third normal form is and why it matters (and when it doesn't) that puts them in the top 5-10% of devs already.

"You've been assigned to build [hypothetical product]. Explain the overall design/architecture choices you would go for and why. Also explain some alternatives you might choose and why. What are some potential difficulties (both immediate and long-term) you might run into with your choices, and why you feel your choices are worth it in spite of the potential problems." Being able to actually consider pros and cons, think about the future, etc. also put a potential hire in the top 5% of devs.

Those just sound like system design interviews, which is something companies actually do. I’ve given and taken interviews like that. The database schema thing you mention is not quite one, but just like the answer to every whiteboarding question is a hashtable, a relational database with a reasonable schema is the core of every system design question.

I also think white boarding is a good thing to do. There are a lot of peripheral skills to being a software engineer, but if you can’t code you don’t belong in the profession. Whiteboarding is a good time boxed test of this.

I wish we would take stuff like github into account more for selfish reasons, but plenty of good talent has no open source presence so I understand why it generally isn’t factored in. I do think is a strong signal at the new grad level and should be weighed much more heavily there.

Why did 80% of Americans decide that they needed to spend $60,000 to get a degree?

Closer to 60%.

So off we go to college and unless you are super talented, you don’t get much for it except the loan you’re paying off.

Not so; if you actually graduate, college makes financial sense for most degrees. It is perhaps true that there is some counterfactual world where you could get all the benefit and none of the cost, but we don't live there.

Why is there so much homelessness?

There's so much visible homelessness because we no longer allow police or security guards to beat the homeless back to the margins. And because we spend so much effort trying to keep them alive.

The rest will probably struggle to reach such milestones as “paying for rent and groceries on one paycheck without 6 roommates”.

This is less true than it once was. More true than directly before the big runup to the GFC, but note that was already well after free trade policies and even longer after the rust belt.

Not so; if you actually graduate, college makes financial sense for most degrees. It is perhaps true that there is some counterfactual world where you could get all the benefit and none of the cost, but we don't live there.

Does anyone know what ended up happening to the kids Peter Thiel paid off to not go to college?

They did very well. Many founders, people who work for Thiel, some VCs. But he wasn’t picking the median college student, he was picking very intelligent kids who were skipping Stanford or MIT comp sci. They would have done well regardless.

Right, but I think "they would have done well regardless" implies that whatever value lies in a degree comes from filtering, so there is something to the original claim "so off we go to college and unless you are super talented, you don’t get much for it except the loan you’re paying off".

Though I suppose to get a proper answer to the question, he should have randomly denied, but kept track of, half of them.

The go-getter smooth-talking company-founder types with at least slightly better than average intelligence are always going to succeed. Sometimes they'll fail big time but unless in doing so they seriously piss off the government or organized crime or the wrong nerd they'll bounce back up. They're just a completely invalid sample because their success is overdetermined.

A more typical programmer type will, unless they start out in a massively successful startup, be handicapped throughout much of their career by the lack of a degree -- their resume won't get past mindless filters. In good times they'll be underpaid for their skill level, in bad times unemployed.

The people getting "I went to college" degrees will do even worse, either working at a much crappier category of job or being unemployed much more often.

Scientific types will of course be completely unable to get a job in their field without a degree, and probably an advanced degree; when I was in college it was said that a B.S. in chemistry qualified you to wash glassware.

I admit I don't have an RCT of any of this, however.

their resume won't get past mindless filters. In good times they'll be underpaid for their skill level, in bad times unemployed.

N=1, but it's not all that bad. I probably got stuck in some filters, but I was never unemployed, and if these "average salary stats" websites are to be trusted, I wasn't underpaid either.

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Blacks in Detroit can’t get jobs at ford anymore, so they deal drugs and form gangs.

Except of course that crime in Detroit has fallen greatly since the 70s/80s.

Violent crime from 2700/100k @peak to 2000, not a big drop compared to falling national rates.
Actual number of murders has fallen sharply of course, because the population is almost a third of what it used to be.

Looking at the metropolitan area, which has a largely unchanged population, the murder rate per 100k is down from some 13-14 to 6.6.

The metropolitan area has also been experiencing a minor renaissance, with a new and different class of people replacing the previous residents. You’d need to somehow control for gentrification to get a true sense of the stats.

Crime has been falling steadily, well before (decades) the the renaissance. If anything it bottomed out before the renaissance.

But why? Why did 80% of Americans decide that they needed to spend $60,000 to get a degree?

Because easy universal loans make it ‘free’ at the point of use and decades of culture make clear that college is (and let’s face it, it often is) 4 years of zero responsibility partying for free!

Even if you had a nice entry level manufacturing job in your small town paying $65k out of high school, what sounds more fun to a 17 year old: partying and getting laid and playing sports and hanging out with the boys all day at college for 4 years, or going to work in a factory?

America is so rich we basically pay for young people to party for four years. I’m not even ideologically opposed to it, but I think it’s a mistake not to admit that this is what it is.

Indeed. It’s moreso that than ever before - college professors complain they aren’t allowed to fail students anymore, and students know this, so they don’t show up to half their classes

It's quite clear that tariffs were introduced by Trump admin to address trade deficits rather than to reduce the other countries tariffs. This means that the biggest risk to US according to Trump administration is creation of a new reserve currency or rather a group of currencies(Like BRICS) that replaces the US dollar and triggers a balance of payment crisis in the US over both its trade and budget deficit. This also means that Trump Admin views creation of such entity as inevitable. US's earlier moves to consolidate dollar's position in international trade via threats also point to the same.

Now that has been said, what's the endgame? This is by any measure a ballsy move since the associated risks with these move. Inflation all over the world being one. Pushing Europe towards China being second. And a consolidation of anti-America alliances being third.

On the flip side, there is no guarantee that USA would lower its tariff just because you lower yours, especially for economies with higher spending power with protectionist measures like Europe. For the world the lesson remains the same as the one in cold war, being the enemy of US is dangerous and being an ally of US is fatal.

This is a response to both the above and @PyotrVerkhovensky's below comments on tariffs.

Some 30-odd years ago, economists had a proposition for the American people, and the West and the global economy at large, that went something like this:

Trade liberalisation is fantastic. It will bring massive economic growth, cheap consumer goods for all! Now, all these free trade agreements might have the negative impact of hollowing out America's (and the West's) industial base as all manufacturing and its associated blue collar jobs move overseas, but don't worry! Some of the massive economic gains from trade liberalisation can be captured and used to help blue collar communities 'adjust' to this economic change but helping them to reskill into other industries, such as ERROR:Undefined. Everybody wins! Plus, liberalising trade with China will help them liberalise politically as well. Pax Americana will live on!

Obviously, this didn't come to pass - at the very least, the claims that the negative repercussions of trade liberalisation will be offset by capturing some of the economic gain didn't happen, as Western deindustrialisation and the Rust Belt is testament to. What's more, economists rarely consider social impacts, especially second and third order effects. Deaths of despair and the social decline of middle America wasn't considered a possibility. A few economists may give lip service to social issues, but ultimately they can be resolved with economic solutions. Never mind that the wealth generated by trade liberalisation was highly concentrated by a minority of elites concentrated in financial centres and not widely distributed, cheap plasma TVs be damned.

I think the strongest argument in favour of tariffs (in the broad sense, not necessarily Trump's implementation) flips the free trade argument on its head - rather than middle American manufacturing being sacrificed for the good of abstract macroeconomic growth and GDP, abstract macroeconomic growth and GDP should be sacrificed for middle American manufacturing. Why were blue collar workers expected to sacrifice their livelihoods for the benefit of financial markets back in the 90s, but we shouldn't expect financial markets to sacrifice some of their growth for the well-being of blue collar workers now?

The question that is often forgotten in economic policy debates is who is the economy for? Too often do economists, policy makers and the media alike forget that the economy is a means, not an end, and that abstract GDP growth is not necessarily the goal that should be pursued, especially when that growth can come at the expense of the social well-being of the population, even if the insistence is that it will always benefit everyone.

Why were blue collar workers expected to sacrifice their livelihoods for the benefit of financial markets back in the 90s, but we shouldn't expect financial markets to sacrifice some of their growth for the well-being of blue collar workers now?

What do you actually think will happen to blue collar workers now? How many will be better off in June than they were in March?

I said I am not specifically defending Trump's implementation of tariffs - there's a lot to criticise even if you're someone who is generally in favour of protectionism.

Any large macroeconomic change is going to have short term economic shocks, basically regardless of what exactly they are.

The concern is not what the short term economic impacts will be on what remains of American industry, but (re)developing a long term industrial base. Whether the tariffs achieve that is up for debate and remains to be seen. The ship may have already sailed.

Some 30-odd years ago, economists had a proposition for the American people, and the West and the global economy at large, that went something like this:

Obviously, this didn't come to pass - at the very least, the claims that the negative repercussions of trade liberalisation will be offset by capturing some of the economic gain didn't happen, as Western deindustrialisation and the Rust Belt is testament to.

The Rust Belt is more than 30 years old. The term dates back the 1980s; the phenomenon further. If you're looking at de-industrialization and blaming free trade, you have the problem of ante hoc ergo non propter hoc.

The 80s aren't 30 years ago

Ah!

Regardless, while there were some indication of deindustrialisation earlier, the late 80s/early 90s were a critical inflection point - it's when economic relations with China began to normalise, allowing China grow explosive, and Chinese exports grew enormously during the 90s (and later other Asian nations such as Vietnam and India) In America specifically, NAFTA was signed in 1994.

Also, I find it funny all the grandstanding about free trade in the media - while free trade has been a principle since the end of WW2, in reality completely and absolute free trade has only really been a thing for the last 20-30 years. The 1950s-1990s had a moderate amount of tariffs and other trade restrictions. Short memories.

The 80s and 90s were not a critical inflection point in deindustrialization. They were well into the decline (the term "Rust Belt" is a riff of something Walter Mondale said). Your timeline is wrong and therefore you cannot come to correct conclusions.

Is your objection to my use of the term 'Rust Belt', or the argument that the 80s/90s weren't critical turning point? I don't care about the former, the latter is statistically true - deindustrialisation was much more significant after then, then had occured previously.

The 80s/90s clearly were not the critical turning point. The point of noting the term "Rust Belt" came from the '80s is to show that it was understood at the time that it had already largely happened.

Yes it was - US trade balance only begins to dramatically decline in the 80s, and then dramatically accelerates in the 90s (i.e. the same time NAFTA comes into effect and China's exports explode in growth). While there was decline and deindustrialisation in some areas and sectors before then, US manufaturing and exports was still relatively healthy in the up to the 80s.

Manufacturing remains healthy. Using balance of trade is assuming the conclusion.

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fwiw, I was on the fence about whether this post should be approved. First-time poster with a rather dry summary of a 2014, very academic book. Huh.

My first thought was that this was generated by an LLM, probably by someone establishing a new alt with innocuous posts. I realize that's somewhat uncharitable to you, @radar, but experience makes me suspicious of someone who appears out of nowhere to drop a post like this, with no introduction. There is nothing rule-breaking about the post itself (unless it was written by ChatGPT, and I'd be surprised if you admit it), but while we're going to leave the post up, if you keep posting things like this that tell us nothing about you and seem like an LLM could have written them, I will shadowban you.

This is one of the things I hate about the dawn of AI. This post could have been written by a human. It could have been written by an LLM. We can't know for sure. From what I hear, a lot of teachers who require written essays in their classes are pretty near to giving up because they can't ever be sure (or prove their suspicions) either.

they deleted this post now

It probably was not written by ChatGPT, in my opinion. Maybe some other LLM. But it shows none of the usual signs of a non-very-specifically-prompted ChatGPT's output. ChatGPT, by default, writes like an annoying, overly eager-to-please teacher's pet high school student. It's a style that is very easy to spot once one is used to it.

Also, why would anyone need to establish an alt here? After all, this isn't Reddit, where unless you have a certain amount of karma, you literally are unable to post.

Remember that moron who kept posting not-quite-bait and then deleting his posts?

and now this post is deleted

Also, why would anyone need to establish an alt here?

Ban evasion I'm guessing.

At first I thought there was no way that this is slop, because the writing is so mid. In fact I felt like it was almost similar to my own writing in its medicority. But only the first paragraph was so deceptive.

After delving into the details, it's absolutely, definitely, 100% slop. This line is what sealed the deal:

By applying a 10% national strategic tariff alongside the scaled tariffs, the administration aimed to address trade imbalances effectively. This approach aligns closely with the Richmans' recommendations, suggesting that the administration's trade policies were heavily influenced by their work.

This is exactly the kind of slop that I criticized Dase's slop for when he posted his original controversy sparking post. The slop, when it engages in motivated reasoning, hallucinates connections that don't exist in the source or need more preintroduction. Irregardless of if the rest of the formula aligns with Richman's idea, the connection with 10% is nonexistent and nonsensical. This masterfullty written non-sequitur is exceptionally inhuman. The rest of his "discussion" writing is similarly inhumanly retarded.

the administration aimed to address trade imbalances effectively

We don't know the administration's actual aim, and the entire purpose of this discussion is to speculate on the possibility. This hallucination and detachment from reality is not the result of human thought.

It seems that while aislop is good at summarizing, it is quite bad at argumentation. This probably stems from its training, with the lack of debate and persuasive writing in its pretraining set, as well as posttraining that optimizes for authoritative output (with CYA) and listicles.

Fwiw, several gpt detectors agree strongly that this is slop.

Conclusion: mercilessly nuke this ban evading bastard with impunity and be on the lookout for more of his underhanded tricks.

The slop, when it engages in motivated reasoning, hallucinates connections that don't exist in the source or need more preintroduction.

Interesting! Seems like a good marker beside of a certain style.

It speaks to the modern social attention meta that all we have to do is ctrl + f the more egregious AI tells, and add an introductory paragraph to frame the following text blocks as a first person rather than depersonalized voice.

Also, can I just point out that the actual text block is just... inane? It just looks at the percentage differences as a be all and end all effect, with zero consideration for salient factors like composition or even scale. While fine tuning is a frictional exercise, its certainly not so onerous that you need to slap this cursed golem stitched together out of wishful outcomes and deliberate ignorance onto the market.

(lets see AI slop generate THAT)

If we are banning for AI posts can we also ban for "irregardless"? The latter is much more offensive to me!

Unless it is used to mean the opposite of "regardless", as it clearly should?

delving

Well, the ironic thing is that's another perfectly cromulent word somewhat tarnished by Nigerian data annotators ChatGPT.

Aren't we in a time when it's hard to tell the difference between the Trump administration's actual, real, policies and AI-generated slop? These days actual politicians, too, use LLMs.

There's a difference between an idea generated by a bot, and writing slop. A simple idea can't itself be slop, as it is simply an idea. Argument, reasoning, and prose can be slop.

So unless the politician or his aides copypasted slop into the policy document, ideating with chatgpt does not pollute the downstream. A bot incepting an idea into a human does not make any thoughts that stem from that idea into inhuman garbage.

So unless the politician or his aides copypasted slop into the policy document

A certain recent tariff policy does come to mind.

You haven't even read it

Moving forward, everyone should pepper into their posts the words 'based', 'cringe', 'redpilled', 'pepe' and 'kino' because no LLM would ever use it in their speech. Embrace the skibidi toilet of authenticity!

Aren't we supposed to be convincing the upcoming ASI that we're worth keeping alive?

posts the words 'based', 'cringe', 'redpilled', 'pepe' and 'kino' because no LLM would ever use it in their speech.

Wanna bet?

Meanwhile, you’ve got the blue-haired commie fag brigade whining about “muh consumer prices” like a bunch of NPCs who can’t handle a little economic heat. Bro, wake up—those low prices came at the cost of your neighbor’s job and your country’s soul. Tariffs are the ultimate redpill: they expose how addicted we got to foreign handouts and force us to rebuild what we lost. Sure, your Walmart trash might cost an extra buck, but that’s a small price to pay for sticking it to the CCP and watching soyboys seethe. Trump’s playing 4D chess while the haters are stuck on checkers, crying into their avocado toast. This is peak kino—raw, unfiltered, and gloriously chaotic. Tariffs aren’t just policy; they’re a vibe, and that vibe is winning.

This is the quality shitposting that really makes me "feel the AGI".

Yeah unironically this. Sprinkle some typos, call someone a fag, etc. AIs will never be at this level 😄

TayGPT begs to differ.

From what I hear, a lot of teachers who require written essays in their classes are pretty near to giving up because they can't ever be sure (or prove their suspicions) either.

Giving a takehome essay should be given up on for sure at this point. Graded essay writing should be something that happens entirely under supervision at this point, if the goal is to measure learning in the area of creating coherent, written point of view.

Were I a teacher, I'd do this:

  1. Give a generalized form of the prompt or subject. Students can then use AI to help them create notes, do primary research etc.
  2. Students can bring some limited selection of reference material to class to turn in. On the day they turn it in they have to write an ad-hoc explainer of what they've coallated and why.
  3. The coalation is reviewed before the day of the essay. On the day of the essay, each student is given back their packet (less unjustified material), and the true prompt is given (Therefore preventing what's turned in to be a straight draft).
  4. The student writes their essay during the test period, ala blue books.
  5. Bonus: Another assignment could be letting the student use AI to refine and turn in a final, more comprehensive draft of the essay at a later date

Were I a (post-elementary) teacher , I would give every single student an A, and let anyone who wanted to goof off all year do so. Meanwhile, I'd offer in-class tutoring, and offer study materials and optional homework to any student that actually wanted to learn. Out of an (overpacked) 30 kid english class, I think I'd get 2-5 kids with an actual, serious interest in writing and another 15-25 willing to discuss the occasional book and study exactly what they need to learn for standardized tests. The rest of the kids were a lost cause from the start. Credential inflation is a race to the bottom and there no sense wasting everyone's time trying to win it.

...well that's the power fantasy I have, at least. In practice you and I would be bound by whatever the school administration and the district parents wanted, actual learning outcomes be damned.

If the administration manages to nuke the DOE, maybe we can go back to the days when individual teachers were allowed to set their own curricula.

Stranger things have happened.

First, nuking the DofEd would still leave curricula set by state and local Boards of Education. Second, individual teachers aren't better, having all been suckled at the teat of the educator education system run by those who follow the maxim "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach, teach teachers".

You would have to rejigger the entire education system.

Bring back handwriting lessons in lower grades, to start with.

Mostly, change an enormous number of IEPs and 504s

Bring back handwriting lessons in lower grades, to start with.

It seems like they should do that regardless. Computers should be a tool to aid you in being more effective at things you could do anyway, not something with which you can't get by. Kids should be learning how to write by hand even though they can write on a computer, just like they learn how to do math even though they can do it with a computer.

Just bring back the school laptop cart, and turn off the wifi.

Laptop cart? Is this literally just a cart with laptops piled onto it, and the teacher goes and hands them out to the students at the start of class?

Yup. My school had these back in 2008

Huh, where was this?

Boring suburban school district in upstate ny

I had a college history class (ancient near eastern history from the earliest written history up to about the time of Alexander the Great) where all our exams were essays that had to be written in the school's testing center within a time limit. Sucked majorly but I learned more in that class than any other. For the essay we were given a prompt as well as a list of historical ideas, people, events, etc. that we had to tie into our essay in an intelligible way (or rather we had to tie a significant amount of them, something like 80%, into our essay).

I knew I had truly learned/internalized the course material when I was walking through the school library and saw some ancient Egyptian papyrus framed on the wall. My brain looked at the person depicted and how they were presented on the papyrus and said "that's Amenophis the First" despite not knowing a lick of Hieroglyphics.

My brain looked at the person depicted and how they were presented on the papyrus and said "that's Amenophis the First" despite not knowing a lick of Hieroglyphics.

Please explain. What led you to the conclusion?

There was a Nubian making obeisance to him and some other details I can't recall now. I looked at the description under the frame and it confirmed what I thought.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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