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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34136 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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I was tired of dealing with the groupthink and circlejerking on Reddit and I Googled "forums that allow for nuanced and respectful political discussion".

Welcome, we are glad to have you and appreciate your contributions to the discussion.

I Googled "forums that allow for nuanced and respectful political discussion".

Not doubting you, but I'd be interesting in knowing how that worked. I just searched Google for that and then clicked through the first couple pages of links and looked inside the content for any reference to the Mottle. Couldn't find it.

After I typed that, I realized it was actually through asking ChatGPT, not Google. My bad.

I saw this and got excited that maybe chatgpt is commonly offering us up as a good discussion forums. I wasn't able to get it to recommend this place with my own prompts. Including adding hints about a former subreddit named after a type of castle.

I did get chatgpt to craft me a prompt that would give me themotte "Can you suggest any online communities or forums that are known for their emphasis on rational, civil discussion of controversial or sensitive topics?"

You must have gotten lucky with your wording, or are we like the 10th place you've tried?

I was curious if ChatGPT actually knew about and would recommend TheMotte (I admit I was doubtful) but can confirm that asking for "nuanced and respectful political discussion", while initially yielding such recommendations as /r/Ask_Politics and ResetEra (lol), when I followed up by asking for "niche forums with a high level of quality and rules around civility," TheMotte was the first recommendation.

Fact check: plausible.

I don’t know this feels dubious. TheMotte has basically zero googleability and the idea someone would stumble into our dying spinoff forum years after it spun off is just hard to believe.

Funnily enough, I did just that a couple of months ago. I was trying to find someone's old reddit comment and happened to notice one of their comments on /r/themotte. My curiosity was piqued, and here I am now.

(Bit mundane for a first post, I promise I'm working on a couple more substantial contributions)

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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.

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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."

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