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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.

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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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naraburns nihil supernum 3mo ago (text post) 5200 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for July 2024

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.

Quality Contributions to the Main Motte

"The more internal debate variant is What Is Intersex to even start with."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

"The state of open-source LLMs as of summer 2024, or: Core Values of Socialism with AGI characteristics"

@John_Doe_Fletcher:

"tl;dr simple RES ripoff for The Motte"

"...after 20 years of making a half-assed attempt at seeing all of the movies on the AFI 100, my journey is finally complete."

@FiveHourMarathon:

@OliveTapenade:

"I always had a problem with the idea of master/slave morality purely on historical terms - Nietzsche's archetypes of them are simply invented, largely based on stereotypes, and don't correspond to any real history."

Contributions for the week of June 24, 2024

"Except, as I've noted before, many on that side tend to define 'Democracy' rather differently than what you imply."

Contributions for the week of July 1, 2024

"Clearly the Supreme Court can make decisions which have effect; they just chose not to."

"I think we may [have] good evidence that the Biden administration is aware of and lying about his neurologic health, which I think many suspect but something that we can point to as evidence is helpful."

"...it is increasingly difficult to take allegations of this nature seriously in this world where women are simultaneously demanding to be treated as fully agentic adults in every other decision they make, ESPECIALLY those involving their own bodies, but are infantilized when it comes to sexual interactions with an older male."

Contributions for the week of July 8, 2024

@TracingWoodgrains:

"New from me: Reliable Sources, investigating how longtime malicious critic of this community, RationalWiki sysadmin, and Wikipedia administrator David Gerard launders his grudges into the public record."

"This demonstrates the motte-and-bailey fallacy at the heart of the trans movement."

"Sorry for snagging on a single word like this but scenes like vaguely gestures around this one very vividly remind me how absolutely ruinous the advent of Discord has been for niche communities like this one and others I considered myself a part of."

Security Advice

"Everybody outside of the individualistic world doesn't need to exercise willpower, because everyone else in the planet and in the past simply has no agency."

"They whipped themselves into a frenzy over Trump, and now someone has actually tried to kill him, and for many on the left there is no actual way to walk it back, nor ability to recognize the realities of their position."

"It is exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time to be doing to be promoting hypotheticals of bad right wingers to excuse and downplay any of this."

Contributions for the week of July 15, 2024

"Some people do genuinely just have a morbid sense of humor, not just when people they don't like are involved."

@FiveHourMarathon:

"I hope 'AI safety' ends up in the dustbin where it belongs. I hate it on multiple levels."

"The next step is to recognize the specific parts of your thinking that are hateful."

"Ok this might just be funny to me, but the Crowdstrike worldwide outage is the funniest thing to happen in computer security this decade."

"I suspect that failure to even slightly understand the technology on which our civilization functions contributes to some pretty distorted perspectives..."

Contributions for the week of July 22, 2024

@WestphalianPeace:

"One of the things Scott does not bring up is the lack of an easy narrative from the anti-woke right to allow people to an easy out."

@FiveHourMarathon:

"I'm just going to throw a bunch of quotes from the excellent Rick Reilly book Who's Your Caddy? in here."

"Politics is the Mind ~~Killer~~ Changer"

@problem_redditor:

"One moment it's Huzzah, Harris is border czar and the next it's You guys, Harris was never border czar, the Republicans just made that up, and we have always been at war with Eastasia."

Contributions for the week of July 29, 2024

@100ProofTollBooth:

"The WSJ published an article today about the voting gap between men and women below the age of thirty."

"El Salvador, by contrast, is basically just a city state centered on San Salvador."

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aqouta 3mo ago

I fully don't even think it is bad. Agnostic on good. People stress testing your information diet is a kindness and a service a perfectly rational person might pay for in a red teaming sense. Hoaxes, as long as they ar published are unambiguously good.

2

Context

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!

Rules

Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats

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