site banner
PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   30217 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This comes up every year around clock change time and perma-DST people and noon is noon people are equally moronic. The mere existence of this debate is proof that time changes are needed. Seriously, if you can't handle two time changes a year maximally coordinated to minimize inconvenience, then you should never be allowed to get on an airplane again in your life. Or stay up past your bedtime. Or sleep in. Or do anything else that results in any mild disruption to your precious sleep schedule.

Losing an hour of sleep on a weekend is something I can deal with once a year. But as a white-collar worker who gets up at normal o'clock, waking up in the dark is something I do not want to deal with on a regular basis, as it is noticeable harder to get going in the morning when it's still dark. I currently have to deal with this maybe a few weeks out of the year. Permanent DST would have me deal with it from the end of October until mid-March, and I really don't want to fucking deal with that. Conversely, if we eliminated DST altogether it would mean I'd forfeit the glorious hour between 8 and 9 in the summertime when it's warm and still light enough to do things outside in exchange for... it getting light a 4 am. To those early birds who think that it getting light a 4 is just as good as it staying light until 9, you either do not have a job, a family, or other real-world obligations. The average person isn't getting up at 3:30 am to sneak a round of golf in before heading to the office. For those of us who don't get out of work until 5 pm or later, that extra hour in the evening is a godsend.

So can we stop this perpetual bitching? Time changes were implemented for a reason, and people who think we'd be better off without them have never actually lived in a world without them. The benefits are all theoretical. When permanent DST was implemented during the 1970s, the program was cancelled within a year because people couldn't abide the first winter. And very few people want to end summer evenings early. This has to be the stupidest debate in American political discourse; just leave things where they are.

I suppose the opening line was a bit antagonistic? But the Steelers lost, so I think that can be forgiven.

On substance I completely agree with this. Losing (and later gaining) one hour of sleep, once a year is such a trivial "cost" that it barely warrants noticing. I am more likely to mess up my sleep schedule, and with more significance by degree, from any of the dozens of meetups, holidays, events, etc. that I will go through in the year than I am from changing the clock forward an hour. The benefits of extra sunlight (for those with a "standard" wakeup schedule of 5:30 or later, apologies to @FiveHourMarathon ) vastly outweighs the negative of losing one hour of sleep, on one of the two days with the least time constraints for the general population (other than church (which commands less and less relevance), what would the modal American have as a firm time constraint on a typical Sunday?). I could see the argument for moving the clock forward and just leaving it there, the point others have made about kids blundering in the dark getting to school being the only significant pragmatic drawback I can think of. The only other argument I have against is a pure "Noon should mean Noon", which connects with me on an emotional level but doesn't really do much for the pragmatist argument.

If forced to choose I think perma-DST is pragmatically the clear choice over Noon-Is-Noon even if viscerally I prefer Noon-Is-Noon more than "My life would be better if time worked differently, so DST should be permanent." A transition to an 8-4 workday would solve the problem better than a perma-DST move, but I don't know how easily one could convince the entire workforce of that.

I do not understand this whole discussion about daylight, mostly because how huge the timezones are. As an example the easternmost Central European Time (UTC+1) timezone is around two hours - so as I write this the sunrise in Northern Macedonia is around 6:50 AM while in Northeast Spain it is 9:00 AM. Even difference between Berlin and Paris is 25 minutes. You will never have ideal amount of sunlight in the morning for the whole timezone, unless you are specifically hunting for a location that suits you specifically. In my experience many countries softly adapted to this, for instance in Spain many people do live till later times, in summer they can have sports matches late in the evening. In the east it is on the other hand normal to have 8-4 or even earlier shifts.

But I agree with you that changing time is actually good for more stability, especially to have more light for whatever time is usual to go to the office in that country. So I am absolutely for keeping time changes twice a year.

Why dont schools just change the time they open? Businesses ditto? It seems the retarded thing is 9-5 being so rigid.

Because it's just a clunky way of achieving the same end.

Clunkier than resetting all the clocks and telling everyone to shift their routine back and forth by an hour and pretending that noon is when the sun is one hour off from the highest point of its transit?

There are many institutions that have different sets of opening hours for different seasons. It's perfectly feasible to change those, if change they must, rather than to pretend to be time travellers.

To those early birds who think that it getting light a 4 is just as good as it staying light until 9, you either do not have a job, a family, or other real-world obligations.

Can I ask how you put a 7 year old to bed when the sun is still up? As a hobo the only thing that matters to me is getting up super early so I can get all of my nothing done for the day. Here's my usual schedule.

3:00 to 4:00 - get up, tie up my bindle and dodge the bulls.

4:00 to 5:00 - tell a sympathetic McDonald's worker an amusingly circuitous anecdote in exchange for the dead nuggets in the frier

5:00 to 6:00 arrange my collection of bark and strings by aesthetic preference.

6:00 to 8:30 gather all of my cans and garbage bags into a discarded shopping trolley and take it down to the nearest major road so I can laugh at the wage apes stuck in their daily commute and waggle my genitals at anyone in a lexus

8:30 to 2:30 chase sunbeams in the park and if I manage to catch any torture them for their secrets

2:30 to 4:30 dupe widows out of their savings

4:30 to 6:00 on to public transport to take up far too much space and recruit agents in my war against the sun by angrily staring at strangers

6:00 to 8:00 where is the sun? Has it retreated yet? What about the moon? Remember, it also can't be trusted! The moon beams are just secret sun beams, find out what they know!

8:00 to 10:00 find tonight's boxcar

10:00 to 3:00 methylated spirits/sleep

The only reason anyone I know is an early riser is real world obligations. Maybe you need to hang out with classier people.

Can I ask how you put a 7 year old to bed when the sun is still up?

You tell him to go to bed, just as my dad told me to go to bed when I was seven and had to go to bed at 8:30 in the spring. I don't know when or why putting school age kids to bed became an hour-long ordeal for the parents.

I wasn't thinking of parents, I was thinking of when I was 7 and made to go to bed while the sun was up. I would lie in bed, wide awake, until after the sun went down. So I wouldn't actually get to sleep until hours after my 'bedtime' (7 at 7) and then be utterly wrecked when I woke up the next morning. And then everyone would wonder why I was so tired. It was perverse.

Once again, the whole of society must reorient so that parents aren't mildly annoyed with their toddler.

Seriously, if you can't handle two time changes a year maximally coordinated to minimize inconvenience

That is two unnecessary dumb government-mandated inconveniences too much.

then you should never be allowed to get on an airplane again in your life

you seem to fail at distinguishing "I dislike it" and "I cannot survive it". You also fail at being aware that planes moving N-S exist and planes travelling on short distances in the same time zone.

Or stay up past your bedtime. Or sleep in.

Yes, I try to avoid it.

But as a white-collar worker who gets up at normal o'clock, waking up in the dark is something I do not want to deal with on a regular basis, as it is noticeable harder to get going in the morning when it's still dark.

Then tell your employer that if they want to keep you, you must be allowed to come in later during the winter. Why is this the government's job to solve?

One of the primary use cases for government / rule by Czar is to break people out of mutually reinforcing bad habits. See China closing down the cram schools.

To those early birds who think that it getting light a 4 is just as good as it staying light until 9, you either do not have a job, a family, or other real-world obligations.

On the contrary. I wake up at 430 so that I can do things before those real world obligations kick in.

The benefits are all theoretical.

I don't really care about DST but it is worth noting that there's supposedly an association between time zone changes and medical and psychiatric health issues. Healthy people can change their sleep easily but medically ill people get more heart attacks, people with bipolar are more likely to have an episode etc.

I say supposedly because doing a lit review right now the evidence base isn't aggressive, but it is often passed around as medical fact.

100%. I audibly scoffed when OP said ‘pretty much everyone likes the idea’

I will also add that Trump likes this because he basically lives in Florida. This is extreme latitudinal prejudice. Ending DSL is less of a big deal the further toward the equator you go.

Dude nobody gives a shit about how early or late it gets light. It's not a big deal. Changing clocks, on the other hand, is an inconvenience for everyone and it messes with time calculation as the Count rightly pointed out. If you're going to call people "moronic" you best bring an argument better than this weaksauce "oh no it'll be dark when I get up for work" shit.

Nobody is saying that changing clocks is the biggest inconvenience in the world. The point is that there's no corresponding benefit, so why keep it?

Full agreement. I didn't know that keeping daylight saving time had a constituency -- every time I've heard DST discussed, both in person and online, in the past several years it's always been mildly-to-highly negative. And I don't live in some kind of crazy bubble, actually I'm from a conservative area.

My guess is that this is just the motte's reflexive contrarianism, combined with a high percentage of temperamental conservatives for whom it's an uphill battle to argue for any change. It's safe to say that most opinions you see on the motte are going to be unpopular ones (even mine!): if people had a popular idea to argue for they could do it somewhere else.

I strongly disagree that you were mod-warned over this comment, and I find it bizarre that the very pragmatic reasons for removing DST would ever be described as "ideological". "Let's keep time consistent over the year and not have to change clocks and sleep schedules" is a very down-to-earth and pragmatic change, and I don't see what 'ideology' it could be said to forward.

Dude nobody gives a shit about how early or late it gets light. It's not a big deal. Changing clocks, on the other hand, is an inconvenience for everyone and it messes with time calculation as the Count rightly pointed out.

I have no idea how to bridge the fact that this is the exact opposite of my intuition and experience. I couldn't possibly give a shit less about the clock changing. I travel pretty often and my clocks change by more than an hour without it being a big deal. Working hours starting while it's still dark out, on the other hand, actually sucks and this seems completely obvious to me. I'm baffled by people that feel differently. Getting up when it's dark sucks.

I'm baffled that the answer to a problem that your employer is introducing into your life (and may be willing to negotiate!) is a nationwide mandate.

In my experience, employers HATE negotiating like that. They’re terrified that if they offer any flexibility, everyone will be lobbying the company to get their preferred working conditions and chaos will erupt. So they refuse to permit any official leniency on anything where they aren’t forced to by law.

Yeah I dunno man. It probably goes without saying, but I'm equally baffled that there are people who genuinely care whether the sun is up when they get up. I believe you, I just can't understand it on a visceral level. Maybe it's the difference between morning people and night owls? I find waking up to be kind of unpleasant no matter what the light is like, so I guess maybe if I didn't feel that way I would notice more of a difference. Not sure though.

It’s not just that it’s dark but also how long it stays dark. Where I live sunrise between dec and Jan is somewhere 7:10-7:30.

My children get up for school at 6:45 and we drop off around 7:40 and school starts at 8. It starts getting light somewhere around 1/2 hr before actual sunrise so this basically means that dawn is just cracking or will be soon when they get up in the winter. If we went dst all year, it would mean school started in the dark. ‘Just start school an hour later’ doesn’t really work since it’s timed to start before the workday, also getting out an hour later means getting home in the dark.

If the argument is to push work hours as well, at this point you are making the argument against dst all year long, since you’re effectively countering it with a shifted schedule.

It’s not really about whether the sun cracks through your window and touches your face as you wake up. It’s about coordinating even the slightest amount of social complexity to maximize both winter and summer differences

You seem, probably unconsciously, to be using arguments as soldiers here.

If we went dst all year, it would mean school started in the dark. ‘Just start school an hour later’ doesn’t really work since it’s timed to start before the workday, also getting out an hour later means getting home in the dark.

As things stand, your kids are already getting home in the dark, so that’s not a good argument to oppose any changes to the DST status quo.

In many parts of the country, it’s just not possible to have sunlight both before and after the work/school day. DST and choice of time zone have nothing to do with it.

As things stand, your kids are already getting home in the dark, so that’s not a good argument to oppose any changes to the DST status quo

It's not an argument as a soldier, it's a stupid mistake of math on my part. Shifting both the time and the school day an hour wouldn't change the fact that my kids don't get home in the dark, you are right.

But the broader point stands: pushing both the school day and the time and my work an hour, undermine the argument for DST all year long. as it effectively negates it. My arguments are:

  1. DST in the winter means a great deal of the morning happens in the dark (school being the most relevant).
  2. This is unsatisfactory imo
  3. A solution which advances the start time of these things, effectively undermines DST all year argument.
  4. Therefore you are left with no DST year long or a variable schedule at different parts of the year which is just DST in effect.
  5. Thus the argument needs to either be for standard year round (for which the objections are the 4:30 sunrise) or for everyone negotiating their own schedule shift preferences in the winter, which has it's own drawbacks against centralized coordination.

Personally, I find the idea of standard time year round much more palletable

Right but I don't see why "start school in the dark" is something you put out there like it's an obvious nonstarter. That seems perfectly fine. Ditto for getting home in the dark. The state of the sun when I'm going about my day doesn't matter to me in the slightest, and I fail to understand why it matters to some people here.

Just registering for the sake of completeness that I find sunlight in the morning hugely important. Sunlight is one of the most cheerful and vitalising stimuli we have, tied directly into a bunch of our natural circuits.

I think there may be a genetic or cultural component - it’s much more common in Asia to treat the Sun as an enemy. In my last office there was a running war between the European employees who wanted the blinds open and the Asians who wanted them all shut.

If you're going to call people "moronic" you best bring an argument better than this weaksauce "oh no it'll be dark when I get up for work" shit.

Seriously, this dude is going way too hard for someone whose objections boil down to a bunch of foppish idiosyncrasies.

All you do is sneer, sneer, sneer.

Unlike the other poster I warned, you do nothing but post things you hope will increase the heat, for no other purpose than to reduce light.

Banned for two weeks this time.

you're a moron

No mod action

This guy is going way too hard

Banned for two weeks.

Thanks, there wouldn't be nearly as many funny jokes around here without your "moderation."
Looking forward to seeing how far back in my post history you'll go to find something "unrelated" to ban me for in revenge.

We factor in posters' history as well as the individual post. This is not new, and you know this. One bad post probably gets a warning. The latest in a long string of bad posts probably gets a ban.

Looking forward to seeing how far back in my post history you'll go to find something "unrelated" to ban me for in revenge.

I have never done anything like this. To anyone. You know this, and yet you never adjust your priors when the things you keep saying will happen never happen. Almost as if you don't really believe the things you say.

You're also being dishonest about "You're a moron," which is further proof that your complaints are entirely based on a desire to see people you like be allowed to say anything, no matter how inflammatory or insulting,and people you don't like get banned.

That's nonsense, I've watched you have arguments with people, then ban them for a two week old post a day later. Maybe it was just "in the queue" lol

This doesn't happen. Bans are almost always approved by more than one moderator. We always let each other know when we have carried out a ban and for what reasons.

Amadan in particular is diligent about recusing himself when he thinks there might even be a hint of bias.

He is still the most active mod on the team. I'd consider him a pillar of the community and essential to keeping this place running.

You on the other hand are on the opposite end of the spectrum. You've been on thin ice for about the entire 8 months that you have had this account active. 7 warnings, 3 tempbans, and no quality posts.

Your pattern of behavior follows many such permabans in the past. You are a dick to everyone to start. Then as your warnings and bans increase you mostly just direct the trolling towards the mods in particular, so it starts looking like any punishment of you is just retalliation for your "speaking truth to power".

I'd rather not go through the whole rigamarole where we pretend you are going to in some way reform. But we have the process in place so these accusations can be seen as false every time they inevitably get trotted out by every bad faith actor we have on this forum.

If I see you making more unfounded accusations against a moderator like this, then I'll be in favor of a permaban, regardless of how it "looks" because at some point its just not worth dealing with this crap again and again.

I'm unsurprised to say the least. Have you guys made any progress on hiding votes on mod actions? That would really help the old consensus machine a lot.

If anyone thinks I'm being rude to them, I'd like them to say it so I can apologize properly.

More comments

That's nonsense, I've watched you have arguments with people, then ban them for a two week old post a day later.

Post a link.

Calm down and be less antagonistic.

I'm not being antagonistic, or at least not moreso than he was. I didn't personally attack him (deliberately so), yet he is directly calling people morons. I don't think I'm breaking the rules to say his argument is weak.

Well, contrary to @Templexious's hastily deleted comment that "It's only ideological," I couldn't care less about DST and I have no reasons to feel anything about you or @Rov_Scam. What I care about is the tone of discourse. "Your argument is weak" is fine, flipping out and trying to start a fight is not. (@Rov_Scam also seems to be calling both arguments moronic, so who exactly are you defending?)

Rov was being way more of a dick than his replies were.

Well, first of all, interestingly enough, no one reported @Rov_Scam, while multiple people (not Rov himself) reported the responses.

If someone had reported him... I wouldn't have modded it. But if you feel super strongly about it, report him and I will let some other mod determine how to handle it.

The most objectionable thing he said was "perma-DST people and noon is noon people are equally moronic," which, yeah, taken literally, is calling certain people who believe certain things morons, and if you are a "perma-DST person" with a thin skin, you could complain that he called you a moron. Could he have phrased it better? Maybe. But I don't think his intent was to say "You (individual person) are a moron" and we see people arguing, essentially, "A is stupid/People who believe A are stupid" all the time, and generally (unless it's really egregious or obvious consensus-building) we will let it go. Do you really want us to apply the standard you are suggesting every time?

It's very weird to me that an argument over DST is causing this much gnashing of teeth (reminds me of the Calendar Riots) and it's hard not to view this entire brouhaha as "ideologically motivated" as one deleted post said (apologies to the poster who apparently was not trying to start a fight).

My subjective opinion is that @Rov_Scam made a somewhat dismissive comment about the controversy, and people with surprisingly big feelings about it (and grudges) took offense and then went on the offense, with namecalling and belligerence. I disagree with you that Rov was being way more of a dick. But that is my opinion.

  • -10

I wouldn't really have reported any of them. I try not to report stuff just because it insults me for waking up early. After all, how much sense can you expect out of people from Pittsburgh?

Just struck me as odd is all.

The point is that Rov_Scam called the people moronic, not the arguments. Upon reflection I probably just should've let it pass, but I do object to the characterization that I was starting a fight. He came in starting a fight by calling names, not me. But yes, I shouldn't have continued the fight and you're correct about that.

It was a fragment of a comment that I genuinely didn't intend to post.

DST is idiotic because it absolutely fucks up any historical time series analysis. E.g. if you're looking at market data for a stock listen in London it opens at 08:00 UK time and closes at 16:30 UK time. Now imagine you wish to do some correlations with a similar stock but listed at the NYSE, which opens 9:30 NY time and closes 16:00 NY time. What people might not realize is the US DST and UK (and European) DST are offset by a week each year so if you're using UTC as your "base" timezone then for each year we have 4 different step functions for the hours where our stocks are open/closed for trading.

If you are dealing with 10 years of historical data this suddenly becomes an absolute pain to deal with (because e.g. for the UK clocks change on the last Sunday of March/October, so now you need your script to have access to a calendar module to work out exactly what dates these were for each of the years). Without DST (shakes fist) we wouldn't need these 40 different separate time regimes for the 10 years of data but could simply hardcode in the opening hours for both our stocks in terms of UTC because they wouldn't change. Much much easier!

I don't think you'll find "Won't someone think of the quants" as a very compelling argument either way.

DST is idiotic because it absolutely fucks up any historical time series analysis.

What sort of half-baked script-kiddey nonsense are you using to do your analysis?

I don't think I've ever seen a professionally developed program (or competent open source project) that didn't store time data in UTC, Zulu, or some other standardized epoch, unless it was an embedded application running off a hardware tickcount.

Our data is stored in UTC. Still fucks up time series analysis (in fact it fucks up time series analysis more than if it were stored in London time, but using UTC is the correct choice) because exchanges open and close based on local time which means that 08:00:15 UTC means 15 seconds after the opening bell for half the year and for the other half an hour and fifteen seconds after the bell. So if you want to do some sort of study based on stock behaviour shortly after the open and you just use the UTC timestamp column from the database half your data will be straight up wrong. Hence necessitating extra work to handle DST properly.

Our data is stored in UTC. Still fucks up time series analysis

I dont see how this happens in a competently run organization. Normalizing your inputs is like basic sanitation, if you can't manage that, how do you manage anything else?

Had it ever occured to you that you can just do all the math/analysis in UTC and then adjust the display output to local time?

Yes, that's what I do. The problem is with converting London time to UTC which is what gets fucked up by the existence of DST unless you use some sort of timezone localisation. If the exchanges opened at 08:00 UTC and closed at 16:30 UTC each business day regardless of DST there would be no problem. Instead because of DST they are opening at 07:00 UTC for half the year. The issue is with them, not us.

Just about every serious programming language includes zoneinfo related functions in the standard library.

The serious programmers that use zoneinfo are lacking. Not the library funcitons.

Agreed.

Yes I agree, e.g. in Python I use pd.DatetimeIndex.tz_localize to help me with this (after spending my first two years as a quant doing things manually before throwing my hands up and realizing that this is a common problem everyone must be having, so someone somewhere has probably created a good solution).

However needing to import it and write like an extra 10 lines of code for every single project I wouldn't need to do if DST (shakes fist) didn't exist adds up over time to become a serious pain in the ass. Plus now my script has an extra dependency and is more susceptible to code bitrot over time as it'll stop working if pd.DatetimeIndex gets its behaviour changed or deprecated.

Also SQL doesn't play nicely with timezones at all, so the problem still very much exists for SQL scripts unless you only want to use SQL to pull the data and will do all your analysis with the pulled data in a different language.

Yes I agree, e.g. in Python I use pd.DatetimeIndex.tz_localize

Well, that's your mistake - I'm talking about the standard library, not pandas. No dependency, no bitrot. No need to localize any datetimes until you're displaying them, so as long as you aren't working with naive datetimes it's pretty low overhead.

Also SQL doesn't play nicely with timezones at all, so the problem still very much exists for SQL scripts unless you only want to use SQL to pull the data and will do all your analysis with the pulled data in a different language.

As SQL is fundamentally not a serious language, it indeed does not support zoneinfo.

Perma DST is preferable in northern climes because

  1. Almost nobody (save for a few joggers) is out enjoying the additional hour of sunshine. In many places, like Northern Europe and much of Canada, people are already at work when it gets light even with DST. Meanwhile, many more people (those who work early shift, kids getting off school, people who have half an hour to go out for a coffee at 4pm, students, NEETs and those retirees who wake up late anyway) are available later in the afternoon to enjoy the extra daylight.

    The real reason permanent DST won’t be rolled out is because of the risk of kids getting run over or moms crashing on the way to school in the dark. That is the sole reason and it’s why politicians are scared of it.

  2. Perma non-DST is extremely dumb for the reason you mention.

My only issue with perma DST is aesthetic - it feels stupid for the answer to modern society suffering from pretending to live by the schedules of a century ago to be decoupling our clocks further from the solar day instead of shifting working hours to be closer to where most people want them.

Which doesn't mean it isn't the easiest answer.

The benefits of Perma DST easily outweigh the yearly cost of some extra kids getting run over.

Sorry I don't know much about this debate, what are the benefits? Are they mainly convenience wrt not needing to switch the clock twice per year?

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