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.
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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."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
New post guidelines
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Notes -
It seems crude to map all of human expression onto a spectrum with with which to make a distribution. A major problem with gender being different to sex is that one needs to decide between meaninglessly vague definitions of genders or crudely specific ones where we tabulate out that someone is 62% masculine and thus a demi boi based on seemingly random traits. The popular hack out of this seems to be "self id" which shunts this issue onto distributed sets of individuals so that there is no central entity to criticize for how absurd the decision process is. Instead of one central entity saying "you like dolls more than you like sports cars, you're a girl" that we could all call arbitrary and idiotic it's seven billion people weighing their relative like of dolls and sports cars, or something even more absurd, but in a not very easy to criticize way.
All valid points. Probably there are a great many human traits which actually don't fit into a bell curve, and once you bring sex into it you begin seeing bimodal distributions everywhere. The article was intended to present a crude model of certain aspects of the human experience in order to illustrate how ambiguity in discussions of same can lead to confusion (and hence entirely new identity categories).
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