site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1246 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 24, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Right now the smallest a Bitcoin can be divided (0.00000001 BTC) is about 1/10 of $0.01, or $0.001. If Bitcoin more than 10xes again, what happens? Dollar-denominated transactions can no longer be transacted in bitcoin cent-for-cent. Will exchanges try to synthetically divide bitcoin further, kind of like fractional shares?

I also learned recently that it's estimated that up to a quarter of the bitcoin supply has already been permanently lost. It's only been 16 years! The divisibility problem will get worse as more continues to be removed from circulation. What's next? Will bitcoin ever be replaced by something else with e.g. a capped-rate supply increase? So modeled not on gold, but not on fiat either.

Off-chain solutions, like Defi protocols like Lightning, allow for denominations in milli-satoshis (or (0.00000000001). Presumably if Bitcoin goes up by 10x again we're really not still publishing things down to the penny on the main blockchain.

I don't much like MGMT. But I quite enjoy Little Dark Age.

They made it last time Trump was president. They felt so bad about him winning and being president. This was their expression in song form.

Now that Trump is back I'm looking forward to grief-stricken artists producing good works again. They need a bit of imagined adversity to output their best.

I wonder if we'll get more "edgy" hardcore bands making music videos about tattooing swastikas on Trump supporters' foreheads: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yy-SiZSlmhI?si=0pc1FG5jcplOh0yr

Wait, is it really a Trump protest song? That's hilarious, Truffaut was indeed right.

Memetic Adverse Possession is a superweapon, and a very funny one at that

Yeah it’s like “TDS: The Song!”

The fact that it’s super popular amongst right wing zoomers is a deliciously ironic twist of the knife.

It’s the current year version of Yankee Doodle dandy, designed as an attack and then judo spun into a counter attack.

Great song! Thank god for the “death of the author”.

Reminds me of TVAM's Porsche Majeure.

Feel the push of an unseen hand

Control without command

From driveways of suburban homes

We go anywhere we please

Hell yeah. Wait, is this pro or anti car again?

I haven't liked them since Oracular Spectacular. Kids would sound great in the movie version of Rainbows End.

Their best song is of course the Justice remix of "Electric Feel."

I recently binge re-watched Mad Men. Two non-spoiler thoughts:

  1. For those who haven't seen it, yes, it really is as good as people say. AMC chose it as their first original series with the brand strategy of starting with a show that would be widely recognized for its quality, even if it didn't immediately have widespread appeal. I think it's telling that the tvtropes page for anachronisms has only inconsequential examples, with many of them being arcane/minute details, things that might get fudged in contemporaneously-set fiction, or both. (E.G., one of the biggest mistakes is a character giving incorrect transit instructions: "In "Love Among the Ruins", set in 1963, Don mentions taking the New York Central and Broadway Limited from Ossining to Penn Station. At the time, Broadway Limited was run by Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR did not merge with New York Central until 1968). A commuter would not make such a mistake. Additionally, the Broadway Limited was a private all-room reserved train to Chicago, and did not allow coach passengers for intermediate stops." Close enough!)

  2. The later seasons all start with a conspicuous change in supporting characters' personal styling and set decor, but a more jarring indication of the pace of cultural change and its resulting dissonance in the second half of the 1960s are the songs chosen to play over the each episode's end credits.

I got into a bit of an argument with a socialist feminist once. My position was that actually even if the President sucks, now is still the best time to be alive. She countered no it has always been great for men. Take Mad Men for instance. Don Draper was rich and got to fuck around and be drunk all day.

I was so shocked by this I couldn't even retort. Like the show leaves some people with the impression that the median male existence in the 60s was a Manhattan advertising executive's hedonistic life and not closer to all of the little people he steps on. (To say nothing of the fact that he was drafted to fight in Korea and ... I'll save the spoilers)

Additional random anecdote: an old girlfriend who was actually in the ad industry had a Mad Men themed birthday party at her place in Brooklyn, while it was still airing. That definitely brought out people's frisky sides.

More reminiscing: I remember that scene with the presentation of the carousel slide projector being pretty epic. Like some of the most mesmerizing TV ever.

Anyway, uh, it's a great show. The breadth and depth of the appeal makes it a legend. Though, I never did see it through to the end. Is it worth it?

Yes it's worth going to the end. It's not as legendary of a finale as, say, The Wire. But it's a hell of a lot better than the sopranos.

I rewatch mad men every couple years, it's that good.

I've watched seasons 1 and 2 and loved them, felt genuinely mature and novelistic in a way Breaking Bad never did for me. We watched the first episode of season 3 and liked it but got distracted and never picked it up again. Maybe we should.

Mad Men came up irl yesterday, my mom (in her late 60s) had been served a vertical clip via facebook, the description did not list the actual source, so I explained once again how to google. "The interesting line 'You're right, Roger, this place really runs on charm', just type that, possibly with quotation marks if you've got it exactly correct, maybe add the word 'quote' afterward, and it usually works." Decent chance it works this time, I've managed to get her to copy and paste within the past 2 years after about 25 of trying.

She asked if she would like it, I said to my understanding it was drama about advertising people in the 60s who after 3 martini lunches backstabbed each other and committed adultery, but was considered well made. She'd enjoy the outfits and wit.

I keep meaning to watch that again. Or at least the final season, because I watched all the way up to it, but never finished it. I miss when they made TV and could let the past be a foreign country. Up there with HBO's Rome in terms of being transported away to a different place and time.

I'm trying to track down a brief study or case report that I first saw in an SSC links post or maybe screenshotted on ratblr. tl;dr mega autist is given heroic dose of LSD in the 1960s, is completely unaffected except maybe feeling a little tired, experimenters shrug and let him go home. Is this ringing any bells for anyone?

My experiment to determine the value of poets:

  • Bring in undergraduates for a series of tests designed to measure reaction time according to time of day and season of year

  • While they wait in the barren experimental room, they sit at a desk in which parts of a poem are clearly etched in by a “student”

  • the student is made to wait in without a phone or any distraction for 25 minutes, essentially forcing them to eventually read the poem

  • They are brought in 3 months later and asked if they remember anything of the poem

If the poet has value, his lines will be remembered, and if he has a lot of value, his lines will be remembered fondly in full.

By remembered do you mean the exact lines in full; or do you mean the themes, concepts, or feelings of the piece?

The poems should be read aloud in his hearing. Silent reading of poems is silly and why they've faded so much.

I don't think this would have the results you're looking for. Most people are more likely to remember pithy doggerel than the works of say, Alfred Lord Tennyson. The highest-value poems would invariably be dirty limericks.

Then perhaps they are. If a bored boy can’t get any value from Tennyson, then there is no value in Tennyson, except to keep academics busy.

By that logic we should value Barry Manilow and Helen Reddy over Pink Floyd, and Neil Diamond over the Rolling Stones.

I don't think your Pink Floyd comparison works but we already do value Neil Diamond over the Rolling Stones except as a cultural icon.

Helen Reddy had 19 chart hits in the 1970s that spent a cumulative 245 weeks on the Hot 100. Barry Manilow had 15 hits that spent 233 weeks on the charts. Pink Floyd had 2 chart hits in the 70s. As far as total weeks are concerned, that's not in my source since they're not in the top 100 of 70s artists, so I consulted AI and got contradictory results. DeepSeek confidently tells me that:

Pink Floyd had several songs chart on the Billboard Hot 100 during the 1970s, but their cumulative weeks on the chart were relatively modest compared to some other artists of the era. Here are the songs that charted and their respective weeks on the Hot 100:

  1. "Money" (1973) - 13 weeks
  2. "Us and Them" (1973) - 1 week
  3. "Time" (1973) - 1 week
  4. "Have a Cigar" (1975) - 4 weeks
  5. "Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)" (1979) - 23 weeks (though this song peaked in early 1980, it spent most of its chart run in 1979)

Adding these up:

  • "Money": 13 weeks
  • "Us and Them": 1 week
  • "Time": 1 week
  • "Have a Cigar": 4 weeks
  • "Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)": 23 weeks

Total cumulative weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 in the 1970s: 42 weeks.

Note: The exact number may vary slightly depending on the specific chart data source, but this is a close approximation.

ChatGPT was more circumspect:

During the 1970s, Pink Floyd had limited presence on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. Their song "Money," released in 1973 from the album The Dark Side of the Moon, reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100. However, specific data regarding the total number of weeks "Money" remained on the Hot 100 during the 1970s is not readily available. It's worth noting that "Another Brick in the Wall, Part II" became a number-one hit, but it was released in late 1979 and achieved its peak chart position in 1980. Therefore, its chart duration primarily falls outside the 1970s. Overall, Pink Floyd's presence on the Billboard Hot 100 during the 1970s was minimal, with "Money" being their primary entry.

Gemini's response was similar to that of ChatGTP, except with the added caveat that "To get the precise number, you would need to consult detailed Billboard chart archives".

To be clear, DeepSeek was clearly the worst of these in that it confidently gave an incorrect answer. The other two gave technically correct responses that nonetheless don't qualify as answers. Pink Floyd only had one chart hit in the 1970s, "Money" which spent 15 weeks on the chart between 5/19/1973 and 7/28/1973, peaking at No. 13. While "Another Brick in the Wall was released in 1979, it wasn't released until November 30, and it did not debut on the charts until January 19, 1980. This was not difficult information for me to find on my own, considering that Billboard publishes it on their own website. "Not readily available" my ass. The Gemini response pisses me off more, though, because Google has detailed Billboard chart archives in the magazines scans that are available on Google Books for all to see. Apparently Gemini's training data doesn't even include their own archives. For the record, "Us and Them" was released as a single in 1974 but didn't chart, "Time" was the b-side of "Us and Them", and "Have a Cigar" was released as a single but also did not chart.

Anyway, getting back to my original point, while Pink Floyd sold a lot of albums, their music just isn't the kind of immediately arresting, memorable thing that @coffee_enjoyer is describing. They didn't get played on the kind of AM Top 40 stations that most college undergraduates were listening to. (Yes, Pink Floyd was, and to a large degree still is, popular among college students, and "College Rock" has largely become a synonym for the kind of independent music that gets played on college radio. But this is the minority. Most college kids listen to Top 40 or other contemporary radio and aren't particularly tuned into progressive music.) Their current iconic status is based on people who bought albums they spent 40 minutes listening to, not catchy radio hits. They aren't particularly memorable, their music is just intriguing enough that it demands multiple listens.

If you were writing a story (a book, movie script, video game lore, anything) and wanted to include a cameo/reference to The Motte, what would it be?

This is not a “My friend has an embarrassing problem” expression where I actually am doing the said thing, I just want to hear some positive moments and impressions.

QUite a bit given I spent a fifth of my life here and documented it publicly.

You could name the forum “One zillion witches” or “OZW”.

@SkookumTree succeeding at the Hock, obviously.

I'm totally throwing this into the next chatbot scenario, thanks.

"the Hock?"

That’s a good one.

Or have a minor character who mentions it be banned from there for life but still lurking. You’d have your pick of the litter as to who that is.

Leviathan shaped hole perhaps

Want to read an interesting wiki bio?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Paul_Jones

I feel like you could take almost any paragraph of that and it makes an interesting story. People just don't live like that anymore!

  • started his career at the age of 13, on a slave ship
  • after a few years, started to feel bad about the whole slavery thing and suddenly resigned while in Jamaica
  • Started a new career on a normal ship from a lower position, but instantly got promoted to captain (at age 21) because the captain and first mate died
  • "This came to an end, however, when he killed a mutinous crew member with a sword in a dispute over wages." Flees to America
  • Somehow makes friends with the Continental Congress and is given command of a ship
  • Leads a raid on his own hometown. Raid fails because they ran out of lantern fuel, went to a pub to get more, and "the temptation to stop for a quick drink led to a further delay"
  • Goes to plunder some nearby Earl instead
  • Gets given a larger ship as a reward. Famous battle ensues. Probably didn't really say the quote that's famous for, but it's a good story nonetheless.
  • War ends, the US can't afford a navy anymore, so Jones has nothing to do. Goes to Russia instead, and is instantly promoted to admiral despite not speaking any Russian
  • Somehow defeats a larger Turkish fleet despite the crappy Russian fleet and his translation issues
  • Sneaky Prince Potemkin steals all the credit from Jones. He loses his job again.
  • He gets accused of raping a 10-year-old girl.
  • Catherine the Great personally intervenes to make sure the trial goes forward
  • Jones tries to defend himself by saying that he thought she was 12, not 10, that he had paid her but not raped her, and that the girl's mother "lived in a brothel, and was herself promiscuous." Not the best defense there by modern standards Jones...
  • After that he really can't get a job, so he makes money by publishing his memoirs. James Fenimoore Cooper and Alexandre Dumas both write adventure novels based on his life.
  • Died in a random French cemetary, unknown and forgotten
  • But... luckily (?) some random French guy paid to have his body mummified
  • In 1905 a French general spends 6 years tracking down his body and eventually finds it.
  • His body is exhumed, placed in an elaborate sarcophagus, and now rests in the US Naval Academy
  • FDR tries to write a screenplay about his life, but it's rejected by Hollywood. I didn't know that FDR wrote screenplays...

Just a wild life from start to finish. I liked this quote from his biography summarizing him:

"In sum, Jones was a sailor of indomitable courage, of strong will, and of great ability in his chosen career. On the other side of the coin, it must be admitted that he was also a hypocrite, a brawler, a rake, and a professional and social climber. Although these elements of his character do not detract from his feats at sea, they do, perhaps, cast in doubt his eligibility for a prominent place in the ranks of America's immortals."

And now, in song form.

I feel like you should mention, he was 45 when he died.

45! He did all that in only 32 years! Incredible.

Yeah, that's true. Talk about living a fast life.

worst mummy's curse ever

Named after a different Jones. But yeah..

What's even more amazing is that he went back to England and ended his career as a rock musician, playing bass and occasional keyboard for Led Zeppelin. This wasn't entirely without precedent, however, as Booker T. Washington had recently had his own career revival as a soul musician, having a series of hits with the Stax record label with backing band the MGs. Remarkable men both.

Not entirely a coincidence, since that guy took his stage name after getting inspried by a 1959 movie about the historical John Paul Jones.

What's even more amazing is that he went back to England and ended his career as a rock musician, playing bass and occasional keyboard for Led Zeppelin.

And don’t forget Them Crooked Vultures!

This wasn't entirely without precedent, however, as Booker T. Washington had recently had his own career revival as a soul musician, having a series of hits with the Stax record label with backing band the MGs. Remarkable men both.

Wasn't he a professional wrestler as well, back when Bischoff ran WCW?

Yes, but to my knowledge, John Paul Jones never wrestled, so that didn't seem relevant. The move from music to wrestling isn't unprecedented either, with Sid Vicious taking up the sport after getting kicked out of the Sex Pistols. As an aside when Sandra Bullock was married to Jesse James I didn't know who that was and just assumed she was married to Road Dogg Jesse James, who had a second act himself as tight end for the Steelers. Currently experiencing a second act is Cam Ward, who decided to try his hand at football with the Miami Hurricanes after a long career as goaltender for the Carolina Hurricanes.

Sid Vicious taking up the sport after getting kicked out of the Sex Pistols.

And the two of them actually fought! https://youtube.com/watch?v=-PyD_2HcowU

Speaking of wrestler musicians, we can't forget Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, known for his distinctive face paint.

Another year, another karma farm<ins>post about civil engineering</ins>.

The fifty-mile-long pavement-preservation project described in my previous post has been sent out for initial review. The one drafter in our office drew from as-builts and from satellite photographs the pieces of roadway that were not available in electronic format. Then the design (as far as pavement preservation even needs any "design") was split up between the five engineers in our office, yielding a workload of around ten miles per person. The end product was two hundred and fifty 24″×36″ sheets for fifty miles of roadway. (Again, this is just a brain-dead pavement-preservation project. Resurfacing projects have been known to exceed one thousand sheets for ten miles of roadway.) A good use of taxpayer dollars? I guess so.

Bureaucratic rigmarole:

  • I mentioned in my first post that, whenever the elevation of a roadway is increased by at least half an inch: The project must be reviewed by the Environmental people for flooding problems, and any location that would cause a flooding problem must be milled down before the new pavement-preservation treatment is applied, so that the overall increase in elevation is reduced to zero. Locations underneath overhead structures (whether bridges or signs) must also be milled down in this fashion.

  • I also mentioned that, if old electronic stuff like weigh-in-motion stations is present in the road, the electronics people may request that the electronic stuff be replaced as part of a pavement-preservation project.

  • New environmental rule: Any amount of elevation increase in or near a floodway (definition; red-and-blue striped areas on this page's maps) is forbidden. The half-inch exemption is not applicable in and near floodways.

  • New rule from FHWA (Federal Highway Administration): Any amount of milling in a project now triggers the requirements to construct new ADA-compliant curb ramps at intersections throughout the project. Previously, pavement-preservation projects were exempt from this requirement if the milling was limited. (I think the limit was something like ten percent of the project's total area, but no pavement-preservation project ever got anywhere near it.) That exemption has been eliminated. Also, weigh-in-motion stations can't be replaced in pavement-preservation projects under whatever exemption they previously were operating under.

  • The construction of new ADA-compliant curb ramps is out of scope for pavement-preservation projects.

  • Result: Goodbye, a quarter-mile-long piece of this pavement-preservation project that runs over a dam, plus a few other random spots adjacent to bridges! Goodbye, two random spots underneath overhead sign structures! Goodbye, three weigh-in-motion stations that the electronics people wanted to replace!

Bureaucratic failure:

  • In the first half of 2024, my office originally was supposed to be working on a project to replace an old traffic circle with a standard intersection. (The traffic engineers recommended a modern roundabout*, but the municipal government rejected that option.)

  • Whoops! The traffic-circle project was immediately adjacent to a bridge-replacement project. There was a minor conflict between the two proposed roadway edges, and a major conflict between two proposed drainage basins. (These conflicts weren't noticed previously because: the bridge spans a river between counties A and B, and the associated project was assigned to county A in the project-management system; the traffic circle is in county B, so the associated project was assigned to county B in the project-management system; and counties A and B are in two different project-management regions.)

  • The conceptual designer for the traffic-circle project and the final designer for the bridge project suggested adjusting the drainage basins and coordinating the roadway edges to eliminate the conflicts. But the Environmental people complained that doing a drainage (or hydrological or hydraulic—whatever) assessment of the same location twice would be a waste of their extremely limited resources. Since the bridge-replacement project was much further along in the design process, the traffic-circle project was merged into it, leaving my office to sit idle with no project assigned (other than the aforementioned fifty-mile pavement-preservation project, plus whatever random maintenance work orders came along) for six months.

What a wonderful use of taxpayer dollars!

*Reminder: A roundabout is a circular intersection with no traffic control except a yield sign at every entrance. Anything else is just a sparkling traffic circle**.

**Imagine being at intersections / so fat you look and see food

Reiteration:

More people need to make lengthy posts about their cool jobs in the vein of my previous post<ins>s</ins>! I've been waiting with bated breath for the past <ins>two </ins>year<ins>s</ins> to hear about the dreaded "scrum master", "daily stand-up", and "Git merge conflict" from some of the 10× programmers that supposedly frequent this website. Maybe we even have an architect who can complain about his clients' wishy-washiness and scoff at all the pathetic free (libre) attempts to compete with Chief Architect, or a paving contractor who can express his hatred of his local transportation authority's resident engineers and in-house designers in the strongest of terms.

Best I can do is complain about how wonky the budget is for a somewhat important piece of shipping software. You'd think we could get $ENTERPRISE licenses squared away easily, we're not some fly-by-night shop. Because we don't have $ENTERPRISE licenses we apparently aren't allowed to install $TOOLS I need to unify our Unix and MS build processes, and we can't just stand up a build server running, say, $DROP_IN_ENTERPRISE_ALTERNATIVE or something on it because policy. Devsecops is goofy.

Also, as a sidebar - apparently barely anybody has put in the effort to try to build $WELL_KNOWN_INFRA_TOOL for Windows on Unix in the last decade and a half, and somewhere down the stack it just completely blows up because of preprocessor hell in a cross-build environment. My favorite thing in the world is when a header is included with nice and neat capitalization that doesn't match the actual file's (entirely lowercase) capitalization, so it builds just fine on MS because MS filesystems aren't case-sensitive and dies on Unix because someone wanted their includes to look pretty. I have done black magic to this dependency tree to get it close to building and then it still dies because of platform-specific linker options that are getting improperly set in a CMakeList. There's reasons why we're building this from source instead of using a package for it, but it's a huge morass of fiddly that I'm allowed to keep bashing my head on because if we get this to work, the payoff for our whole CI environment is huge. Somehow I've only had two drinks in the last six months.

(Apologies if you find the formatting obnoxious but I'm trying to keep a minimal degree of opsec.)

MinGW and MSVC capitalize their header names differently, so it's possible they were correct for the person who wrote them.

My civil-engineering organization only recently upgraded from a version of CAD software that was literally twenty years old—not for budgetary reasons, but because the old codger in charge of the CAD unit saw no need to upgrade, and dug in his heels to resist upgrading until just a few years before he retired. There were regular problems with renewing the license for it.

Ooooof, that sounds rough. At least my shop is aware of the licensing problem - part of our major infra push is an effort to fix it, but we're still kinda kneecapped by policy at the end of the day.

I switched from doing Java Spring Boot microservice development at one company to doing the exact same thing at another company.

Well, not the exact same thing.

Old Job:

  • Provided a somewhat innovative software product/platform/service that helped private companies get a good deal on transport logistics.
  • Was an organizational mess that never got its goals straight.
  • Was a somewhat international affair with English as the lingua franca.
  • Did run-of-the-mill agile software development, and had fairly mature and functional processes.
  • I started out in a local team, but transitioned to an international one.
  • I did it all Working From Home, poorly.
  • Paid decently.

New job:

  • Provides an extremely specific financial product/in-house software platform/service that helps private individuals maximize their gains from government subsidies.
  • Is fairly well-organized overall, but is very set in its ways and responds glacially to any problems.
  • Is an extremely localized company, almost provincial in terms of who works here. Obviously German is the only language in use here. Even our code is in German!
  • Does "agile" software development, which should make any software dev laugh out loud but all the people here except me never worked anywhere else and don't know just how ludicrously not agile their practices are. It makes sense, of course - the company isn't in the business of going fast and breaking things; it needs to observe a million regulations and sell financial products that last a lifetime. Fun activities here include doing tons of manual testing, having reviews every step of the way, several layers of quality control and redundancy on everything, and needing manual authorization by this authority or that for things that devs would be expected to handle on their own anywhere else. I keep needing to explain why I want to even write unit tests, and I need to admit that given the slow pace of development and the very thorough manual testing they are not quite as essential here as I thought them elsewhere.
  • I work with a local team, and it's great because I actually get to know the people and we speak in dialect. Absolutely excellent.
  • I work in the office, which is also great because I actually get things done. At least as long as I keep my phone switched off so I can't receive messages from home.
  • I get paid somewhat generously. I also suspect that my experience and abilities were grossly overestimated in the hiring process (I deny responsibility here; I'm very certain I did not oversell myself), but it seems both sides are willing to make it work anyways.

Overall I'm happy with the change. I still ask myself sometimes whether I should've maybe taken a more technologically interesting job, but eh, everything else about it is pretty decent.

> Even our code is in German!

> Java Spring Boot

Must lead to some long class names...

Ex: AbstractAutomatischeKonfigurationsStrategieProxyFactoryBeanImplementierungDelegate

Hah! Yes it does, except for names that need to match those of our COBOL systems, which have something like a 32 character limit.

So we end up with names like AAutoKonfigStratPFacBImplDel.

Uncle Bob wouldn't survive a day here.

More people need to make lengthy posts about their cool jobs in the vein of my previous post

My current job is fake and lame, but maybe I'll manage to get off my ass at some point and write a few words on the day in the life of a System Design Agent. Or, before that, a Technical Writer allowed to do exactly zero writing/editing.

Since renaming bodies of water is a thing these days, I'd like to point out that the "north sea" is a particularly bland name. Are there any better historic names?

Dogger Sea

Sea of Doggers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogger_(boat)

I'm just envisioning a particular corner of the ocean to which weary sailors travel in pursuit of rough, anonymous sex.

You know about the barrel, don't you?

"Sea of America" has a nice ring to it...

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