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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   24281 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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and what are you really left with?

A value that's still more than you sitting around and doing whatever else you do.

If I actually considered vague abstract probabilities like this worth acting on I'd probably be doing all kinds of dumb shit all the time.

This wouldn't actually be the case, if you were convinced a single path was better expected value. Then you'd just do that single thing.

A value that's still more than you sitting around and doing whatever else you do.

I disagree. Doing whatever I want without having to consider what Zeus might think of it has value unto itself. I'm not pulling a mythology out of a hat and basing my life around it because there's an abstract philosophical nonzero chance that Tiamat is real or something and maybe I'll have lucked out and guessed correctly.

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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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