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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   1750 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for December 21, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Yeah, fuck the critics. I'll take whatever SMTM is doing over the experts who came up with the food pyramid with 6-11 servings of bread at the bottom. I can understand how "real" scientists feel threatened when SMTM is doing interesting work and they are, by and large, not.

this is a bad reason to support something. it's possible for both parties to be wrong.

Huh? It's possible for SMTM to do bad science while most nutritionists also do bad science. Same way Ray Peat does it.

I can understand how "real" scientists feel threatened

"Natália Coelho Mendonça" isn't a nutrition scientist or anything afaict, they're just a smart person?

agree. bad science is not just limited to 'health authorities'.

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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."

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