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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.

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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.

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naraburns nihil supernum 1yr ago (text post) Edited 1yr ago 5996 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for January 2023

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

This month we have another special AAQC recognition for @drmanhattan16. This readthrough of Helen Joyce’s Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality garnered several AAQC nominations throughout the month:

Part 1 – The History of Transgenderism

Part 2 – The Causes and Rationalization of Transgenderism

Part 3 – How Transgenderism Harms Women And Children

Part 4 – How Transgenderism Took Over Institutions And How Some Women Are Fighting Back

Part 5 – Conclusion and Discussion

Now: on with the show!

Quality Contributions Outside the CW Thread

"Some of it reflects the modern youth being far more reviewable ('seeable-to-a-state') than any demographic in history, at far smaller scales, and social pressures encouraging that review."

"The censorship of social media was a direct response to its increased reach and popularity."

@OracleOutlook:

"But we don't see older people transition at significant rates, instead we see many detransition."

"Things like porn and pizza are not existential threats. The existential threat is the mismatch between a technological society's requirements and human social and cognitive reality."

"Srinivasan's book, The Network State is largely an attempt to envision how recent technological developments – mostly, crypto – might enable the formation of alternative societies that look quite a bit like what Stephenson envisioned."

"'Free debate amongst dissenting people' became right-coded, and hence the motte did too."

@Chrisprattalpharaptr:

"Mice live two years, scientists have shown that you can take differentiated T cells (not stem cells!), stimulate them with a virus, transfer them to a new mouse and so on and so forth for more than 10 years (!)."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

"Now that I think about it, not much has changed since 1988 and 'The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy.'"

"Poor areas are not awful because of tragic dirt; they are awful because they are filled with stupid, violent, impulsive people."

"So if we set aside the grimdark sci-fi scenarios for the moment, what are some near-term risks of humans using AI for evil?"

"At the end of the day, the barrier for gay sex is so insanely low that any 'competition' that happens is purely elective."

"The Yad Vashem 'Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names' includes both people who survived and people who died. "

@throwaway20230125:

Six Months in the Life of a Civil Engineer

Contributions for the week of December 26, 2022

@FiveHourMarathon:

"So I might hold a genuine belief, but have no interest in marginalizing myself by advocating it or implementing it in a useless way, while having an ultimate interest in implementing the idea in an effective way."

"I buried a beloved uncle this week and was asked to be a pallbearer in a Catholic mass."

Contributions for the week of January 2, 2023

@FiveHourMarathon:

"The Penfield Mood Organ and Me: Are We Already Transhuman by Chemistry and Mnemonics Rather than Engineering?"

"I think it's worth recapping American political history during the period during which Millennials became politically aware."

@JhanicManifold:

"The current scientific knowledge on optimizing muscle growth states that muscle growth mainly depends on 2 key variables under your control: daily protein intake and weekly workout volume. I'll go into each of these before mentioning other stuff."

"Without Islam, Pakistanis are just Indians, and that reality is indigestible to them."

@problem_redditor:

"Historically, the key event which formed Ukraine was the Polish Lithuanian commonwealth forming in 1569 (from a centuries long personal union)."

"But Christian conservatives I can only ever see as fair-weather friends - maybe we're allied on this particular political issue, but if your social milieu had gone another way, then we would've been enemies."

@LacklustreFriend:

"We are still experiencing the philosophical implications of the Darwinian Revolution."

Contributions for the week of January 9, 2023

" I am suspicious of the frequency with which (what are probably in all cases entirely predictably) 'mishandled documents' is becoming everyone's favorite 'gotcha!'"

"Transportation and housing are incredibly tightly linked in my view, since the point of living somewhere is to get to the locations you want to."

"During the present war the Finnish society has been firmly pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian."

"God is a bulwark in many ways, but the fact that I am committed to him in a durable way, and so are those I surround myself with, is certainly not the least of them."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

"The real point is: eugenicists, too, wanted to prevent existential risks arising from dysgenic civilizational collapse."

"For the better part of the last decade, at nearly every stage in the Ukraine crisis, Putin has had agency on how to proceed, and keeps fucking it up..."

Contributions for the week of January 16, 2023

@ControlsFreak:

"Preventing coercion is why we have secrecy in voting! Preventing coercion is what it's for!"

"And 'putting a hippy-dippy sheen on processes designed to make money' describes quite a bit of what WEF does, really."

"Ironically, the backstory of the final trilogy could have been the first film of it and garnered critical acclaim! Call it Fall Of Skywalker."

"Does Trump sue just to fundraise?"

@strappingfrequent:

" If Ukraine is willing to fight -- and polling indicates that they are -- then NATO has no reason to disrupt this status quo."

"Some complaints about Netflix's new adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front."

Contributions for the week of January 23, 2023

"Oi, Bruv, Can I See Your Porn Loisence"

@TracingWoodgrains:

"Heaven save me from misleading social science papers."

"Are The Global Elites Coordinating to Push LGBT Acceptance And Gender Theory?"

"When you grow up in an atmosphere where all the information about a practice is freely available, when many of the practices have already slowly secularized and been unbundled from religion, it is very easy to become a tourist going here and there, and never matching the achievements of a true pilgrim who sets out for a specific destination and knows where they're going."

"First They Came for the Fantasy Authors"

Contributions for the week of January 30, 2023

"It's physically possible to discuss the material without endorsing it (although whether such discussion would prepare students for an AP exam...), but do you really expect the average classroom to manage it?"

@TracingWoodgrains:

"In Defense of the New College Takeover"

@DaseindustriesLtd:

«Media is being honest and good to have you believe it's honest and good when it's actually deceptive and bad – and those few issues are central to its mission.»

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drmanhattan16 1yr ago

Amadan explicitly picked out creationists, not evolution skeptics. The motive is in the name, they explicitly believe that evolution is a complete lie, but pick holes to claim they are just skeptics.

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Context

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

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