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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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naraburns nihil supernum 1yr ago (text post) 5462 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for April 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.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. Here we go:

Quality Contributions to the Main Motte

"A long time ago, some primitive apes got addicted to rocks."

"Three Felonies A Day was less interested in asking how hard it was to comply with the law, and more interested in asking whether the laws really mattered when police, prosecutors, and sometimes even judges were willing and happy to accept novel frameworks for the right target or high enough (or low enough) stakes."

"Book Review: The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution"

Contributions for the week of April 3, 2023

"O’Toole’s criticisms of trains are not inherent to their engineering, but in very large part contingent on the way the investment in car infrastructure saps away their ridership."

@FiveHourMarathon:

"A peasant village? Never. But up until the mid-late twentieth century, the rich had very personal relationships with their servants."

"It's Morning in California. Rather, it's Morning in the legislative season, a time when big ideas seem possible, before they disappear into a swamp of obscure pitfalls and shenaniganry."

"Given...certain recent events, there might be a renewed interest in discussing what redress (if any) we might have when a prosecutor misbehaves."

Recognition Diplomacy

"But being denied the apparent moral victory of being personally involved in electing America's First Woman President was (for many) apparently so, so much more than just another loss."

"But when you're making products for a business, you run into the issue of actually having to appeal to potential customers so that they give you their money for the product."

@FiveHourMarathon:

"Don't teach that Nazis were extraordinary for being villains, or that Jews were extraordinary for being victims."

Contributions for the week of April 10, 2023

"Minsky's Marvelous Minutia, or why I'm bearish on GPT"

@TracingWoodgrains:

"People often defend surrogacy with the idea that people have the right to do what they want with their bodies. I appreciate and respect those willing to stand in a libertarian defense of something I value, but for my part, I strongly prefer a more affirmative case."

@FlyingLionWithABook:

"Natural Law is the philosophical setting out of which all modern Western societies came."

"Why isn’t anarchism talked about more?"

"Imagine if the US was genuinely tough on crime, if they made a serious effort to kill or detain serious criminals, permanently remove them from circulation."

Transitive Reasoning

"For many people whose exposure to transgenderism has been filtered through sympathetic lenses — popular media or news about transgender oppression — this may be their first genuine glimpse at the uglier side of it."

@self_made_human:

"If we had the technology to safely (ideally reversibly) transition people to the opposite sex at a cellular level, such that they were functionally indistinguishable from someone assigned the same gender at birth, then I see no reason to object! I"

"If we're lucky, this new ideology might be better, might not have any side effects, might not change us, and might never go away. Wait..."

"But if you're just a base-human in the future, your life will be decided by others forever."

@TracingWoodgrains:

"Rarely is the chasm between my own thought and mainstream thought so apparent as when conversation turns to advertisers."

Contributions for the week of April 17, 2023

"There are three broad classes of radioactive nuclear waste..."

@ControlsFreak:

"School/education on its own seems relatively fine. It's just the particular way we go about it that ruins everything."

"...if a bunch has been written about a topic, ChatGPT actually has quite a lot of knowledge about that topic, and the trick is creating a context where a human who knew the thing you wanted to know would have expressed that knowledge."

Identity Politics

@throwawaygendertheorist:

"Why biological sex and not 'gender identity' matters for norms, culture and language"

"If I want to date you, I want to know your sex, not your gender; If I'm working with you, I want to know neither."

@SophisticatedHillbilly:

"The same boiling that hardens the egg softens the potato"

"There is no general solution to the problem of tolerance, only best-fit local solutions."

Contributions for the week of April 24, 2023

"Imagine if worship of Greek gods had survived to the present day--a religion of, say, 20 million, with half living in Greece but the other half in various diasporas around the world. In that hypothetical world, who is plausibly 'Greek?'"

"I guess the problem with reddit is the redditors."

"What is going in Sudan is a practical demonstration that being a global power does not mean that everything going on in the world is secretly about you."

@self_made_human:

"Dr. GPT will see you now"

Discriminating Taste

"I'm not interested in resegregation in any way, but I think people are really bad at understanding the historical perspective."

"Discrimination is pervasive, overt, systemic, and often explicitly codified."

"Can you imagine a modern politician being in favor of legalizing something that they thought was deeply morally wrong?"

"We've engaged in heroic levels of social engineering to try to eliminate discrimination and racism. To the extent that such elimination is actually possible, I'd say we've done it."

@MonkeyWithAMachinegun:

"Be present in your child's life."

"There is a reason we don't just leave cigarettes or alcohol or sexual activity to the good judgment and curious nature of children."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

"There's a profound epistemic benefit to learning about HBD as a scientifically sound framework."

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aqouta 1yr ago

The difference is in monopoly scenarios, which is kind of the root of the problem. If the desert man engineered the situation in which you are dying of thirst then I'd say they did something wrong. The reason someone isn't already selling the product at marginal cost is monopoly power, so when the monopolist comes around and only demands 5000% of the marginal cost instead of 10000% it's maybe not as generous as it seems.

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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

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