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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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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) 4175 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for May 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. Here we go:

Quality Contributions in the Main Motte

@ControlsFreak:

"No one thinks that when you go to the grocery store, or go to buy a TV, a refrigerator, or car, or anything else, that you should first have to just give them all your financial information so that they can tailor your price."

@OracleOutlook:

"A definitive list of Catholic Dogmas and their teaching weight has been made, yes."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

"High-performing brains ride the edge of metastability and wrangle representations easily; low-performing ones waste power fending off chaos and lose track of the context."

"Coed settings have their own dynamic."

"A lot of gatekeeping discourse in trans spheres reflected practices based around WPATH SoC v6; while this officially only ran from 2001-2011 (most of that under the name Harry Benjamin International Genders Dysphoria Association), it had a pretty significant foundational effect..."

"So it seems to me that if I'm to be a Christian, this directly implies feeding my child to the dogs. And if I'm to do otherwise, this fully generalizes to Hitler."

"That’s why, whenever a demagogue starts to gesture at the Other, we think of Hitler. He demonstrated that full arc, from growth to apex to disaster."

" But ultimately, how scary is it to know your deeply held convictions are subject to materialistic opportunism?"

Contributions for the week of May 1, 2023

@Quantumfreakonomics:

"The purpose of empathy is to approximate good decision theory."

@ApplesauceIrishCream:

"I've been trying to get myself to do a writeup of Walter Russell Mead's four traditions of American foreign policy..."

@FiveHourMarathon:

"A world where Bud Light's customers do at least a little critical examination of what they consume will probably improve the world."

"Steal money, buy compute."

@Primaprimaprima:

"Covid didn't really teach us anything new. But I do think it was possibly the first example that showed how spectacularly easy it is to manipulate mass sentiment in the social media age."

@raggedy_anthem:

"Tourist pamphlets play up Louisiana’s French-ness. In reality, the Creole elite has not been in the driver’s seat since Reconstruction, and arguably since before the Civil War."

"No, we should not allow insane people to roam the subways threatening others. But there are many possible solutions between 'do nothing' and 'kill them all'."

"tl;dr - recently I did a flyout for a humanities job in the US, and wow, it put me off returning to US academia in a big way."

@coffee_enjoyer:

"Christians are not golems designed to do good for outsiders continually."

Contributions for the week of May 8, 2023

@self_made_human:

"An Indian Abroad in Thailand"

"American cultural exports"

"More than 77% of all sex discrimination complaints filed with the OCR are filed by a single person, at a rate of about 20 complaints per day..."

@FiveHourMarathon:

"Shakespeare, Honor, Unitary Leadership, and How To End the Culture War"

"Interestingly, I think the difference between the Special Olympics and the Paralympics is a very good intuition pump for the trans and intersex in women's sports issue."

"Defamation Bear Trap"

"Our legal system increasingly resembles a system of 'might makes right' if you have enough powerful people on your side then the law can literally be what you want it to be."

Contributions for the week of May 15, 2023

"So yesterday Turkish Presidential and Parliamentary elections took place. I wanted to give an overview of the main characters and themes."

"The ironic outcome of this is that for advocates of increased densification, you end up trying to make a fundamentally capitalist argument (less regulation will make us richer) on terms of anything but capitalism."

@Primaprimaprima:

"I think those high-falutin' art snobs do get some things right (it would be weird if they were so dysfunctional that they got everything exactly wrong)."

"Consolidated Markets in Healthcare"

"The reason Anheuser-Busch being boycotted is that they got dragged into the culture war."

@FarNearEverywhere:

"[T]here are people who shoplift because they genuinely have no money and are hungry or their kids are hungry. The vast majority are not these cases."

@raggedy_anthem:

"You could call Rangel an unwitting pawn of white supremacy, but then you would have to explain the other 95% of his career."

Contributions for the week of May 22, 2023

"What are the limits of the weak man?"

"I sort of lean towards weak-manning not being a thing, and any view that anyone holds is fair game."

@DaseindustriesLtd:

"I suspect that the biggest intellectual deficit of the rationalist culture is precisely this preoccupation with the meta."

@SecureSignals:

"The point here is that Holocaust Revisionism went from being a quirky movement of libertarian-adjacent autists to a genuine political dissident movement."

"International Updates"

@hydroacetylene:

"Texas politics update: Articles of impeachment are being floated against attorney general Ken Paxton, the most important culture war figure you don't think of very often."

"We rarely agree on things, but I absolutely agree with you that the gay and trans movement is motivated by the same impulse that motivates individualist, get-the-government-out-of-my-wallet libertarian conservatism."

"Most of what you think you know about sex/romance/dating is a feminist lie, fed to you through a combination of the education system and the media, or people repeating falsehoods they themselves learned from school and movies and TV shows."

@felis-parenthesis:

"One of the rival positions is monocensorship. The other position is bicensorship."

"As I've said before I feel like the left's dominance of academia and traditional media has effectively left a Hobbes-and-Burke-shaped hole in the discourse."

"Our established systems are failing en masse, and there's a blatant disconnect between the way things are hypothetically supposed to work, and the way they actually work."

Contributions for the week of May 29, 2023

"The message of reddit is no longer the actual thoughts of its users: it's the message of reddit as medium - that is, a highly restrictive diet of information curated by those wanting to impose a particular reality tunnel on its users."

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Folamh3 1yr ago

Thanks for the nomination! For the full experience, I recommend reading the article on my newsletter: https://firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com/p/american-cultural-exports

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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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