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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2034 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for June 14, 2023

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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Having one megathread in which most things are happening helps with engagement, and separating things out would dilute attention and decrease activity, at least under my current mental model.

This is definitely true . . .

. . . if you assume that users are kept constant. It may be that splitting things up actually attracts more users because people can join communities that are better-suited for them. This is the transition that Reddit made, several times, with great success.

Are we at that point? No idea, which is why if I do this I want to ensure that I have ways to undo it and good metrics on what's going on. But it's at least something I'd be willing to try.

That's a good point. The attracting users might have to be done carefully—users won't stick to one community, and if culture war things are our core thing, we'd hope the new users wouldn't make that too much worse…

Really depends on what sorts of users it might attract.

I would honestly be happy if this whole site somehow changed so that culture war things weren't the core thing. I'd be happy if the general concept of Tolerate Disagreement was the core thing, and Tolerate Disagreement About The Culture War was merely a niche.

Hard to get there from here, of course.

(I'd be less happy if doing this required completely eliminating Tolerate Disagreement About The Culture War, I probably wouldn't take that tradeoff.)

Fair enough.

I think politics-y topics are unusually likely to be ones where people don't tolerate disagreement, though, and so politics would be a large part of the hardly-anywhere-else-will-tolerate-disagreement-on-this-topic niche?

(I'm also not even that sure that we're that great at tolerating disagreement, though surely much better than the internet average.)

I think that's generally true, but pretty much everything is politics-adjacent now and then. That doesn't mean everything needs to be all politics all the time though. Certainly Reddit has a problem where the moment anything becomes political, it turns into Hivemind Central.

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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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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).

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