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
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Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
Apple died on March 24, 2001 -- the current company is a skinsuit optimized for extracting money from stupid people; fite me.
Easy.
M1.
Skinsuit leechers don't produce state of the art CPU architectures. Ask Oracle how many they've done since they started wearing Sun.
You may say they're not as good at product design as they used to be, but that's only because they went from best of all time to best in the world.
Not to mention if the glasses catch on, that'll arguably be an equal or greater feat than the iPhone. They'll eat the entire market for monitors if that gamble works out.
And I say all this as someone who deeply hates Apple's business model and refuses to buy their products on principle. People who expected they would get stuck after Jobs death, including myself, were just wrong.
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