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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.
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
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- When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
- Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
- Accept temporary bans as a time-out, and don't attempt to rejoin the conversation until it's lifted.
- Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity.
- Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
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Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I dub this the official rdrama.net visit thread; importantly, the single rdrama.net visit thread, because y'all are kinda spamming the place with low-content stuff.
Post it here and keep it within community standards.
Sorry I'm from rdrama and I posted another thread just now but it was before I had seen this and I posted it to let you know your stickies are broken!
They should be fixed now!
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Not fair! I tried to post my thread back when you guys had like three posts, and then your site died...
Yeah it's been a bit rocky. Sorry 'bout that :)
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Hi, I came here from rdrama, but I like the concept of this community, so I'm eager to lurk a bit and learn more.
You say "low-content" rather than "low-quality" or "low-effort". Does this imply that you look for sheer volume of a post above other metrics? Is brevity and conciseness something you value at all, or should I strive to put as many words to the page as possible?
The culture of this forum, and the forums it descends from, dislike brevity; it may be the soul of wit, but it is the bane of rationalists, whose idols are all infamous for taking a thousand words to say a hundred-word idea. That is not to say that the best posts and favorite posters have nothing interesting to say, merely that the shapers of the culture did not know how to speak succinctly, and it has colored the perspective of everyone drawn to these spaces.
The ideal post is interesting and high-quality, but undeniably you look better if your posts are longer. I greatly dislike this, but I get it; it's not perfect, but the effort to write out an essay is often incompatible with low-effort shitposting.
I sincerely hope this can change. If a sentence gets the point across, a paragraph is wasted time for everyone.
If.
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90 percent of the time I short post and I've never gotten shit for it. Except for when I'm a dumbass, but that isn't really a length issue
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We've never modded posts just for being one-liners if a single line expresses a point succinctly. The vast majority of posts on themotte, even those that received AAQCs, were not long essays.
What we dislike are "lol," "I agree," "These people suck," etc. (even if expressed in complete grammatical sentences), and various forms of shitposting. The more you tolerate one-line zingers or adds-nothing "likes/dislikes," the more the place starts to look like every other Internet forum.
Maybe the end result is that we tend to select for wordiness. Shrug.
Yeah, I get it. Wordiness is a proxy for effort, but like all proxies, it eventually starts being valued for its own sake.
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Yeah. The reason I ask is because a considerable amount of (really, most of) the effort I put into a post is paring it down from a stream on consciousness ramble to something that actually will get my point across.
Like if you really want long posts it would be trivial for me to produce long meaningless essays that state the same point in fifteen different ways, but personally; as a reader, that type of writing style can be frustrating.
If the reader feels like their time is being wasted it will be difficult to convince them to seriously consider an opposing view. Patience is a limited resource, after all. Plus, I'd hate to have someone waste all their effort reading my bullshit and then forgo reading something actually meaningful as a result.
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You can get away with short posts here as long as you state your point clearly. Keeping things laconic takes a lot of effort and skill in language but it's hard to tell the difference at a glance between a nessessarily short post and a lazy shitpost.
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mottemods have the usual bias for longposting, but they want actual content in the same way that netflix wants content. Stuff that drives people here.
So interesting perspectives and being a political weirdo gets you rather far.
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You’re very boring.
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