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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3996 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 30, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I'm a smart person, and I'm certain that even if I hadn't discovered LW or Scott in my late teens, I'd have wandered into spaces where I'd have heard the same concepts eventually.

Don't be so sure. When I was in college, these places DIDN'T EXIST. It took the internet to bring together the critical mass to make it happen.

You certainly weren't going to be exposed to rationalist ideas on a typical college campus or by reading the New Yorker or the Economist or anything. The gulf between the writing of someone like Scott, and the publications available to a layperson in the 1990s is vast.

Even today, let's say TheMotte/SSC/LessWrong don't exist. Where are you going to get information that isn't hopelessly normie biased?

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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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