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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29422 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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It's a mirror of LessWrong for people who don't like the way LessWrong 2.0 looks and prefer something closer to the original.

If you don't know what LessWrong is and how it relates to The Motte, here's a quick rundown:

The Rationalist community was born during the 2 years in which Eliezer Yudkowsky, author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, blogged daily, first on Robin Hanson's blog, Overcoming Bias, then later on his own blog called LessWrong. These blog posts are known as The Sequences, and form the foundation of modern rationality discourse. For more on Eliezer's backstory, please see my earlier comment on /r/CultureWarRoundup.

A few years after Eliezer stopped blogging, LessWrong declined to the point of irrelevance and the community moved on to various other websites, an event known as the Rationalist diaspora. Scott Alexander (author of Unsong), who had made a name for himself on LessWrong under the pseudonym Yvain, started a blog called Slate Star Codex, which became the major website of the diaspora. So popular was this website that it spawned it's own subreddit, /r/slatestarcodex.

Like in a lot of other forums, political discussion started taking over the sub; the solution was to corral all political talk to a single recurring thread called the Culture War Thread, which quickly became the single most popular thread on the subreddit, accruing thousands of comments each week. Eventually, under pressure from critics (most notably /r/SneerClub), Scott decided to evict the thread from the sub. Those who wanted to continue the thread created a new subreddit, /r/TheMotte, where the thread continues to this day. You can think of it as the rationalist politics subreddit, much like this is the rationalist fiction subreddit.

And you didn't ask about this one, but since it will probably come up, /r/CultureWarRoundup is a competing alternative to /r/TheMotte created by users who were dissatisfied with the latter's moderation policies.

I prefer using it to not feed cookie data to the Lesswrong cabal directly.

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.


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