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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.

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naraburns nihil supernum 1yr ago (text post) 6436 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for August 2023

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

Quality Contributions in the Main Motte

@Hoffmeister25:

"In which I pine for a monastic escape from the sexual rat race"

"Some proposed classes of problems that could lead to having a problem with a wide array of foods include..."

@ControlsFreak:

"So, well, if we can't come up with any good ideas to actually implement the principle in the face of the concrete thing that we want to do right now, the 'principle' will just be attested to verbally, as a signalling mechanism, while we proceed in just trodding all over it."

Contributions for the week of July 31, 2023

"...the disposition of a trans character will depend substantially on the trans-ness you put into your worldbuilding."

@ChestertonsMeme:

"I'm becoming more and more convinced that all of the negative aspects of American (sub)urban design post-1950 are basically compensation for not being able to exclude undesirables explicitly."

"The Virtue Theory of Money"

@raggedy_anthem:

"We might prefer one physical environment to another, but the main factor for where people live is the human environment - family, jobs, schools, crime."

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

"'Racism' now means whatever it is that progressive activist networks say it means on any given day, and in turn it's just one more term of abuse hurled by self-aggrandizing partisans heavily steeped in conflict theory who want good zero sum things for their allies and bad zero sum things for you."

Contributions for the week of August 7, 2023

"I used to be obese, I've used semeglutide, and I no longer am. There's more too it than that though."

"Why Cross-Examination Is So Damn Great"

"But the crux in epistemic, ideological, and political debates, is that the "we all know" is far less founded than in empirical examinations. When the examiner sets the frame, he controls the debate."

"Being moderates, both of them are liars: Rufo is lying about the past, claiming that Jefferson wasn't a white supremacist, and Robinson is lying about the present, claiming that Jefferson's white supremacy is at all relevant to the current situation."

Contributions for the week of August 14, 2023

"The problem with just doing what you want, is that you, like all other humans before you, are fucking stupid and will fuck this up."

@hydroacetylene:

"I think at the level of running a society there is no difference between stupid and evil and the right doesn't quite get why the left doesn't get that."

"And boy, that's a hell of a scissor statement graph, isn't it?"

@Hoffmeister25:

"Much of people’s moral reasoning about this dilemma centers on the question How much agency does each participant have in his or her choice?"

"Has the Beinoff Homelessness and Housing Initiative Report been discussed yet here?"

"Having spent some time in a homeless shelter myself for vulnerable youth, I am dismayed at how often this particular subset of the 'hidden homeless' population is overlooked."

"The detente cannot exist any more or be returned to because the necessary tension between liberalism and shared cultural restraint snapped and the institutions of the latter fell over."

"Christians positing the existence of Hell neither breaks your leg nor picks your pocket, any more than your claiming our God and Heaven does not exist."

"Native children didn't go to residential schools because they were 'kidnapped', they went because their parents believed it was better than the alternatives, including the alternative of not going to school at all."

Contributions for the week of August 21, 2023

"It's not socially acceptable to talk about anything other than 'good teachers/facilities', so everyone pretends that's what they care about."

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

"I think, ironically, it's an atheist conceit that 'theists' believe that 'religion' is generically good."

"The College of Psychologists of Ontario, as with the politically correct mob that colonized the technology sphere, has little to say regarding Peterson's actual clinical practice of psychology, but instead would prefer to engage in this same language policing game played by those who lambasted Linus on the kernel mailing list."

"There's a reason rationalists are sometimes accused of being quokkas. There is also a reason why, at a certain threshold, open-armed rationalists can be seen transforming virtually overnight into hardened black-pilled culture warriors."

Contributions for the week of August 28, 2023

"America First is an anti-doctrine. It anti-manufactures consent domestically."

@raggedy_anthem:

"Having everyone in a child's life treat them as a member of the opposite sex is, in fact, a pretty major psychological intervention."

@problem_redditor:

"The high-status, influential, thought leaders of our time do in fact promote such negative narratives about men, and it's ubiquitous in our institutions to the point that it's overtly endorsed by governments and many prominent organisations."

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BurdensomeCount Apparently "BIPOC" is a racial slur now. 1yr ago · Edited 1yr ago

Yeah, this here too. I personally consider myself to have an IQ close to 140 and that's around what I scored when you convert my SAT results, my GRE results and the proctored IQ test I sat once many moons ago, which probably means my true IQ is somewhere close to 135 (I made sure I was prepared and ready to go for all those tests, and we all tell ourselves some comfortable lies), and I certainly think I'm smarter than the average bear who frequents these parts. I'd be very surprised if the average here was actually 135.

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Context

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

Recommended Posts And Communities

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