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
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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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Notes -
You do realize that there are thousands of hypotheses that are similar to the strongyloides one that could be raised against any conceivable drug or other health intervention? Let me give you some examples:
What if toxoplasmosis is responsible for the effectiveness of ivermectin? Afterall, toxo makes covid worse, and some studies report ivm helps with toxo. Do people have to debunk this too before using ivm?
Or, what if fluvoxamine doesn't help with covid, but instead helps with depression? Afterall, depression makes COVID a lot worse, and fluvoxamine is known to help with depression. Further, women suffer more from depression, and in several studies, the benefit of fluvoxamine seems to be disproportionately concentrated towards women. Do people have to debunk this before using fluvoxamine?
And what if there is some other, unknown effect, that Paxlovid has, which we are unaware of, which confounds or mediates the results of its clinical trials? How much research has been done on that question?
You see where I'm going with this. How is it not yet another isolated demand for rigor?
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