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This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a
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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 -
I do. I worry that that's the biggest problem in the world today, because the soul does exist. Or we are more than our image, whichever way you want to look at it. I want to talk more about it, but I don't know how. Especially when I see people buying into media narratives, which seem to be the foundation for reality for almost everyone in my life no matter what I say to them. So many people seem to think the the world works the way the movies they watched in their formative years told them it works and no amount of loudly screaming that Hollywood isn't reality has any effect, the instant the subject changes they immediately return to basing their reality on art.
It was a mistake to wipe your history though, appropriate or not.
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