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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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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.

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naraburns nihil supernum 7mo ago (text post) 5884 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for March 2024

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.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.

Contributions to the Main Motte

"Denials - even very stupid denials - might be an adaptive strategy in most circumstances."

"I got drunk for the better part of a decade. You think you want this life, listen up, because there's a price to pay for those stories."

@felis-parenthesis:

"Asking 'Do you believe Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation is true?' is doing the 20000 foot overview thing. It can only lead to vague waffle."

@George_E_Hale:

The Motte: A Working Glossary

@self_made_human:

"You're mostly right. Psychiatry is largely pre-paradigmatic. We only have very vague ideas about the underlying underpinnings of many of the most common diseases."

"One of the problems is that we are so used to living in the World That Liberalism Made that we can't really often see how radical the core ideas of liberalism were and, indeed, are (if you don't take them as given)."

"Over a year ago, I started a project where I gave a ranked countdown of all the albums of the 4000+ I’ve spent the last decade scrupulously evaluating."

Contributions for the week of February 26, 2024

Health Scare

@self_made_human:

"Any wonders I wish we could all be smarter so my chosen preference of letting everyone decide, for better or worse, about their health, would cost less in bodies and money? I'll still pay with mine."

@ControlsFreak:

"But how effective is it? How costly is it? How efficient compared to possible alternatives? Who knows? Who cares?"

Affirmative Faction

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

"Which is to say, from this perspective, affirmative action is a red herring and rhetorical distraction."

"The reasons for why civil rights legislation, including affirmative action, have been enacted and are maintained in the US have at least at much to do with external as with internal policy."

Why Not Both?

"Have you considered that people are just really unhappy that wealth and status are siphoned from productive, law-abiding people and given to non-productive and violent people?"

Contributions for the week of March 4, 2024

"Basically, if you have the freedom inside a system to act mostly how you want and have steering power over your own future, you have free will."

@ArmedTooHeavily:

"The current state of Portland makes the costs of these luxury beliefs ubiquitous and impossible to ignore."

@MaximumCuddles:

"Just because the earthquake stopped and the house is still standing doesn’t mean it is not still in the process of falling over."

"There's just no sense that the writers had any understanding of the way people in these roles and with these responsibilities think and operate."

"My general conclusion is: contrary to Jack Turban, and the general pre-2022-ish pro-trans discourse, gender affirming care, especially it's pediatric variant, is not uncontroversial within medicine, it's not The Science, it's an experiment."

"High-IQ high-SES bubbles, where members have been filtered for agreeability and conscientiousness since birth, function without the librarian. Other spaces cannot."

Let's Talk About Us

"The Motte is not intended, nor is it fit, to Do Something."

@WestphalianPeace:

"I find this forum to be a civilizational candle in the dark in these ircivilizational times. And that means taking the religious among us here seriously."

Contributions for the week of March 11, 2024

"The 'radical fringe' which is neither"

"On disparate impact, prejudice, American civil rights law, and academic vs. lay definitions of words."

"Blankslatism is a huge drain on group efficiency, understanding HBD increases efficiency."

@hydroacetylene:

"What Happened to Society's Life Script"

What is a Man?

"It is clear that what educational and social institutions want are meek, inoffensive and productive men who do not question the rules of society."

@100ProofTollBooth:

"I think the crux of it lies in the fact that a society wide ritual of real consequence to mark the transition from boy to man has been effectively eliminated."

"You left out 4) Men aren't allowed to have anything to themselves anymore, ever."

"...progressives can't do 'male role models' because progressives are fundamentally opposed to the existence of men."

Contributions for the week of March 18, 2024

"Indian elections are coming up in a month, and seeing the rising importance of India, I wanted to do a series on culture wars in Indian politics, give you a bit of the historical context of what's going on."

"I can't see the US being globally competitive in manufacturing anything that needs a Li-Ion battery in it 20 years from now."

"The current paradigm is 'women's bodies are defective male bodies, men's brains are defective women's brains.'"

@FiveHourMarathon:

"The TikTok Ban, Male Role Models, the New Punk, and the Right to be Cool in American Society"

@PyotrVerkhovensky:

"Having recently finished Cochrane's Fiscal Theory of the Price Level, I was primarily struck by how contrived all modern macro-economic models are, whether Monetarist, New Keynesian, or Fiscal."

Free as in Software

"During my run yesterday, I gave a listen to the oral arguments from Murthy v. Missouri that had happened earlier in the day."

"A Map for the Regulation and Destruction of Free Software."

@ControlsFreak:

"As such, I think the freedom of speech part is kind of a distraction for what should really be considered freedom of the modern press."

Contributions for the week of March 25, 2024

"Health, Fitness, Obesity, and Politics"

"I don't know that there's any theory that neatly ties all this together. I'll just say, as someone who's been a leftist Democrat all my life, seeing Democrats whine about Republicans for so many decades without taking responsibility to improve themselves has largely made me check out of politics over the past half-decade to a decade."

"Is it still a conspiracy if they're not literally wearing capes and bathing in blood?"

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Walterodim Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t 7mo ago

Alternatively, March was a wildly productive Motte-month. I like to believe that AAQC posts tend to have required a bit of actual thought to get the framing and message to hit the way you're looking for. Not exactly a money-maker, but helpful for trying to keep the noggin joggin.

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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

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Recommended Realtime Chats

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