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
- Courtesy
- Content
- Engagement
- When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
- Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
- Accept temporary bans as a time-out, and don't attempt to rejoin the conversation until it's lifted.
- Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity.
- Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
- The Wildcard Rule
- The Metarule
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
More graphs and ways to think about identity vs distribution of attributes
I'm thinking about breasts, and I think you're missing a more important question than the gaussian distribution.
Shitty sketch graph
{In my limited experiences as a hetero male} Women identify their breasts as important or not important less by the size of their breasts than by their bodyweight. In this model, women prefer to be skinny, but if they can't reasonably say they are skinny it is better to be "curvy" with big tits than be a pudgeball. So a woman with small tits will still identify herself as curvy (emphasize her breasts) if she's fat, but a woman with large tits will identify as skinny even if she has large breasts. A woman with medium-sized breasts will emphasize or de-emphasize how nice they are based on her body weight, a mostly-unrelated variable.
Or consider, guys identifying as Jocks or as Nerds. Second shitty sketch graph
Guys to the upper left, more athletic than smart, identify as jocks; guys to the lower right of the line, smarter than they are athletic, identify as nerds. But the result is that many guys who identify as nerds aren't actually as smart as guys who identify as jocks. And many guys who identify as nerds are actually a lot stronger than guys who identify as jocks. Which attribute you identify with has less to do with what you have than with what you lack, it's the balance between the two that makes the difference.
So I think, to cite SA on themotte, the best way to figure out if someone identifies as something odd has to do with a need for a quirk to avoid being "basic." So maybe it's like skinny vs curvy, you'd rather be a manly man, but if you can't be manly you'd rather be nonbinary.
*The Jalen Hurts joke It's gonna get memed so bad when he starts losing games.
"Women so ugly I don't notice or know them"
Dangerously based
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link