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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3184 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 23, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

Still on The End of Faith, Menace of the Herd and Non-Computable You. Picking up Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, which seems overdue.

After the discussion in here, I picked up The Mote in God's Eye. Haven't gotten very far into it yet (just to the point of the first contact), but it made me wonder if Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky was conceived as a rebuttal to this novel.

Military-inspired hardons aside, the novel has some of the worst characterization I've read in a critically-acclaimed sci-fi novel. Egan and Liu are Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky when compared to the Pournelle/Niven duo.

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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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