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naraburns  nihil supernum  9d ago (text post)   5510 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for April 2025

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.

Quality Contributions to the Main Motte

@Throwaway05:

@ArjinFerman:

@Closedshop:

Contributions for the week of March 31, 2025

@Dean:

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

@cjet79:

@coffee_enjoyer:

@ThenElection:

Contributions for the week of April 7, 2025

@100ProofTollBooth:

@LacklustreFriend:

@Dean:

@FiveHourMarathon:

@TitaniumButterfly:

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

@Gooofuckyourself:

@MadMonzer:

Contributions for the week of April 14, 2025

@FtttG:

@phosphorus2:

@RandomRanger:

@Dean:

@urquan:

Contributions for the week of April 21, 2025

@hydroacetylene:

@OracleOutlook:

@Rov_Scam:

@Dean:

@BreakerofHorsesandMen:

@naraburns:

Contributions for the week of April 28, 2025

@OracleOutlook:

@aiislove:

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I'm disappointed that I missed @coffee_enjoyer 's post on audience manipulation in Adolescence. It vindicates an intuition that I've long held (since high school at least) that the average person is completely defenseless and unaware of the psychological damage that is being done to them by popular media. It's the mental equivalent of being a radium dial painter or a pre-modern lead smelter.

Another poster in that thread asked you for your research notes. Do you know of any accessible articles or books on this subject that I could share with normie friends and family?

Good analogy. We're now living in the epoch were we have discovered radioactive materials but have zero idea what the ionizing radiation does to the body - only in the informational/cognitive space. So, thorium toothpaste, radium showers, radium-spiked beer (gives you extra energy!), and so on. Stuff that makes you hairs stand on end reading about it now - only the society has no idea yet what is happening.

Another poster in that thread asked you for your research notes. Do you know of any accessible articles or books on this subject that I could share with normie friends and family?

I haven’t found a singular source for this kind of “dark arts” of manipulation. Everything I’ve learned has been via trawling through studies on google scholar, I’m afraid. If I write a longer post on all the ways we can be inadvertently / invisibly manipulated, I’ll ping.

Not the OP, but the framing (social sciences) page on wikipedia isn't the worst place to start. The page has a fair amount of info, but additional related topics, like spin (propaganda).

Once you get a handle of connotation usage as a practice, honestly TV Tropes isn't a bad place to deep-dive as well. A lot of the trop pages describing a trope will have a smaller section of related / adjacent tropes. For propaganda purposes, these distinctions can make a difference, since a trope that is associated with more heroic connotations can be subverted by a related trope with more nefarious nuances, and so on.

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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!

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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."

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