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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   22760 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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I sounded the alarm when Nate Silver accidentally posted a 100% AI generated hoax article about Tim Walz, and nobody listened.

Now, our very own self_made_human, a generally intelligent and well regarded poster here, has succumbed to the exact same trap and posted a 100% AI generated hoax article about OpenAI and the UAE.

It appears that this problem is getting out of hand. In the past (let's say <2022) we had shitty reporting too, with low quality tabloids like daily mail, kotaku, vice, etc. posting poorly sourced sensationalist stories. But at least for those, they had human authors on the payroll whose job was to find sensationalist stories that were ideally true. And the tabloids could be sued for defamation if their false claims went too far, meaning that anything too spicy had to enough evidence, however thin, to cover ass for lawsuits.

Now we have 100 million Indians all trying to set up fake websites masquerading as "news" all hooked up to script kiddie scripts and ChatGPT, configured to pump out stories without the hand of a human even touching on the process. There was no human who even pressed a button to generate the fake article about Tim, just a cronjob that triggered the generate_todays_hoax() function like it does every day. And they simply need to put up lookalikes of real news sites (think scameras, white van speakers, etc.) and pay black hat SEOs to get their results into Google/Yahoo and get eyeballs on their absolute diarrhea of shit.

And yes, I admit that writers can use AI to help them be more productive and effective. But that absolutely isn't what's happening here. These scammers/hoaxers are only after clicks/money and have literally 0 care for the accuracy or reality of their bullshit at all.

You can clearly see that "business today" is AI generated fake USA today, "economic times" is fake The Economist / Financial Times, etc...

I would like to humbly ask everyone here to please be aware that these grift websites (distinct from AI output in general, feel free to chat with ChatGPT on your own time) have zero truth value and should be regarded as about as trustworthy as those nigerian prince emails in your inbox. The people creating this slop are literally malicious hoaxers and scammers who only see you as moneybags and run this as a side gig from their main job of scamming grandmas in tech support scams.

Edit: It appears that business today does in fact publish real human written articles in addition to fake AI hoaxes, so uhhh your mileage may vary

It's not clear to me why linking to AI-generated articles is far worse than, say, linking to a human-written article with tons of falsehoods. If AI is writing entire articles and confabulating facts that didn't happen, the problem is that a person linking to the article is assuming those facts are true when they aren't. Why does it matter if a bot wrote them or a human did?

The idea that the internet will soon be swamped in AI generated nonsense isn't convincing either, since Indians and Indonesians were always cheap and could reliably hash out SEO slop for pennies on the dollar. This led to a modest degradation of Google search results, but you could always still find the facts without too much trouble if you were aware of this.

AI generated nonsense is approximately 40,000 times cheaper than hiring an Indian to make human nonsense.

Some quick google check says that human Indian ghostwriters charge approx 5 INR per word, so for 1M words it would cost approximately $60,000. GPT-4.1 mini costs $1.60 / 1M tokens.

Let me say that again, it would cost you $40,000 to hire human slopwriters to write the same amount of slop that $1 buys on OpenAI.

This absolutely lowers the bar on bad actors in a transformative way. A person trying to make a human slop site with humans still has to invest 5 figures of money on content, and cares about things like not getting sued, having a passable reputation, and retaining repeat customers. A person making an AI slop can be set up a fly-by-night operation on a shoestring budget, with their black hat SEOs being the bulk of the cost.

As I said to the other guy: it's an issue of demand, not supply. The price was already cheap enough that it was saturating what (revealed) demand there was. As a toy example, let's say the price dropped to fully $0. Would that lead to infinity words being generated by the slop-meisters, and the entire internet being nothing but SEO stuff? No, obviously not. It can't replace things already being written by humans, nor can it infinitely crowd out something like Google search results -- there can only be one top result, one second result, etc. Plus, well-known sites like the NYT are already heavily favored, and that's unlikely to ever change. Maybe things get slightly worse, but I bet that would be more from AI being able to lie/confabulate more convincingly rather than a cost proposition.

There are a lot of legitimate concerns about AI, but the notion that it will just broadly destroy the internet somehow isn't one of them.

The price was already cheap enough that it was saturating what (revealed) demand there was.

Citation needed.

Would that lead to infinity words being generated by the slop-meisters

Yes, this is already happening. I can easily link you to black hat sites that have tens of millions of words of AI generated slop. That would be >$100K to pay Indians to ghostwrite, but only $5 of AI costs.

Here take a look at some examples:

So yes, I can confidently say that the introduction of AI slop has significantly increased the quantity of negative-worth garbage out there. It might even be that the amount of AI generated slop currently on the internet is greater than the amount of text ever written by humans in all history.

nor can it infinitely crowd out something like Google search results

Only if google gets on their game of bonking these malicious sloppers. I only know of these slops because they were able to successfully rank on the first page or even as the first result on some keywords.

AI writes slop cheaper, faster and better (in the "exploits SEO better" way) (perhaps better even than most whites).

perhaps better even than most whites

What do you mean by this??

That the modal native English speaker is white, or if not native, then more likely to be in contact with anglophone culture, and finally, if you believe that sort of thing, is more likely to have higher verbal IQ.

I shrank that down to "white" because I write for the audience I'm in, and admittedly I overestimate the number of those who already believe most Indians are innately worse at things.

@George_E_Hale

The grandparent comment is skeptical that AI will ruin the online media landscape, comparing AI to brown third-worlders (Indians and Indonesians), who have been writing slop for years:

The idea that the internet will soon be swamped in AI generated nonsense isn't convincing either, since Indians and Indonesians were always cheap and could reliably hash out SEO slop for pennies on the dollar.

Whether AI is better than (the more expensive) white writers is relevant to if AI writing will lead to a paradigm shift or if its just kind of the same old at a slightly different scale.

This is an extrapolation but you're explaining for the person who posted, who made no caveats about "more expensive" white writers, just wrote "most whites" as if we are to believe whites (defined how I do not know) are somehow more talented as a whole at writing than ___. This kind of presumptuous comment jars and I concur with @ThomasdelVasto that it shouldn't be just left unquestioned.

I would be shocked if the average white person was not better at writing convincing lies in European languages than the average Indian person, if for no other reason than because the average white person speaks a European first language. I'll give two more, though: Firstly because every signifier of Indian dialect is considered a red flag by people hunting for spam, so the Indian has to try not to trip over their dialect. Secondly because if you're writing copy then it matters whether you have a native command of the language and are immersed in the culture.

At least this is a rationale. I'd counter with the notion that the average person, white or not, probably can't write very well anyway. Twenty five years ago as a grad student I taught freshman composition, and the majority of my native-speaking students (almost entirely white) couldn't write their way out of a paper bag. Also dialects are legion even within the English language, and not as prominent in writing as speaking, in particularly phonological dialect. I can write "pen" and you read it in your own dialect, not realizing I'm imagining it pronounced "pin." Even lexically there aren't all that many terms in English used by native Indians that wouldn't be used by, say a British person* (e.g. "lift" for the proper term: elevator).

In any case I appreciate your having a stab at defending the position. I still think it's giving "whites" way too much generalized credit. Admittedly my experience with Indians has been with the highly educated.

*Let's say white British person.

I'm kind of sympathetic to Sunshine, there's a tendency in certain parts of India to write ridiculous lies in quite poor English.

See here: https://www.indiatoday.in/news-analysis/story/rafale-superior-to-chinese-j-20-a-comparison-of-the-two-fighter-jets-1705178-2020-07-28

"Rafale is far superior to the J-20, the Chengdu fighter of China. Even though it’s believed to be a 5th generation fighter, it is probably at best a 3.5 generation aircraft. It's got a third generation engine as we have in the Sukhoi," said Air Marshal R Nambiar (retd) who flight tested the Rafale fighter jets for India.

The stealth characteristics of the J-20 are also under suspicion, say experts based on several analysis done by the Indian Air Force. The J-20 was hyped to be a highly stealthy aircraft and that it could conceal itself in operations and not be easily detected.

Experts say if the J-20 was the best, why would the Chinese go for the Russian Su35. But the Russian jets too might not be able to compete with the Rafale.

"Su35 is also no match to the Rafale with its weapons, superior sensors and fully integrated architecture. The capability to super cruise even with four missiles, stealth characteristics all put together make the Rafale far more potent than Su35," Nambiar added.

Firstly, these sentences look like they were written by a child. Extremely awkward structuring and poor grammar.

Secondly, the content is extremely silly. 3rd generation engine in the J-20? The Russian engines they were using at the time in the J-20 were 4th gen and they were introducing better Chinese engines. A 3.5 generation aircraft would be something like a late-model Phantom, around the end of Vietnam, it's like saying China is 50 years behind. The Air Marshal is a fool, there was considerable schadenfreude in some parts of military-aviation twitter when export-grade Chinese J-10s wrecked India's Rafales.

The biggest difference is that Rafale is an omni-role aircraft. It can carry out at least four missions in one sortie while the J-20 cannot carry out multiple missions is one go.

Basic spellchecking failures too. Is one go? This is from the most popular Indian newspaper apparently. I have no doubt that much Indian journalism is better than this but it's easy to see a qualitative gap.

More comments

It's always been an issue of demand, though. Indians and Indonesians were always cheap enough that they could "flood the internet" with false, low-effort clickbait, but as long as people had some degree of standards then it wasn't a huge issue.

As has been noted we've existed in a brief window of time when evidence of reality has been pretty good. There is a reason why in the past calling someone a liar could lead to a fight to the death.

In the end this will force people to blindly trust preferred sources in a way we haven’t done in 120+ years.

Since the popularization of the camera, major hoaxes have required escalating amounts of effort to reliably and persuasively fake audiovisual evidence.

Of course, they still existed. Stalin’s erstwhile colleagues were airbrushed. The BBC convinced the British public that spaghetti grew on trees. But until recently, hardcore OSINT types on Twitter could pretty reliably prove quite quickly whether something was real or fake.

Now, that’s increasingly no longer the case. We are moving back to the days when you decided to believe the foreign correspondent of your preferred newspaper simply because you believe him, and his reporting, with no further evidence required, necessary, or even available.

The BBC convinced the British public that spaghetti grew on trees.

Wow this is real. Truly a modern marvel.

This is an example of not understanding the past. How could people be so stupid as to not know where spaghetti comes from?

Well if you don't eat spaghetti, it's not a common dish in any restaurant in your area, you haven't gone on foreign holidays, and all you know is the name of it as a food from abroad, how do you know where it comes from or how it's made? You don't care about it so you don't go to the bother of finding out "what is spaghetti and how is it made", all you've ever seen of it might be a packet of it on a shop shelf.

And this is the BBC, with the gravitas of its history behind it as the Reithian project to "to educate, inform and entertain" the public. You would no more expect a joke item on the Serious Current Affairs Programme than modern Americans would expect an Oscars musical number in the middle of the State of the Union address:

Panorama cameraman Charles de Jaeger dreamed up the story after remembering how teachers at his school in Austria teased his classmates for being so stupid that if they were told that spaghetti grew on trees, they would believe it. The editor of Panorama, Michael Peacock, told the BBC in 2014 how he gave de Jaeger a budget of £100 and sent him off. The report was made more believable through its voice-over by respected broadcaster Richard Dimbleby. Peacock said Dimbleby knew they were using his authority to make the joke work, and that Dimbleby loved the idea and went at it eagerly.

In an American context, imagine Walter Cronkite presenting a similar story.

It wasn't everybody, "hundreds" out of an audience of millions, which is probably reasonable to expect regarding general levels of public credulousness:

At the time, 7 million of the 15.8 million homes (about 44%) in Britain had television receivers. Pasta was not an everyday food in 1950s Britain, and it was known mainly from tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce and considered by many to be an exotic delicacy. An estimated eight million people watched the programme on 1 April 1957, and hundreds phoned in the following day to question the authenticity of the story or ask for more information about spaghetti cultivation and how they could grow their own spaghetti trees; the BBC told them to "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best".

Right now, there's probably some exotic foodstuff that in ten years will be introduced to us in the West, but which right now we're unfamiliar with, and if a trusted source (probably AI, the way things are going) said "this food item is harvested by pixies after being fertilised with unicorn dung", we'd fall for it. Hell, we're probably already falling for AI generated slop as evidenced by the posts above re: the Tim Walz fake quote.

Ok fair, I have a history degree I should have known. I guess the recent past is harder for me to grok than the ancient past sometimes.

That's the trap we all fall into. We have some vague notion that a hundred or five hundred years ago, things weren't the same as they are now (though modern adaptations of classic works do seem to be trying their hardest to persuade us all that Regency Englishmen and women behaved just like late 20th century/early 21st century people. Ditto for genre/historical novels where the heroes, but more usually the heroines, have all the values of 21st century liberals around everything from race to sex, and the villains of course have the values of their time).

But when it comes to thirty/forty/fifty years ago, we think that's close enough that things were Just Like Now, and we forget how much social change happens in quite a little time.

EDIT: Don't be too hard on yourself, I'm old enough that I've lived through the change from "garlic is a rare, foreign, and untrusted ingredient that is not suitable for our plain but wholesome national cookery" to "now we have three new sushi joints started up in the town" 😁

This is more of a reflection on the British public than the BBC.

I think honestly the advent of AI contest is going to force the issue of epistemology more so than “trusted sources”. Things like knowing statistics and logic and using the information to make predictions is much more important than “it comes from the NYT so it’s true.

The conceit of Liberalism is that the average man has the time or inclination to invest into this level of reasoning. I think you'll be disappointed if you still think they will.

The brand of autist that hangs around in these parts might well put in the effort. Most people won't. They may or may not end up trusting the NYT. They could also revert to base superstition because the NYT is not trustworthy.

when Nate Silver accidentally posted a 100% AI generated hoax article about Tim Walz

Minor nitpick: the verb to post implies either authorship or perhaps editorial publishing. The appropriate verb for Nate Silver's behavior is to link, or perhaps to tweet about something.

The internet has always been full of fake BS- I remember the halcyon days of the dihydrogen monoxide research front. AI is surely a gift to trolls, but you already had to do some due diligence when you found information on the internets.

The UAE / AI BS has a long pedigree.

They've been having some sort of LLM spam campaign for .. a year now at least.

AI is just the latest iteration of our future full of spam. Every new invention will be primarily used for advertising.

Every new invention will be primarily used for advertising.

I don't think it'll be 'primarily' used for it. I don't think it's primarily used for ads even now.

In my defense, I didn't even read the article, so I wouldn't have known if it was a lazy human journo or AI slop. I'd seen a reputable Twitter user tweet about it, and then looked for any news outlets that backed it up. I was taken aback when it was revealed that the whole thing was a misunderstanding or willfully overblown.

(The Economic Times is a real newspaper in India, and a decent one by reputation)

You can clearly see that "business today" is AI generated fake USA today, "economic times" is fake The Economist / Financial Times, etc...

The Economic Times is a real Indian newspaper, isn't it?

Related: "That picture's got to be AI generated: just look at the text." "That's Finnish!"

Of course people would use AI to maintain the conspiracy that has us believe Finland is a real country.

Lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas? Come on.

Finnish is a ridiculous language, but the country is real enough. Mostly it exports people (like Linus Torvalds) who are angry all the time from having to speak that language.

Except Linus is from the ethnic minority of Finns that are native Swedish speakers. Further reinforcing the conspiracy theory that Finland is an imaginary country made up by the Swedes.

@Stefferi, isn't the minority in question actual ethnic Finns, who just so happen to speak Swedish as their primary language due to some historical happenstance, or am I wildly misinformed?

Yes. Finland-Swedes are ethnic Finns, with some elements of historical immigration from Sweden. Essentially until mid-1800s there was a trend towards Finns rising up in societal ranks to adopt Swedish as language, which was then followed by a trend towards Fennicization, leaving the current 5 % as a remnant.

Also, almost all Swedish-speakers expect those from Åland and maybe the deepest Swedish-speaking countryside tend to also speak native-level or almost native-level Finnish, Linus Torvalds included.

His native language is Swedish, but he had to speak Finnish to get by.

You have to speak Finnish in Finland. When you go to the shops and do things, 95% of everybody speaks Finnish so I learned Finnish as a second language and these days it’s my weakest language by far.

I'm sure this made him even madder than a native Finnish speaker who at least knew nothing better.

Yes, and it appears that the article I linked from them is a real human article as well, though the author sloppily fell for the hoax.

Guess it makes me just as much of an idiot

It is.

In an ideal world, these kinds of serious missteps could lead to on the ground reporting being more valued. Put boots on the actual place, talk to actual people. It was already a problem that most "news" is just regurgitating press statements or "reaction" based takes like fake cable news style round table debates or monologing about what you should think about the press release. That was already pretty useless, and people have lamented for over a decade about the death of original reporting.

Shit, one of the reasons I first started watching Tim Pool was that he actually went places and did some original reporting. But that didn't cover the bills and instead he turned into a slop-tuber.

On the one hand I'd like to believe that AI makes this problem so much worse on the ground reporting comes back. On the other hand, even as I've thought more about this post as I write it...how much worse really does AI make the current press release/official lies information environment? More chaotic perhaps. But we're already almost a decade into the MSM's Fine People hoax and it still gets pushed and believed. I find it hard to make a distinction between major political institutions blatantly lying, and an LLM hallucinating information on the receiving end.

It was already a problem that most "news" is just regurgitating press statements

At least 99% of these cases cite the original press statement so you can judge it. AI slop regurgitates stuff and treats it like a fact that was always true, and also makes up other stuff too.

At least 99% of these cases cite the original press statement so you can judge it.

Can you link two examples? I've seen one news article that contained a link back to the company/government/organization's original press release. The rest just say "according to a press release", if that.

More chaotic perhaps. But we're already almost a decade into the MSM's Fine People hoax and it still gets pushed and believed. I find it hard to make a distinction between major political institutions blatantly lying, and an LLM hallucinating information on the receiving end.

Only someone who largely consumes rolling news slop could say this. MSM produces reams of very high quality reporting every day, it's just that no-one cares about it because round-table shouting gets more clicks. If you actually think LLM generated false articles are no different to say, reading the Financial Times or New York Times you are simply wrong. Does the latter (and to a lesser extent the former) embed left-liberal assumptions in a lot of their reporting? Of course, and one should read anything with a critical eye. But they're still pretty good. If you don't want that just read the WSJ instead. These aren't as popular as the slop of course, but that's mostly the fault of the readers/viewers. If one read any of those publications daily or every few days, you would have a more complete and accurate understanding of politics, the economy etc. than probably 99% of the American public.

Maybe. Maybe not. Virtually every long form article I read I find out, sometimes years later, was a blatant lie. Or not? Sometime I never really find out.

Case in point, and something that never really leaves my mind. To this day I still don't know if this article in Bloomberg about China using their manufacturing to put backdoors in nearly every electronic device made there is true. It reads like it has tons of companies, if not on record, than with dozens of employees in them speaking of their experience in confidence. They appear to outline the actions numerous manufacturer's have taken to limit or mitigate this threat vector because they've been burned by it.

And yet in aftermath of that article, big splash though it made, virtually every entity named in it denied everything in it. I still have no clue if any of it was true, or they caved to pressure from China. I never heard of any real follow up reporting. And so I find myself almost less informed than if I'd read nothing at all. I have knowledge debt.

Edit: I'm going to double dip on this one actually.

Second example. Bitcoin. I tried for years to educate myself on bitcoin. It seemed interesting. Not one single news article about it told me anything. I was still reading Ars Technica back then, and even their "technical" reporting was lacking in any technical details and just came back to the same conclusion. Bitcoin is a scam. I remember this article in particular, which continues on that theme of seeming to impart negative knowledge. Like it's basically a blog of them setting up and running a bitcoin miner, but their stream of consciousness confusion about every step leaves you with an experience of a very unreliable narrator. And there is zero information what so ever about how any of it works beyond the most superficial ("it calculates hashes!")

Some time around 2017 I did my own research, ignoring everything "respectable" publishers were saying about bitcoin. I'm greatful every day since that I did, because I took literal decades off my savings goals by simply DCAing into bitcoin every month for 8 years. Even today the "respectable long form" articles about Bitcoin are probably 70-90% irrelevant smearing, ignorant half truths or malicious lies.

It kind of says it all that you're go-to example is a seven-year old story from a third-rate publication. This article was literally famous for the extravagance of the claims within it and the denials from relevant organisations. And you know who published many of those denials? Bloomberg. Perhaps something from the current decade and in an actual prestige publication might be nice - after all if 'virtually every longform article' you read turns out to be a lie it shouldn't be that hard to find reams of examples.

My example is a nine year old story from a second rate publication: Machine Bias from ProPublica was the last long-form news article I trusted.

I don't have anything newer because...I stopped trusting the authors, and therefore stopped reading the articles. I'll revisit the issue once they cut ties with the old, flawed system and try to make a new one. I'm not holding my breath, though.

How about you give me a list of publications that would count to you, and how many examples you require.

That would take forever so to get an idea of what I mean I'll give some examples from a single subgroup, say foreign policy/international affairs (for no particular reason): Foreign Affairs, the Economist, ISW, World Today (Chatham House's magazine), the World Service, Brookings, the aforementioned FT and WSJ, Foreign Policy, JDW etc. etc.

This says more about your ability to recognize sources that regularly include slop than your ability to avoid sources that routinely include slop.

Foreign Affairs as an opener was a good joke, I will give you that.

This Bloomberg story in particular has me quite mad. It seems like it should be easily falsifiable by anyone with moderate power (e.g. mid level NYTimes editor or FBI team leader) but no one has done so and I don't understand why.

My best guess is that the story is something like "directionally correct" with maybe half the facts being true and half the facts being made up, and this would explain why it's so hard for someone else to properly verify/discredit. Either way, the followup team has to do a LOT of work and they don't get any reward. For all the false parts they point out, the original authors can just say "but those are minor details" and for all the true parts they point out the original authors get all the credit for the work and there's no reward for the "peer review".

There were a decent number of followups, the problem's that we were kinda stuck between 'impossible to prove a negative' and 'she doeth protest too much'. Even if everything in the Bloomberg story was true, tearing down every single chip on a wide variety of boards couldn't actually disprove the claims, since Bloomberg said that only boards delivered to high-profile targets were modified. And neither did we ever see a released photo of a modified board, or a hexdump of whatever compromise it was supposed to be pushing. But there's also pretty good reasons to not want to do that from a national security perspective, and thanks to certain types of gag orders the feds can make it illegal to admit there's a problem.

My gutcheck is that it's not 'real' in the full sense Bloomberg claimed rather than just simple modified firmware -- though a lot of ErrataRob pointed out contemporaneously, a lot of the reasons that it feels 'not real' might be because of incompetence by the reporting -- but it's a messy enough situation that I can't put even moderate confidence in it.

It's not as if nation states invading a supply chain to make devices literally explode is unheard of.

Working in an industry that takes this sort or compromise seriously we have a list of countries we can't buy from. Sometimes even if it's a US based company but a particular model or production run of a product is from a 'wrong' location, we can't use it.

Yeah I am basically blackpilled on any journalistic integrity in the current culture. We need to have a dramatic realignment of societal values before such a thing becomes possible again, imo.

I think the big problem is exactly this. My choice on who to trust for news is limited simply because almost no sources are committed to truth first and foremost. Almost all journalists and news sites “of record” are cesspits of bias, featuring such things as selective reporting, biased reporting, misquoting, removing context, and other misinformation. In fact, the saving grace of places that don’t yet have “of record” status is that you know you have to check up on anything they say.

The best work arounds tend to be less about finding the reputable sources— they frankly don’t exist. The real defense is strict scrutiny of the facts reported. Fining out if others say the same thing. Doing sanity checks for the characters and quotes — does the reporting sound like something a normal person in that situation might plausibly do, are people saying things that make themselves look bad or stupid or evil, do the statistics reported track? And furthermore, if a story is true, it can be used to predict the future.

If you believe this you probably consume too much low-quality media. Turn off the TV and pick up the Financial Times, Economist or other such prestige publications.

The list of reputable publications quickly gets very small when you raise standards to expect at least good faith reporting and quality. I can think of only two Finnish publications that I consider to do actual journalism today.

How many is a 'small' amount is a how long is a piece of string question of course, but the point is that there is more than enough high quality 'mainstream' (as in conventional or establishment rather than mass market) journalism to satisfy even the most voracious reader. Which is to say that the problem I think is mostly with the audience rather than journalists. Most people want slop so that's what they get given, especially on television. Idk about the situation in Finland (and obviously in smaller markets there'll be less choice) but for an American or Briton there is ample very high quality mainstream journalism out there if only anyone would be bothered to pick it up.

And yes, I admit that writers can use AI to help them be more productive and effective. But that absolutely isn't what's happening here. These scammers/hoaxers are only after clicks/money and have literally 0 care for the accuracy or reality of their bullshit at all.

This is my concern. Even if there are people with integrity, the way the internet works now we will be overrun with so much slop it won't be possible to find high quality articles.

I'm hoping that in the most optimistic scenario, we end up with an internet that filters for quality much better, and where people put a much stronger focus on quality over quantity.

its might be a good thing. at the moment there is some value from pushing false information but if there is monetary value from generating false information then hopefully this will end up pushing the value and monetary value from pushing false information close to zero. there is some kind of commons that these false information spreaders are farming but once the barriers are removed and there are monetary incentives the commons is going to be destroyed.

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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