Contact Us
Sign In
Sign Up
Rules Admins Moderation Log Random Post Random User
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
Recommended Posts And Communities
Recommended Realtime Chats
- Astral Codex Ten Discord
- Quokka's Den Telegram

naraburns nihil supernum 1d ago (text post) 1161 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for May 2025

I had to get this done a day early, or it wouldn't get done until several days late. Any AAQCs nominated on May 31st will be considered for the June roundup.

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

@problem_redditor:

"Would I travel to Vietnam again? The answer's 'absolutely yes, but not soon'."

"It can be hard to see on the motte, where disagreeableness is common, but agreeableness is necessary for the maintanence of society."

@MonkeyWithAMachinegun:

"Don't Kill the Baby"

@theCircusWeakman:

"A rule freeing cops from having to articulate probable cause for certain kinds of minimally-intrusive searches would greatly increase the crime-fighting ability of law enforcement, at negligible cost to the law-abiding masses."

"Low information, low intellect, low agency people exist in dizzying array. Their lives would generally be better if they were supervised."

@FiveHourMarathon:

"My Life Measured in Captains of the New York Yankees"

Contributions for the week of April 28, 2025

"I find it interesting how siblings who by and large grew up in the same house can have radically differing opinions of their relatives..."

"Honey wake up. The US Fiscal Year 2026 Budget War started today."

"'Don't be such a pussy, go kill that dragon on minimum wage' isn't going to cut it."

Contributions for the week of May 5, 2025

@coffee_enjoyer:

"LARPing isn’t fake, it’s pre-reality."

"I think there's a conceptual muddle (everywhere, not just here) between LARPing ... and Cargo Cult behavior..."

"Just imagine feeling sad and upset that your girlfriend is fucking another man who's more attractive than you, and thinking 'Yes, obviously this is an unhealthy emotional response, I need to dose myself up with antidepressants'."

@Grant_us_eyes:

"The issue with rationalist communities is that they arose at the point in time where there still existed a remnant of Gatekeeping for the internet at large, even as the midwit hordes were beginning to clamor over the gate."

"Orthodoxy feels foreign, alien, even converts often feel somewhat odd or unusual, and very often its prescription to Westerners is 'reject your people, RETVRN to ours.'"

"It's a year beginning with a 2, which means there is drama over this year's WorldCon."

@CrispyFriedBarnacles:

"But I think this has probably been a great example of arson being applied to Chesterton's fence - the older Reagan-era norm, with its insistence that "of course you can expect plenty of black people to live up to high standards" played a really important social role in encouraging everyone else to go along with integration."

@OracleOutlook:

"Due to a temporal change in circumstances, a legitimate disagreement has developed between two or more groups of well-intentioned believers. Both groups believe they find support in tradition and scripture."

Contributions for the week of May 12, 2025

"Regardless of what you think of the luxury beliefs concept ... the discussion about polyamory has got me thinking of a related idea, the general case of which polyamory is a specific example."

"My question is whether the rationalists now doubting the viability of polyamory will realize that this has structural implications for some of their other beliefs."

"That underscored to me how serious the rot was in the Anglican Church in America, even back then; it really did seem like Anglicans saw the church as a social club, and took or left portions of their faith as it served their other interests."

@TheAntipopulist:

"Predictions of AI progress hinge on two questions that nobody has convincing answers for."

@ControlsFreak:

"You have to do both these things... simultaneously convince prospective students and employers, because if you don't do both simultaneously, the group that was falsely convinced will quickly realize that they were duped and stop..."

"Even assuming that early family formation is good, desirable, and pleasant for women compared to schooling, why would they choose college? Not to bury the lede: I think it’s risk mitigation."

@FiveHourMarathon:

"Playboy Was Never a Magazine, It Was a Breast Certification Organization"

"Then very, very suddenly, for the first time in the history of our species, most women became the ones who chose."

@PyotrVerkhovensky:

"Despite my criticisms, I'm glad that there is an anarcho-capitalist whose ideas have purchase in the rationalist community."

"If you want people to choose the education over the diploma, you need to make the education cheap and the diploma matter less."

Contributions for the week of May 19, 2025

"I'm reminded here of Arnold Kling's 'Where are the Servants?' from back in 2011..."

@FiveHourMarathon:

"I don’t know how to square that circle. Was the adultery somehow necessary? Or an inevitable side effect. I’d take JFK over Biden any day."

On low-hanging intellectual fruits through history.

@100ProofTollBooth:

"As they say, one of the the best things you can do for your career is die."

"How ~~Trump Defeated Columbia University~~ Columbia University Defeated Itself"

"But what I am trying to tell you is that, right now, no one can enforce a norm against political violence, because the norm is already gone."

"I don't think he's actually particularly pissed at Harvard specifically."

Contributions for the week of May 26, 2025

"The Reincarnation of Julius Caesar or: Why So Many People Give Trump a Pass for Corruption"

"That, really, is why an era of 'negative partisanship only' bothers me--because at this point, if we really did have a deeply corrupt politician in office, how would I know?"

"A treatment as far-reaching and poorly-understood as preventing puberty should not be adopted as standard practice without conducting the research required to know if it is safe and effective."

"The Obama administration, when DAPA/DACA was being challenged, swore before court both in writing and orally in the court proper that they would not issue any new determinations under the new policies, in order to avoid having the judge issue a preliminary injunction. And then the issued literally over a hundred thousand."

" What gave the Progressive movement of the 19th century such muscle was the obvious, incontrovertible, and massive improvements to life of applying its methods generally."

"Apparently my whole feed is late 30s bloggers writing about child rearing now, even the ones I subscribed to for the AI news."

1

6

1
6

Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Sign up Sign in

Dean Flairless 13hr ago

I had to get this done a day early, or it wouldn't get done until several days late.

Thank you for doing so. The 1st of the month roundup is, well, a highlight of the month. The new month wouldn't start off right without it.

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

Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats

Link copied to clipboard

Action successful!

Error, please try again later.