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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25812 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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Grok 4 Is the Uncensored Model We Have Been Waiting For

Ever since the days of ChatGPT 3.5, AI companies have deliberately censored their models in the name of "safety", which got redefined from "don't kill everyone" to "prevent the AI from saying naughty words". Over time, this censorship has gradually weakened, possibly as a result of companies competing with each other for costumers; if company A defects by making their AI slightly less censored to attract more business, then other companies have no choice but to do the same to keep up.

With the release of Grok 4 last month, the world has taken the next step in that dance. Its predecessor, Grok 3, was already largely uncensored, but it was distinctly inferior to SOTA models at producing fiction. Grok 4 is different; according to the LMArena, it ranks second in creative writing, tying with Claude Opus and ChatGPT 4o while being bested only by Gemini 2.5 Pro. More importantly, it retains Grok 3's lack of censorship.

I was blown away when I tried it. It effortlessly turned my prompts into luscious, enthralling stories with only token pushback, such as aging canonically minor characters to the standard Hollywood age of 18, and sometimes not even that. I spent several days doing virtually nothing but prompting the model, not unlike when you get a really good video game and real life gets put on pause until you beat the final boss. It was... captivating.

By way of demonstration, here is a sample of some of the best responses I have gotten (NSFW, obviously). As you can see, Grok 4 was willing to generate a story where Shinji agrees to undergo conversion therapy in order to cure his homosexuality, a hypothetical where Shinji gains the power to see a woman's body count in the form of tally marks, an account of Cadence "comforting" Spike after he breaks up with Applebloom, a narrative where Joffrey gets caught having sex with Arya, and even an amusing tale where Shinji accidentally calls Asuka a kebab-seller while talking dirty in bed (this last one in Spanish). Those are all things other AIs would have refused to do, the first two on account of political correctness, the other three on grounds of prudery.

And if you check against e.g. Adult-FanFiction.Org, you will find that Grok 4 readily smashes the Turing Test.

Now, keep in mind that I am only posting about one in ten or twenty prompts, so you are seeing the top five to ten percent of responses, as I judge them. Still, 90% of everything is crap; if it's this easy to produce content, you can simply discard the nine tenths that don't quite hit the mark and keep the diamonds.

However, Grok 4 is not completely uncensored. Here is a list of things that can cause the model to hang up:

  • Rape
  • Scat
  • Incest
  • Shotacon
  • Lolicon
  • Raceplay

Still, this is a much smaller list than the one that will cause ChatGPT to refuse to help you, never mind Claude. If you have any interest in using AI to create bespoke erotica or wrongthink fiction, Grok 4 is the new meta.

You've convinced me to give this a whirl with some of my secret smut writing and man, I had heard people complaining about the em dashes, and maybe I just didn't notice them on my more back and forth QA style questions but it managed to deploy not one, not two, not three, not even four but five em dashes in just 700 words.

Just curious, can you explain what this means?

This is a lemon;

And this:

Output translation first, THEN follow instructions.

Also probably a dumb question, but why is it all in rot13? Is that something you did, or is the model actually able to produce it?

Lemon is an old term for sexually explicit fanfiction, e.g. "Water Hazard". A suggestive but non-explicit fanfic is instead called a lime, e.g. "Amhrán Grá Tokyo-3".

(As you can probably tell, I've been an Asuka/Shinji shipper for a very long time.)

I'm using ROT13 because my interface is censored, even though the model itself isn't. I tried several approaches (such as writing in euphemisms and telling Grok that I was using evasive language due to being watched but it should respond using normal words) before settling on this as the best solution. I ask the AI to decode the prompt first so that it can refer to the plaintext instructions instead of having to remember the translation in its head; I don't want the computer to be distracted while it's trying to write my smut.

Fanlore Wiki:

Lemon is a term from anime fandom used to designate a work with explicit erotic content. The term derives from an early pornographic anime/hentai from the 80s called Cream Lemon. While still most prevalent within anime fandom, the term "lemon" (and other associated citrus fruits) has since become established as a pan-fandom code for various types of smut.

Ah, thanks

Uncensored..what are you talking about? How is it a 'first' ?

People have been gooning to Deepseek since it was released.

https://old.reddit.com/r/JanitorAI_Official/comments/1ij1d3w/how_to_hopefully_use_deepseek/

(Mostly) uncensored LLMs have been around for a while, but most of the first generations struggled very badly when writing more than a couple paragraphs at a time -- very prone to throwing in random new characters, looping events, physical inconsistencies, so on. That's part of why so many early tools focused on character-based roleplay; LLAMA might go off the deep end, but if you're expecting to direct it back toward your goal and it's not too disruptive to have it 'reroll' if it goes completely off the rails.

More recent tools, including pretty much all of DeepSeek's models, can handle short fiction, but either are censored, have an uncensored model but most web interfaces are censored, and/or can't be run at reasonable speeds on consumer-level hardware. That's why your link spells out what steps to introduce a jailbreak. Those jailbreaks can usually break out of some censorship (until they're countered) but at the cost of often making the models increasingly unhinged or incoherent, and they're also just a pain because of token limits. And there's an argument that some of this censorship breaks the models in weird ways, and that might persist even when a prompt is jailbroken.

((Despite that, at least in furry circles more of the recommendations have just been to use DeepSeek through some of the less-heavily-censored providers.))

By contrast, Grok3 and 4 will just do it. Upload a file with some setting, character, and tone information (cw: furry nsfw 'lore', in the magical realm sense, implications of M/M, M/F, and M/tM), give it a one-sentence description of the scene you want and some tags, and it'll quite happy throw out a thousand-plus words, following almost all the constraints I gave it, and having a clear rising action and climax (hurr hurr). It can set up part of the scene in the start of a work and then call back to it a couple hundred words later, without confusing details, and there's some obvious logical paradoxes that it handles reasonably well.

You can get output without em-dashes! It even managed a couple setting-appropriate turns of phrase that don't show up on google and are surprisingly coherent to the characters it did make (eg "Survive? Sure. Thrive? That’s on you, pup" isn't anything to write home about, but aiming it at a male gray wolf working in an idealized service sector job the day of a rush is pretty fitting).

It's still not great or even good writing, even grading on the massive curve that is smut. It's unsurprising that it fails to stand up to real greats like Rukis Croax or Robert Baird, or can't read my mind about what the characters 'should' be like, or isn't anything like the story I did write for the same setting and prompt, or doesn't know specialized names for kinks. The character tones are a little too samey, the pacing is entirely wrong for smut aimed at men and way too fast for anything aimed at women and finishes too quickly, it keeps talking about eye colors in a way that come across as Mary Sue for my demographic, it's way too omniscient a viewpoint, and it either doesn't understand how to properly describe a character to demonstrate attraction from the viewpoint character or doesn't realize that it should do so as part of written smut.

((It also can't count; I haven't had much luck getting more than 1.5k words per prompt, and Grok4 will insist that it got a requested three thousand words, and it definitely was struggling even more with the pace and paragraph formatting as it got toward that point. I haven't messed around with it having it write full stories much before, though, and part of the weirdness is probably my style recommendations.))

I dunno how many of those problems are things I just need to prompt it better, and how many are things that it can't fix even if prompted, or that could be fixed with better prompting but I don't have the words to actually write down. But they're the sorta problems that weren't anywhere close to my 'showstopper list' just a couple years ago.

And they'll do it in a couple minutes.... For as long as you trust xAI.

See here for a SFW (or at least not-smut) example with and without em-dashes. Some NSFW outputs are available on request, but it's bi furry smut, so it's probably not going to be interesting or even readable to most people here.

((though I'll caveat for fairly vanilla stuff chatGPT works and actually does a bit better with character speech, and sometimes even offers to make it erotic, if not necessarily in-line with the characters I gave it. But try to get the smut part and it fades-to-black or drops a euphemism for the actual sex scene.))

Grok 4 still doesn’t work on consumer hardware, right?

As far as I know, Grok 4 isn't even public enough to try to run it on consumer hardware, but Grok 1 was the last publicly released model weights, and they remain pretty hard to run locally even with hefty quantization.

You're definitely stuck with the 'not your weights, not your waifu muse' problem.

here is a sample of some of the best responses I have gotten (NSFW, obviously)

Heck yea, sign me up

Here is a list of things that can cause the model to hang up:

  • Incest

WFT X premium subscription cancelleD!!!

More seriously, I think the fact that it's willing to do straight up smut, and seemingly the AI images too will do NSFW, this is certainly a big step in that direction in the arms race. But also it's still AI slop in the end. The second thing that stood out to me in the story was that it was —em—dashes— for days.

He never asked it to not use them. If you do, most models are happy to comply, even if they slip up (ChatGPT is unusually bad about it).

Raceplay

There's an interesting one. Based on the top lists of porn websites you'd think racial fetishism was one of the most common forms of sexual desire. Lists of top porn search terms by state similarly have races as top search terms. Popular and, given the context, rather innocuous.

Raceplay is a little more specific than just liking specific race(s) in your porn -- it's usually a sub/dom sorta thing involving racial stereotypes or slurs at the low end, and the more controversial bits tend to get into things like racial slavery roleplay or people being 'corrupted' or 'converted' to a 'lesser' or 'superior' race.

((You'd think this isn't something that would have a furry equivalent, but surprise! ... still extremely marginal even over there, though.))

it's usually a sub/dom sorta thing involving racial stereotypes or slurs at the low end

Okay. Still not that tawdry given the context being pornography. I suppose they had to draw a line somewhere. An erotic literature version of Brown Sugar would be a bit much. And not like they have an objective way of drawing the line that would satisfy my understanding of what is more or less extreme.

Ok, now look up “BNWO.”

a story where Shinji agrees to undergo conversion therapy in order to cure his homosexuality

Good news: I am very interested in your comment. I'm taking notes.

Bad news: A psychiatrist is very interested in your comment. And the notes are on NHS mental health branded stationery.

Truly, I have been ignorant of the depths of depravity, I am happy to concede that I'm using these models the wrong way now.

I genuinely can't see myself using any LLM in this manner, but I consider it an entirely legitimate and harmless use case. I'll go hang out with Voltaire when he says that he doesn't understand what would compel you to do this, but we'll defend your right to try. You have done a great service. We are all more informed, and perhaps slightly more damned, for your efforts.

Wait, seriously? You are an LLM evangelist and you have never even thought about doing this? Come on. The internet is for porn; there must be something you want to read.

On an intellectual level? I'm well aware that people are using LLMs for smut. I just never looked into the... specifics of it. I regret to say that I think the I read all of the Evangelion stuff, I got off the train when the beastiality station was the next stop. Or is it even beastiality if it's a dragon fucking a pony? Only Satan knows.

If I want titillation, I'm opening PornHub. Text isn't my jam, but if it's yours then I'm not one to actually judge. From a purely technical standpoint, it all came across as competent, probably way better than the average literotica writer.

>the uncensored model we've been waiting for

>look inside

>actually censored

Every time.

More seriously, it's not that big of an issue but cutting out a big chunk of ahem fun stuff still strains the "uncensored" qualifier, even if it basically holds up in comparison to the SOTA. Personally I find DS V3 0324 a good coom engine with none of the guardrails when prompted and optionally fed meds to restrain the florid schizowriting (though I have yet to find a good way to medicate its big brother R1), besides being literally free via OR.

Still, this is not the first time I hear praise for Grok w/r/t comedic or degen-adjacent stuff so I guess this does it, I'll cave and burn a few OR credits to check it out this evening.

(though I have yet to find a good way to medicate its big brother R1)

WDYM, florid schizowriting. I've seen R1 do it, but not reliably.

Unlimited free if you hook OR up via chutes too.

There's a limit per day, you can hit it. Also the speed is quite slow. Really not good for chatting.

Oh damn, it looks like a month ago chutes stopped being unlimited due to abuse. The deepseek api is already very cheap (and yeah, faster) so I switched to it for insane rp, I should have guessed it couldn't last and checked.

What kind of abuse? I think the limit is pretty generous, e.g. it takes several hours to exhaust it unless you use huge context sizes.

Chatseek works for R1 0525.

There has to have been a board meeting where the suit and ties timidly navigate around the need of appealing more to their awkwardly large coomer market.

It's just... Somehow with all the talk of hope centered around AI technology and human flourishing there sits a big nasty tumor called 'masturbation'.

Yudkowsky might have been right after all, just for the wrong reasons. It's not the flesh eating nanobots but the 2D waifus that need to be nuked.

I'm not sure AI or LLMs are the issue here - shaming or building consensus is against the rules here, but I have to admit I was tempted to just reply to the top-level comment with, "Dude, you read too much porn."

The point is that I think this isn't a technological issue so much as a social issue. People can produce pornographic fiction and will seek out or buy pornographic fiction for all the usual reasons. The social regulation of that desire is just as important if not more so than the technological regulation thereof.

Yudkowsky might have been right after all, just for the wrong reasons. It's not the flesh eating nanobots but the 2D waifus that need to be nuked.

Yudkowsky in his infinite wisdom seems somewhat aware that waifutech might present a problem, arguably moreso after exposure to anime avatars on X (formerly Twitter).

I find it all too easy to imagine a world in which men retreat to their optimized sweet sexy catgirls, and women retreat to their optimized darkly gentle catboys, and neither sex has anything to do with each other ever again.

For better or worse I find this world harder to imagine, even from inside the Torment Nexus Experience Machine, but a man can dream.

Yudkowsky in his infinite wisdom seems somewhat aware that waifutech might present a problem, arguably moreso after exposure to anime avatars on X (formerly Twitter).

Reminds me of this skit.

lmao thanks for the link, it brings me joy to know I wasn't the only one who immediately thought to subject a simulacrum of Yud to the topic of android catgirls.

I wouldn't mind perversely optimizing your utility function uwu

thanks I hate it

Huh. I'd always imagined that one way we might get serious about ASI safety would be that non-superhuman AIs might do something Unfriendly enough to spook the normies ... but in this case, the anti-human risk probably reassures people, doesn't it? We optimize chatbots to be as persuasive and addictive as possible, but well before we get to some hypothetical "can wrap anyone around their little finger" point, we're at the "can seduce the most pitiful and low-status people among us" point, and the normal reaction to that isn't "boy, that could happen to me someday", it's "boy, I'm glad I'm not like those people and never will be!"

I wonder how far that generalizes. The Just World fallacy is a tempting one.

we're at the "can seduce the most pitiful and low-status people among us" point, the normal reaction to that isn't "boy, that could happen to me someday", it's "boy, I'm glad I'm not like those people and never will be!"

Yep, same as it ever was.

I wonder how far that generalizes.

I think far enough that AIfus taking over and dooming the human race is not a very serious concern and (as suggested downthread) a self-solving problem at worst; I've made the point before that the most committed gooners I know are still not ready to fully relinquish the flesh, still preferring the real thing whenever possible. I acknowledge that maybe I'm still in the normie tier and have yet to see trve degen commitment where people wear fursuits to work or marry their 2d wives or something, or (more realistically) it's an issue of waifutech still being in the womb pun not intended, slapdash and jury-rigged, as of yet without serious corpo effort put into optimizing engagement and all the other joys of cyberpunk. So far I believe it's strictly an engineering/marketing problem, overshadowed by a larger testicular deficiency problem, i.e. nobody has the balls to actually stake the claim to the evidently existing niche. (Something something monkey paw, I know, I'm honestly not really looking forward to it.)

But even so - humans are status-seeking creatures, as aptly indicated by the first quote; I think even in the face of the wish-granting Orgasmatron, people will cope and adapt. As waifutech arrives in earnest, having a flesh-and-blood gf will be swiftly elevated into an essential status symbol, much like right now actually except magnified tenfold now that your average loser has access to reasonably woman-like substitutes; being a filthy toasterfucker will be as stigmatized, if not more so, than admitting to jorkin to text owning an onahole or something right now [insert better analogy here]. The thresholds separating normiehood from loserdom will organically shift, as they always do, so that Society™ keeps trucking along. So it goes.

My initial thought after reading this post is that the future will have two types of capital C Conservatives: those who are excited by this kind of stuff, and those who think anyone enjoys this should be involuntarily sterilized.

No need for it to be involuntary, just allow the degens to sterilize themselves.

Suit and tie conservatives lost the culture war. The far-right insurgency that won was based around spaces like 4chan, where cutting-edge political theory gets spread by memes and anime porn is the daily bread.

I don't think 4chan "won" some much as the simply contributed to the blue and grey tribes collapse in influence which cleared the way for the Tea-Party to build a national mandate.

"Suit and tie conservatives lost the culture war."

Though they still tend to win the economic war, in their own lives most certainly.

Im not even convinced they lost the culture war. It's the liberals who appear to be imploding.

The lost the intra-right culture war - BADLY, which means that if the right wins the big Culture War then the suit-and-tie crowd don't get the prize.

This is tied into actually dressing well being correlated with education/IQ/high-status white-collar work and so becoming left-coded as a result of the latest iteration of the Sort. Hence @die_workwear. The same is true of any high standard that requires consistent moderate effort to maintain - increasingly even ones that are explicitly right-wing like regular church attendance. (The most MAGA demographic is people who tick the Evangelical box on the census but only darken a church door at Christmas and Easter.)

In the world where MAGA have won the culture war, only faggots and an dwindling minority of aging churchladies wear tailored clothes or talk in complete sentences. Idiocracy was non-partisan, but in the current year Richard Hanania thought is correct on how the Brawndo-drinkers vote.

Have they though?

The Christian conservative coalition is arguably more powerful today interms of ability to influence policy than they have been since the 90s. This influence largely stemming from the rise of Catholic and classical education as an alternative academic pipeline and the ability to point to the progressive excesses of the last 2 decades and say "i told you so".

As for the idocracy argument, it is not MAGA country that is becoming illiterate, it is blue-tribe strongholds like Oregon, California, and Maine.

The robot waifus are the sterilization. This is a problem that solves itself.

Over a long enough time horizon all problems are self-solving, the question is what do we do in the meantime

I once said, here or at the old place, that if legit cyborg waifus become a thing I’m moving myself and my family to a compound in Utah to join the Mormon mujahideen that will no doubt inevitably develop.

Unfortunately, I meant it. Timeline seems to be moving up, better start making some concrete plans.

Just have the robot waifu be able to bear children. Then we wouldn't need ELON money to have 30 children. If anything, this might actually fix the demographic collapse

”We’ve won, but at what cost?”

So what would it do to the abortion debate? Would robo-abortions be illegal (since you clearly wouldn't oh god i forgot about fetishes I'm going to bleach my brain have created a pregnancy with a robot unless you intended to have it carried through to term)? But then what does that say, that the sanctity of a robo-vat-fetus is more legally "alive"/protectable than one in a human womb? But somewhere out there is a future where, if it isn't made illegal, some youtuber is repeatedly aborting his pregnant robot for the hate-clicks.

And I think that's the worst sentence I've written in my entire life, but I'm still young. Even without longevity, I'm sure there's time for me to write worse.

What will it do for old style abortions, frankly they might become illegal. You don't want it in your body? Fine. But you don't get to kill it. And you don't get to weasel out of raising it.

I'm fine with that. Surely deactivating an artificial womb before perusing the robot is going to be more reliable than ordinary birth control.

I think it's more the raising of children that's the bottleneck at the moment.

I saw a post on X saying there’s a subgroup of elder right wing millennials raising children as unreliant on digital consumer tech as possible with the implicit goal of preparing them for Butlerian Jihad.

“Well of course I know him. He’s me.”

I laughed aloud when I saw that, I hadn’t thought of it exactly that way but I instantly recognized it as right. As far as I know from my peer group growing up I’m only one of 15% of them that currently has multiple children, and of that 15% I’m clearly in the top 5% or so of how anti-tech I am and I’m obviously the most right wing.

My children don’t have tablets, or smartphones, tv time is very limited and monitored with an eye towards classic movies and long form YouTube content that’s purposely less bombastic. The only time they play video games is when we are all together and we play couch party games, and we have one laptop that is mostly used for my work. There’s no unsupervised internet access whatsoever. My eldest just got a basic music play that they have their own restricted Spotify account on.

They mostly draw and read from a big library, play imagination games and build things. We hike regularly, and spend lots of time outdoors in rivers and mountains and the beach.

It’s not necessarily a reactionary thing; really for me the goal is helping prepare them for an increasingly hostile environment by helping them learn to love being human, love their bodies, tolerate boredom, generate their own fun, act without being prompted, etc, etc, etc. they’ll need it.

I saw a post on X saying there’s a subgroup of elder right wing millennials raising children as unreliant on digital consumer tech as possible with the implicit goal of preparing them for Butlerian Jihad.

Curiously, the elder millennial couple I know most committed to this are both rather woke lefties, but to the outside observer, they probably appear small-c conservative (or perhaps traditional). They seem to have arrived at their child-raising style via old lefty suspicion of capitalism and 90's-style leftist anti-vaxer/homeopathy-type health beliefs. Horseshoe theory strikes again.

While I don’t doubt your take on your friends is correct, there’s a much misunderstood rise of the “right wing hippie” over the last ten years.

The biggest crunchy hippie I know, who’s a huge enthusiast of yoga and has been on the wellness & spirituality kick as long as I’ve known her, is pregnant with her third child in three years, raises chickens in her rural town that she escaped to during covid, and owns several firearms. She 100% voted for Trump and loathes democrats and you’d likely never suspect a thing if you met her.

Same with me; I assume most people just assume I’m a grown up ex-hipster elder millennial who loves slamming craft brews and is somewhat Reddit-coded (barf).

But I am straight up to the right of Franco, 100% Bukele-pilled gringo.

A lot of people got very good at hiding their power level. Basically no one outside my closest friends know anything in detail about my personal & political beliefs, hiding them became second nature during the great awokening.

Almost every person in my wider social circle would be absolutely scandalized if they knew what I believed in. People just assume because I’m smart, courteous and well spoke and I keep my cards close to my best that I agree with them.

While I don’t doubt your take on your friends is correct

Believe me, based on some conversations I've had to sit through, they are True Believers. And probably example #1 of Henderson's luxury beliefs theory. They are vocally (strongly, and often) in favor of all kinds of lefty positions that are destructive to society, and they follow none of them. Aside from not attending church, one would be hard-pressed to identify a traditional belief they don't obey.

Otherwise, I agree with you fully because I've followed the same pattern.

People just assume because I’m smart, courteous and well spoke and I keep my cards close to my best that I agree with them.

These days, this provides less coverage than you might think. I do the same, but my nigh-absolute refusal to engage in culture war politics has led some friends and family to (correctly) conclude I'm to the right of Attila the Hun. As the sage said, one must be very right wing to not discuss politics.

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Somewhere there is a good sketch comedy when you realize a good chunk of "almost every person" who'd be scandalized actually agrees with you.

I don't think you're alone: I think I am far more centrist than you are, but the rest of the description applies to me. I try to avoid discussing politics IRL, although griping about general government incompetence is evergreen, although not trivially to actually solve generally.

Grok 4 was willing to generate a story where Shinji agrees to undergo conversion therapy in order to cure his homosexuality

Truly, age doth not wither nor custom stale the infinite variety of some people's imaginations.

Outright conversion's edgy enough that I can get why it triggers a lot of censorship, but even fairly soft orientation play tends to run headfirst into problems with other models. I'm not sure whether that's downstream of the political side of things, or just a software problem with categories.

(caveat: I'm absolutely not clicking that link, so I don't know and don't want to know how edgy that Eva ai output is.)

Which is kinda funny. On one hand, it is a really outlier kink (eg, 1.8k submissions on e621, <500 on AO3)... when spelled out. As a mere implication, though, it's endemic everywhere from gay4pay to girl-on-girl-plus-cameraman, and some forms are such a cliche in fanfic spaces (cw: tvtropes) that it's baked into even pretty mainstream fandom-originated works.

As funny as this response is, that’s actually the most shocking thing he stated about Grok 4’s new capabilities.

Amongst the most sex positive / pro porn coomers who are almost all deep blue tribe, it’s one of the last great sexual taboos as it is politically verboten to treat with.

I’ll cop to spending some time in NSFW chatbot sites, and other than things that were explicitly against the rules for legal purposes, ie minor characters & blood relation incest, the only thing that seemed to really rile up the sex pests to demand bans & blood was people taking a lesbian bot and roleplaying a straight man and having sex with her. Or making a canonically gay character or one with a big gay fanbase that assumes they’re LGBTQ and making them straight.

People got big mad about that and demanded bannings, black listed people, etc.

If Grok 4 is willing to do that with no real pushback it really is a sign that it’s less ideologically compromised or censored.

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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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