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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   916 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 10, 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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How long have you been around rationalist-adjacent spaces?

I found Scott in 2013 or 2014, possibly via LJ. I remember discussing "Universal Love Said the Cactus Person" with a friend IRL who brought it up and he previously had never mentioned reading SSC. Somewhere in there I found /r/SSC because in 2016 I saw a notice for a meetup taking place 5 minutes away from my house and didn't go because I found many people active in /r/SSC off-putting. I stopped paying close attention to Scott after the 2017 Kolmogorov entry. I remember /r/theMotte being created and then /r/SneerClub with the latter being distilled perfection of what I didn't like about so many /r/SSC posters to start with plus reddit overall. I guess that's about where I stopped paying close attention because it was only much later that I became aware of this site starting separately to escape reddit, the TW/schism hullaballo, and some other subsequent happenings.

Because I have a strong memory that works in strange ways, it's a bizarre feeling to recognize a few user names from ancient /r/SSC days (Zorba, Hlynka, gattsuru, etc.), or look into /r/SSC now and see a few users I dislike still plugging away, and realize I've been paying attention (or at least mildly aware) of their written output for a decade.

I think 2013 is a fair shout in my case, that was probably when I was in high school and accidentally stumbled onto LW or SSC. Can't recall which one came first, but the other must have followed shortly thereafter.

I imagine my initial encounter with The Motte would have been after 2015, since I don't seem to recall engaging in the Culture War threads on the SSC subreddit. I'm confident that I was a regular participant by 2017 when I was a few years into med school.

The greatest melancholy I feel is when I see the upvote or comment counts in the old CWR threads: you can tell we had a lot more people around. To this day, I'm not sure if the migration off of Reddit was entirely warranted, or if we could have managed to avoid the gaze of the Reddit Admins till the political climate changed. While the Motte is definitely in a healthy state, and the fears that we'd collapse to an unsustainably low population didn't materialize, Reddit did make it easier. We had plenty of people stumble across us following a link, or by checking someone's profile.

Are you suggesting a RETVRN?

I am unsure of whether or not that's warranted.

I think the reasons for Zorba planning an exodus were based in clear merit. We did attract the wrong kind of attention. It was better to leave on our own terms than scramble after the subreddit ended up quarantined.

I wouldn't be averse to us re-activating the sub, but I think that's an option best used in extremis. We're here, we're functional. The moderation tools are so much better. The Reddit experience, in general, is so much worse.

If we end up in a state where we don't have the active user base to justify our existence, that's about the only situation where I think dusting off /r/TheMotte truly becomes the obviously correct procedure.

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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