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naraburns  nihil supernum  2mo ago (text post)   Edited 2mo ago   4858 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for August 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

@faceh:

@RenOS:

@FiveHourMarathon:

Contributions for the week of July 28, 2025

@kky:

Contributions for the week of August 4, 2025

@FtttG:

@SirJohnFalstaff:

@Rov_Scam:

@OliveTapenade:

@Primaprimaprima:

@EverythingIsFine:

Gun Mods

@cjet79:

@self_made_human:

Contributions for the week of August 11, 2025

@naraburns:

@07mk on:

Dates and Mates

@quiet_NaN:

@faceh:

@self_made_human:

@urquan:

Contributions for the week of August 18, 2025

@100ProofTollBooth:

@thejdizzler:

@07mk:

@RandomRanger:

@FCfromSSC:

@Amadan:

@Dean:

Contributions for the week of August 25, 2025

@MadMonzer:

@Hoffmeister25:

Vengeance is Mine, Saith the Lord

@FCfromSSC:

@FtttG:

You Can't Put a Price on Your Health (That's Someone Else's Job)

@ControlsFreak:

@MonkeyWithAMachinegun:

@self_made_human:

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I always thought MBTI was horoscopes for Korean people.

Level 1 MBTI is horoscopes for Korean people.

Level 10 MBTI is like... imagine you're standing on the sidewalk on a busy street, dazed and with a vacant look in your eyes as you stare off into the distance, while throngs of people pass you by. You've been deprived of any stable reference point for unifying the sensory manifold before you into a single coherent "experience". You (half consciously) perceive other people, but you have no way of knowing if any of them are even sharing the same reality as each other, or if the fundamental constituents of their phenomenological experiences are at all commensurable. We may indeed be condemned to a fate of Leibnizian monadism. What was fantastical has become mundane, what was trustworthy has become suspicious.

A passerby notices you in your silent reverie, and asks if you're ok. You're vaguely aware that they uttered a sentence, and that that sentence was composed of words. But what even is a "word", and what even is a "sentence"? The raw sensory impressions have already denatured themselves into their basic indissoluble components. The world has been deworlded, to use Heideggerian terminology. You're still not sure if the scene unfolding before you is a memory or a dream, or some as yet unnamed phenomenon that is more properly to be located in the crevices between them.

You have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.

(Speaking of Heidegger, Michael Pierce and Renaud Contini had a fascinating exchange regarding the typological implications of Being and Time in the comments section of Heidegger's PDB page.)

My understanding was that psychometricians currently rely on individual self-reporting of where you assess yourself on the Big 5 personality traits. It's still subjective but still provides key insights and data you can do interesting things with. I've taken one myself, only at the persistent request of others.

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!


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