site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1561 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 16, 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.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Probably better suited for the wellness thread, but w/e.

Are any of you pathologically secretive/have problems with feeling excessive amounts of shame? Or, even better, have you been secretive beyond what is necessary in the past and then managed to move past that stop being that way?

In real life I’m a pathologically secretive kind of guy. My phone’s wallpapers are always set to the default image. I never wear graphic T-shirts or any piece of clothing that could be considered a statement. The walls of my apartment are mostly plain. I’ve always been this way – I remember how I’d always pause my games as a kid when parents came into the living room where I was playing on the family TV. I wasn’t even playing anything particularly embarrassing at the time, it was more often than not FIFA or some racing game, something completely normal for a schoolboy to be playing! I just always had the weird connection “personal = embarrassing = has to stay hidden” in my head, even about the most innocuous things. I don’t think there was any kind of inciting incident that led to me ending up this way either – my mom, who I lived with, was not particularly strict, I wasn’t getting bullied at school and did not experience any particular serious trauma that I can think of.

I suppose it’s a function of lots and lots of internalized shame, social anxiety and low self-esteem, as I’m, and have always been into a lot of things that are niche and kind of embarassing (think of a generic weeby neckbeard's interests and that's me). I can’t bring myself to outright lie to others or myself by constructing a fake socially approved identity, but I also diligently hide my power level, so the result is that I come off as a very plain, unremarkable if somewhat awkward dude.  Although it goes beyond hobby stuff – I remember having trouble doing anything on my laptop during class in college, unless I was sitting in the corner at the very back of the class, where no one could see my screen. Some dudes in that classroom were pretty openly playing League, and here I was, struggling to open the file containing the essay I was working on for another subject.

This approach to life probably helped me avoid my fair share of public embarrassment, but it hasn’t won me many close friends either. By now, I’ve come to consider it much more of a liability than an asset. I feel terrible even playing video games in front of my girlfriend, who also enjoys them, in my own home, for Pete’s sake, and that’s definitely not a great way to live.

So, if any of any you Mottizens have experienced something similar, how did you move past it? Or does it still haunt you to this day?

This is my hole pathology! It was made for me!

I don't want to waste space or hijack the thread by describing my experiences here, but suffice to say it's bad, to the point more or less exactly this tendency estranged me from my family (whose likely absent scrutiny I cannot bear, I can barely even talk about videogames with my sister) and blew up my last LD situationship where I repeatedly failed to respond accordingly to a woman bluntly and overtly hornyposting at me over an extended period.

It really fucks with my life at this point and is definitely not worth the 'upsides' if there ever were any, and I wish with all my heart to ditch this retarded habit, but so far little progress has been made. Internalizing that barely anyone cares about your 'inner life' hasn't helped, especially since like @faceh below I am actually the sort of person who Nootices and keeps track of off-key moments in other people. Alcohol helps with shame/cringe in the moment, but has no lasting effect, and increasing alcoholism has also increased the amount of alcohol needed to achieve the salutary effect. Sharing small things with friends unfortunately requires friends, which I have, but not the "kind"(?) I feel comfortable exposing my power level to. Even in waifutech-related communities (which I initially joined explicitly as an attempt to fight this stupid reflex), as an anon/pseudonymous poster under a totally separate identity, I find it extremely hard to just put my metaphorical balls on the table by shitpoasting in threads or posting explicit coomer shit (even though I suspect I am virtually a saint compared to the median denizen). Hell, writing this post has taken several shots, with me literally forcing myself to pick the phone back up (which I am suddenly very interested in laying down and doing something else) and continue writing.

I've been attempting to do "exposure therapy" by putting myself out there, on Halloween I showed up to the office in a (literal) robe and wizard hat with a tarot deck to do readings with. It was kind of a success even, I expected to play it as an ironic bit but normies people actually took it completely straight without batting an eye, and were even delighted that the ever-reclusive Rayon who never wore anything other than a plain black shirt has a quirky side after all. I don't feel any different (and mumble noncommittally whenever this is brought up) but I guess this is the kind of thing you just have to keep doing.

Next step is posting something embarrassing online but for now this post will do I suppose. I commend you for writing this and giving me the excuse to blogpost leech off of it, I thought of asking more or less this question myself sometime back, but could never actually sit down and commit it to keyboard. My condolences, couldn't have been easy.

I showed up to the office in a (literal) robe and wizard hat with a tarot deck to do readings with. It was kind of a success even, I expected to play it as an ironic bit but normies people actually took it completely straight without batting an eye, and were even delighted that the ever-reclusive Rayon who never wore anything other than a plain black shirt has a quirky side after all.

That's really cool. And may we never forget bloodninja; perhaps we can fix AI gooners by LoRA-ing the models they talk to with his work.

My recommendation: pick something ridiculous to wear e.g. a huge hat, or a neon-colored suit jacket, or cowboy boots, or full cosplay of an anime character. Go for a walk in a crowded place. You will feel like you want to die for a moment (up to an hour or two), and then you will not. Probably.

(Link shows me and now-wife at a friend's wedding in 2021. Since your case is pretty severe, I'd recommend to start smaller than that.)

I hope you are still getting mileage out of that suit!

Just want to tell you you're not alone, I have done many of the same things (dimming the laptop screen a lot to make it hard to read even though I'm literally just using it to take notes in class, video game hiding despite not being anything weird or wrong). These are weird things to do I think, and I have done them, although perhaps I'm different than you in that I have not done them as much with family, as I tend to let this "guard" down once I really get to know someone/they are family. I agree it's a bit of a liability, so I am curious what people say in the comments regarding how to get past it. Keep in mind I am only in my early 20s and only recently has it occurred to me this is something that is a problem, so don't feel bad that I haven't moved past it yet, and probably only recently you have really started to consider this a liability. I believe it can be moved past, let's see what people suggest.

Used to be. Up until approximately age 30, I fit that description of yourself to a Tee.

I've mentioned before how I kept all my online profiles across various sites and forums separate to maximize opsec and avoid anyone tracing any particular statements back to me, the real life persona. And I diligently avoided exposing all but the most innocuous details about my personal preferences. Finding someone (my Ex) who I could let down my barriers with was a huge relief in that regard.

But eventually you learn that you vastly overestimate how much any person will actually care about certain details about your personality and tastes. Unless you are actively seeking attention upon yourself very, very few people will even remember learning that you like [band] or even that you find [porn type] alluring will barely budge any person's opinion of you, since its probably not a major concern of theirs anyway.

And the people who DO care are ones you can usually avoid and are best to avoid anyway.

I STILL do place a premium on personal privacy. I like to think I'm a 'hard target' when it comes to getting me to reveal personal details that could be used against me, be it passwords or embarrassing anecdotes from my past.

How to move past it? Oof. Well, try intentionally exposing some detail about yourself that you consider incriminating or embarrassing to someone whose opinion matters to you. It shouldn't be something illegal or particularly salacious, just something you worry would lower your status or lead to conflicts if it came out.

And then see how they react. Which most of the time will be completely nonchalant. Then see if they ever bring it up again.

Then internalize the idea that most normies go through life with minimal awareness or attention paid to the 'weird' behaviors of those around them, and never feel any inclination to use information about others to undermine them or attack them.

I eventually had the realization that despite my best efforts, a lot of information I tried to keep secret was leaking out anyway to friends and acquaintances and they just... didn't care. Or in fact just found it normal and acceptable and not actually embarrassing.

Here's my dark secret though. I DO notice aberrant behaviors or preferences of others. I DO judge them internally for it. And DO store that information for potential later use.

This process feels completely involuntary to me, my brain just pays attention and notes that this is potentially useful information and stores it away for later without me actively 'wanting' to doing so.

I also do this with positive information. Like noting what sort of music someone likes or their favorite brand of energy drink so I can give them a better gift later.

But there's a decent amount of information in my head that could in theory be used to attack someone's status or induce a mental breakdown (oh, that person has trauma from the death of their father, that's good to know), or at least to manipulate them a little better.

And I make a conscious effort not to actually do that sort of thing for ill. I don't want to be evil.

But that leaves me with the little niggling doubt that other people are also noticing all the weird stuff I do and consciously choosing not to abuse that knowledge, and one day it could all burst out...

I used to have that. It's much less of an issue now. You could spend months or years gradually exposing yourself more and more to triggering stimuli or waste time with some midwit therapist who probably doesn't have the specific competence you need, but it's better to cut to the chase and heal the root of the issue. I addressed it with guided meditations that let me discover and edit my mental schemas and procedural memories. Even very deep, early conditioning that shaped your attachments to parental figures and unspoken knowledges about self, other and world can be changed as an adult. The brain doesn't differentiate between real and imaginally produced learning experiences. This type of self-treatment works very well IME. There are courses available. I have all the audio files for one that focuses specifically on this issue of secretiveness/shame/unspeakable or unthinkable parts of yourself. PM me if interested. That goes for others who read this, too. @PreformancePertension @Zephyr

For me what did it was job stress. The client is chasing me, we have a massive deal on the way. I don't care what the others think, I am setting my phone to loudspeaker so I can see what is shared on the screen in the zoom meeting in a public place. I have to get to the office asap, I don't give a bleep what the others in the checkout line think of me. Traveling has also helped. I have been super tired, a bit annoyed and I simply stopped caring.

It still haunts me to this day - I can say from years of therapy that what has helped (even if only a little) is deliberately sharing small things with someone you trust. Your body is going to reject it - I’d recommend making a ritual of it (like, you will tell your girlfriend one small thing you like before going to bed each night).

Is it 100% shame? Is any part of it "I don't want to let someone see what's on my screen because then they might talk to me about it and that sounds annoying"?

Yeah I'm kind of the same way, and I think it's mostly this -- for example, and interaction that started ~as soon as I learned to read and more or less persists to this day:

Annoying person: "Whatcha reading?"

Me, looking at them over the top of a book (which has an obvious title on the cover): "A book."

In neurotypical, this means "I want to talk to you and I am using the book as an icebreaker" (I don't know why they can't just say that, though). They will eventually go away if you show you are more interested in the book than in talking back.

In neurotypical, this means "I want to talk to you and I am using the book as an icebreaker" (I don't know why they can't just say that, though).

I figured this out by the time I was about 6, but "he wants to talk to me" != "I want to talk to him" -- IME supposedly neurotypical people are surprisingly bad at internalizing this...

They will eventually go away if you show you are more interested in the book than in talking back.

You'd think that my stock answer (followed by going back to my book, with maybe a penetrating stare thrown in) would be a strong hint, but people can be pretty persistent.

I know exactly what you mean, and I'd like to say I've moved past it, but I completely haven't.

I haven't experienced anything to this degree, but I also have felt scared to share personal stuff. It may sound lame but I do think some sort of therapeutic / emotional approach is warranted here. Or perhaps exposure therapy!

So, what are you reading?

Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything has raised expectations, but it remains to be seen if it will fulfill them. So far they have tried to reconsider the Enlightenment in light of discussions missionaries had with the natives of the New World, on the assumption that the records of these discussions are sincere and not just European uses of "Indians" as characters to project their own subversive beliefs.

The topic of indigenous influence on what we call western culture has been on my radar ever since I read Felix Cohen's brilliant 1952 paper Americanizing the White Man. Normally I would consider these kinds of things to be proto-woke nonsense, but Cohen immediately struck me as a man of intelligence, dedication and nerve, so it has stayed with me. He posited that core American traits existed before the settlers ever came:

As yet, few Americans and fewer Europeans realize that America is not just a pale reflection of Europe - that what is distinctive about America is Indian, through and through. American cigarettes, chewing gum, rubber balls, popcorn and corn flakes, flapjacks and maple syrup, still make European eyebrows crawl. American disrespect for the authority of parents, presidents and would-be dictators still shocks our European critics. And visitors from the Old World are still mystified when they find no peasants on American soil. But the expressions of pain, surprise and amused superiority that one finds in European accounts of the habits of the "crazy Americans" are not new. One finds them in European reports of American life that are 200 and even 400 years old. All these things, and many things more important in our life today, were distinctively American when the first European immigrants came to these shores... Something happened to these immigrants. Some, to be sure, remained European, less hungry, perhaps, but equally intolerant and equally submissive to the authority of rulers and regulations. But some of these immigrants became Americans, tolerant and neighborly, as strong and self-reliant men may be, and for the same reason disrespectful of all authority. To such Americans, a chief who forgets that he is a public servant and tries to tell other people what to do has always been an object of ridicule.

Cohen goes on to describe what he sees as native contributions in various domains including democracy, agriculture and sport. I have also found it amusing that he mentions " the golden tan of an Indian skin" given that arguably the most famous trait of Donald Trump is that he is orange.

Fury: Unbound Book 4 by Nicoli Gonnella.

I finally read The Road by Cormac Mcarthy. Great book, and hard to put down, with no chapters or any other breaks at all. I don't know why I mentally associated Cormac Mcarthy with abstruse James-Joyce-style "literary" fiction, but while the book has a large vocabulary and was semi-poetic at times it was not hard to follow. Might check out some of his others.

The Orchard Keeper is much more similar to the near-inaccessible fiction you describe (I tried to get through Ulysses and failed.) It took me a while to get used to McCarthy's style. I'd say The Road is one of his more readable books, though of course it isn't light reading.

I’ve read almost all of McCarthy’s books and I even have his solo album. it’s true that his style becomes more accessible over time but not in a bad way.

I personally think that the sweet spot for him is the border trilogy - set in post-wwii Texas and Mexico. I don’t remember the order but the books are The Crossing, All the Pretty Horses, and Cities of the Plain.

It's the only McCarthy book I've read from start to finish, and I remember sobbing for literally hours when I got to the end. Not sure if I could put myself through it again.

I don't know why I mentally associated Cormac Mcarthy with abstruse James-Joyce-style "literary" fiction

I've heard that this is true of Blood Meridian, but that his style became more accessible the older he got.

Blood Meridian required me to re-read pages at times, but was a singularly trippy experience. At the end I was both confused and oddly disappointed that it had ended. I would warn anyone off reading it, though I've read it twice. I heard once that someone wanted to make a movie of it, and I'd be interested to see how the hell they would try. One of my most memorable reading experiences. And I'd definitely put it in my list of best reads.

I heard once that someone wanted to make a movie of it, and I'd be interested to see how the hell they would try.

James Franco has attempted to adapt at least one of McCarthy's less cinematic works, and my understanding is that the results left a lot to be desired.

"How the hell they would try to make a movie out of this" novels are pretty much the only reason I still read literary fiction. It is an incredible feeling when you realize you are witnessing something that could only be told on paper and no other way.

Today I read The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History. I think it makes a very good case in favour of the idea that premodern China was not a stagnant, conservative, pacifistic Confucian state indifferent to warfare as it is usually imagined in popular conceptions, but was actually an exceptionally dynamic place receptive to new technologies and ideas both before and after the Renaissance hit Europe. In fact, even after the development of the musket and the Renaissance-style star fort, East Asia was no paper tiger; it adopted and modified European-style firearms quickly, and managed to maintain its military might against Europe until as late as the seventeenth century.

It's well known that while the Chinese developed gunpowder during the Tang and used it in increasingly creative ways during the Song Dynasty (with Europe having come across it relatively late), Europe was the first to refine it into the classical cannon style. What's less known is that guns in China were actually developing concurrently in a similar fashion to those in Europe, growing longer relative to muzzle bore, until the existential wars that rocked the Ming Dynasty ended around 1449 and the Ming enjoyed a long period of peace - meanwhile, warfare in Europe grew progressively more intense. What seems to have been a decisive early Chinese advantage was quickly eroded, and to a large amount of historians on the topic, this is viewed as the beginning of European hegemony.

In reality it's not nearly that simple. Once the Portuguese introduced their cannons to China in the 1510s, the Chinese learned rather quickly from it. During the first Sino-Portuguese war, Chinese artillery was inferior to that of the Portuguese, but the following year the Portuguese suffered a serious loss to the Chinese, with every account of the war suggesting that Chinese artillery had improved to the point that it was a decisive factor in their victory. As the Portuguese attempted to collect water, they were pinned down for an hour by heavy firepower, and after they made it back to their ships Chinese gunners blasted them so fiercely that Portuguese guns were incapable of answering. This marks the beginning of a rapid military modernisation in East Asia that brought them well into parity with Europeans during 1522 through the early 1700s.

The Chinese seem to have innovated not only in the design of artillery, but they also innovated in many serious aspects of how firearms were used, the most notable being their usage of drilling and coordination. Most historians seem to think that volley fire for firearms was developed twice; the first being in Japan during the 1570s, and the second being in the Netherlands in the 1590s. But Japan was in fact not the progenitor; volley formations have a long history in China, being described in texts as early as 801 (it initially used crossbows). After the introduction of muskets this strategy was applied very quickly - in 1560 there are already military texts that demonstrate the Ming Dynasty were firing arquebuses in volleys; it is likely this was a common strategy before then.

Possibly the East Asian state most affected by the musket, though, was none other than Korea, who developed advanced musket strategies after the Imjin War and ended up with one of the most effective musket armies during the seventeenth century. Their musketeers were exceptionally lethal in battle with extremely high levels of accuracy, and were feared by pretty much everyone participating in the East Asian sphere at the time. Two of the most expansionary European forces in this period took on East Asians on the battlefield - the Dutch against the Ming and the Russians against the Qing and Korea - and they both lost. When the Dutch actually ended up facing off against the Ming loyalists, of an initial army of 240 European soldiers only 80 escaped, with the remainder either hacked to death, drowned, or captured. European military advantage over East Asia was actually a very recent development in history.

While Europeans had big advantages in defensive fortifications and shipbuilding which the East couldn't quite emulate, Qing China in particular had far superior logistics, with the Kangxi Emperor's careful planning being instrumental in defeating the Russians during the 17th century. This advantage allowed the Qing to consolidate their power and establish an unprecedented period of dominance in East Asia during the high Qing period - which ended up being a double-edged sword. Without external threats, the Qing developed a gay and retarded bureaucracy incapable of responding in an effective centralised manner. Britain came back newly industrialised and pretty much wiped out the Chinese armies during the Opium War, and while Japan centralised and threw out their ancien regime (and, as an aside, destroyed a ton of traditional Japanese culture as a side effect of this culture shift, involving the iconoclastic destruction of many feudal castles and historical Buddhist temples), China was still funding armies that had been established in the seventeenth century which had metastasised into powerful interest groups in spite of their effective uselessness. Their shipbuilding and artillery was actually superior to Japan's, but their internal politics were so dysfunctional they were unable to mount a capable response during the Sino-Japanese war. The rotting corpse of the late Qing held on until 1911, and at that point China was a source of global entertainment and derision: an article from the NYT in 1895 claimed "China is an anachronism, and a filthy one on the face of the earth". Well, it certainly didn't remain that way for long. An anachronism today, it is not.

As an aside I'm quite stunned by how ridiculously advanced the Song Dynasty was for its time, to the point that I think it represents one of the most dizzying heights achieved by a premodern civilisation. More people lived in urban centres during the Song period than at any other time until the late eighteenth century, and 10% of the country was urbanised, a metric that Europe would not reach until 1800. Their production of iron around 1100 was equivalent to the output generated by the entire continent of Europe in 1700, using refined techniques that would only occur in Europe centuries later. The Song utilised automation in textile production to an extent that exceeded medieval and even early modern Europe, in fact it wasn't even until the eighteenth century that Europe achieved such devices.

There were significant advances in gunpowder, printing, anatomy, the discovery of tree dating, rain and snow gauges, rotary cutting discs, the knowledge of magnetic declination, thermoremanent magnetisation, magnetism in medicine, relief maps, all kinds of mathematical innovations and discoveries (including effective algebraic notation and the Pascal triangle of binomial coefficients), steam sterilisation, pasteurisation (of wine), artificial induction of pearls in oysters, effective underwater salvage techniques, all kinds of silk processing devices, including reeling machines, multiple-spindle twisting frames, and others, smallpox inoculation, the discovery of urinary steroids, the use of the toothbrush and toothpaste, a method for the precipitation of copper from iron, the chain drive, the understanding of the camera obscura phenomenon, and new types of clock mechanisms.

They may even have been the first people to become anatomically modern, developing the "modern overbite"; for context, throughout most of history people's top and bottom incisors met tooth to tooth instead of overlapping each other, once food started being cut into small pieces this changed. In Europe this shift only started occuring during the eighteenth century when the fork and knife came into common usage, during the Song Dynasty it was already common at least among the upper class.

Anyway, rather interesting book and something I would recommend to anyone interested in a comparative history of warfare.

The topic of indigenous influence on what we call western culture

If I remember the book correctly, Robert Pirsig had the same idea in Lila. Not western culture in general, but he considered US-American culture to be a merger of Native American and European cultures.

I've been reading, and am most of the way through Fifty-Three Days on Starvation Island: The World War II Battle That Saved Marine Corps Aviation. It's decent I guess. I'd say it's kind of two types of book combined into one.

One type, and the type IMO it actually works at, is as a series of short stories about the air battles between the "Cactus Air Force" on Guadalcanal in WWII and the Imperial Japanese forces. This is in the early days of the war, when American forces were mostly few in number, poorly trained, poorly equipped, and going up against the the cream of the crop of experienced Japanese veterans. The forces end up fairly evenly matched overall, and the stories are exciting. The Americans sometimes take a beating and sometimes dish one out, depending on the details of how well equipped they are at the moment, what tactics the Japanese use that particular time, the weather, etc.

The other type is as a coherent overall story with characters that you care about and who have a narrative. I think it fails at that. There's just too many people, coming and going at random times. There's brief individual stories about some of them, but I don't feel like I remember any of them in particular, or understand them or really care about them in particular. Major issues get brought up as a huge problem, then just forgotten about.

Of course, I still respect their sacrifices and all that. I just don't think it works narratively. It does make me understand a bit more why so many more compelling but fictional war movies keep the focus excessively tightly on a small group that suffers relatively few casualties during the story, even if that isn't really that realistic.

Earlier this week I finished The Story of a New Name, the second book in Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet. While I can admire these books on a theoretical level, ultimately I just think they're not for me. The thing that really puts me off them is just how slow they are: that holiday in Ischia went for well over a hundred pages, most of which consisted of "we woke up, went to meet Nino and Bruno at the beach, we talked about this and that, there was sexual tension, then we went home", occasionally jazzed up with Lila throwing a tantrum or a visit from Stefano. Even my girlfriend, who loves those books, did admit that the slow pace had become a problem for her by the fourth book. I don't plan to read books three and four any time soon: I have a hard time caring what happens to any of the characters.

At @TitaniumButterfly's recommendation, I ordered Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, not realising until it had arrived that it's about nine hundred pages long. If I manage to finish it before the new year (which will be an undertaking) it will be the longest book I've read this year by almost three hundred pages. I started reading it on Thursday, and by page 17 it had already made me laugh out loud twice, which is more than e.g. Doxology managed in ~400. I'm liking it so far, but it has the same problem that every book with this narrative structure has: with the constant jumping back and forth between different perspective characters in different temporal and spatial locations, it's hard to stay immersed, as just as you're getting invested in one of the characters' stories, the chapter ends and you're whisked off elsewhere.

I highly recommend Cryptonomicon as well. Ranges from good to amazing depending on your interest in computing and communications.

Prescient in a hilarious way, too.

I read Crytonomicon earlier this year and loved it. A slow start as I wasn’t expecting such a vastly different world to Snowcrash etc.

Even the dense maths behind some of the cryptography kept my attention, somehow!

Just started Into the Silent Land by Martin Laird on Christian contemplation. It's great so far!

I am an inveterate saver, and due to a dirt-poor upbringing I am probably more financially conservative than 90% of the people on this board.

That said, I am trying to change that, and I'd like to take a few grand of my savings and put them to better work.

If you had ~$3,000 right now that you could use to try and get a better than 3.8% return from, what would you do with it?

Right now I can get 4.10% from a 9 month CD. I could, in theory, invest it, but I have some concerns about the economic fundamentals of the market right now.

Any advice would be appreciated.

I would go on a fun trip, perhaps snowboarding in Hokkaido. Best way to get more comfortable with your money is spending it. Preferably on something enjoyable.

If it had to be an investment, I'd do GOOGL or ONDS. GOOGL - They're kicking ass in AI and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. ONDS - I think they'll get a lucrative government contract soon, currently undervalued imo.

Buy VTI with all of it as soon as you can. You should own assets, not dollars, unless you think the USD is going to deflate meaningfully in your lifetime.

I have some concerns about the economic fundamentals of the market right now.

People have been saying this since the instant the major indexes broke through the dot-com highs in 2013 or so. I (and many others!) have more than tripled what I socked away during the 2016 election cycle when others who are too smart for their own good were concerned about what Trump would do to the economy.

My sister sold everything in November 2016 and she is much poorer for it.

I gave aiislove similar advice, and I really hope he took it.

Yes I decided to just trim a tiny bit of my portfolio to pump my cash a little bit (I’m fine with about 8% of my portfolio in cash earning 3.5% interest as a very safe segment of my wealth even as I see cash as a pretty bad investment generally but I can’t stomach being 100% out of cash either.)

I am still squeamish about the market and the AI bubble as well as the commercial housing market but I am humble enough not to try to time the market and at my age I can just wait out any downturn or crash that isn’t completely apocalyptic

Why do you recommend VTI over VT or VOO, if you don't mind my asking?

If a friend said he was 100% allocated to any of those three, I wouldn’t tell him he needed to switch.

Honestly, I like VTI (or VTSAX) because it was what all the smart financial people online were talking about when I became interested in personal finance. That, plus when I was shopping funds on Vanguard all that time ago, I think it may have been performing better than VOO at the time. Now I’m pretty much married to it for tax reasons and simplicity’s sake.

I became uninterested in international stocks after watching them underperform for years (I know this year it’s a different story). I will reconsider if and when VT consistently outperforms VTI.

Can you explain your post for dumb people? I started working 2 years ago, but I haven't invested anything yet. What website do you use?

VTI (Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF) is an ETF (exchange-traded fund) that covers the entirety of the US stock market. VTSAX (Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund Admiral Shares) is the mutual-fund equivalent. The previous commenter is recommending that you invest exclusively in US stocks. The more standard advice is to invest in a mixture that trends from 90/10 stocks/bonds (high reward but high risk) when you're working to 70/30 bonds/stocks (low risk but low reward) when you're retired—and also 60/40 US/foreign, so four different component funds in total.

Recommending bonds is dubious advice, even for retirees. They've performed badly over the last few decades and I don't see why that would change for the better now. If a safe, low % return is the goal, why not just go for money market funds or HYSA? You'd have to know what you were doing to benefit from bonds in a period of falling yields (bonds becoming more valuable as a result).

An r/bogleheads bigwig says otherwise.

The Cash Trap

The way it might play out if you switch from a total bond fund to a cash equivalent is as follows. The economy goes into a recession, and the Fed signals and then implements significant rate cuts—for example, −1.5% over 2 years. Now you’ll find your HYSA or MMF may be suddenly yielding less than 3% while the total bond fund, thanks to its 5–6 year duration, is still yielding close to 5%. So you think you’ll switch back to the total bond fund after that happens. But what you missed is that, when the Fed cut rates, BND’s holdings became more valuable and the price will have shot up. How much? I can’t say exactly. But, as one indication, at the end of October 2023, the Fed only signaled that they were stopping rate increases—not even a signal of actual cuts—and BND’s value jumped 8% in two months.

Think about it—you are contemplating moving money from BND to an MMF to earn maybe 0.75% more yield over the course of a whole year, and when the Fed signals rate pausing BND increases in value by 8% in just 2 months. The December 12–13 Fed meeting alone caused a +1.6% daily increase in BND’s value. So the decision to chase a little more yield could cost you years’ worth of the spread you were trying to capture. As described in this post:

The cash trap describes the risk of investing in short-term bonds or cash instruments at higher rates that ultimately prove temporary. The Federal Reserve eventually cuts rates, and the high short-term yields disappear. Because the securities have short maturities, falling rates do not lead to material price appreciation. Once the securities mature, the cash flow stream withers and investors are left with a much lower return outlook. However, if investors lock in longer-term rates, unlike the short-term options, the yields do not go away. Not only does the cash flow stream stay steady, but the reduction in market rates also leads to price appreciation. The result historically has been significantly higher returns on longer-term securities, despite the lower starting yield.

The point of bonds is that over the very long run they are not full correlated with equities, and have some positive risk prima above the risk-free rate. This means one can construct a Markowitz hyperbola with a combination of equities and bonds, and you can then construct a tangency portfolio that is superior to equities alone for any given tolerance for variance.

This is all, however, extremely theoretical and not useful to someone who jut wants to get started. Doing anything reasonable suggested here is better than holding cash. VTI, VT, or VOO, 60/40 to 100/0. (All of this not investing advice, on average over the last 50-150 years, past performance is not necessarily predictive of future performance, etc, etc.)

Or if you want the absolute simplest thing you could go for the index card advice and go for the single fund Vanguard Target Retirement 20XX Fund, and they'll do the thinking and rebalancing for you for a 0.08% annual fee. It wouldn't have been the best ex post performer over the last 10 years, but someone who followed the advice would have done fine and much better than cash. I don't know if it will be the best over the next 10 years, but I would be highly suspicious of anyone who says they know better for sure ex anti.

Not OP, but I use Vanguard.com. I barely know what I'm doing or how to adult, but I stuck a bunch of money in VTSAX (which is similar to VTI but slightly different in some way that I don't really understand), and it mostly sat there doing nothing for 4 years and then suddenly shot up a bunch making it worthwhile. I think right now I have an average gain of like 12% per year or so. I should probably stick some more money in it at some point.

My brother uses Robinhood a bunch for buying and selling individual stocks, but I don't have the mental or emotional energy/motivation to spend researching and buying and selling daily. I just stuck a bunch of money in there and then forget it exists. Vanguard is great for that. I can't speak to comparisons to other websites, since I've only ever used this one, and I can't say much about quality of use for most purposes since I do stuff on it less than once a year. But I stuck money in, and 5 years later I have almost twice as much money in there. Yay.

The market is choppy and looking a bit dodgy right now. It could keep going up for another year or it's already on the way down. Nobody knows for sure but there's been signs of weakness lately.

Imo... Wait for the next (bigger) correction/bear market and then put as much money as possible in shares of great companies. There's no shame in being in 100% cash, waiting for a fresher bull market. The most important part of patience comes before buying stock, rather than after. But don't worry about hitting the exact bottom. It's impossible and foolish to try.

This is my feeling, but there's a non-zero chance Trump wakes up one morning and ditches all the tariffs, and shit moons.

Or some nerd cracks a new LLM/AI algorithm/paradigm and stuff mega-moons

Etc etc

Timing the market is RISKY

Personally, I do actually intend on not buying any more S&P ETFs for a bit, I'll probably get some more world-market equity and keep back a bit in cash

You can set alerts and buy in asap if the rocketing starts. It's ok to miss the first 10%. If something major happens it's not like the entirety of the new money will pile in during 5 minutes. It takes time, especially where institutions, who account for 80% of the money in the markets, are concerned. They buy in over the course of weeks.

Timing the market is where the real money is made. By jumping out before the worst of the bear market happens (there are signs - distribution days) you save your wallet, your confidence and your nights sleep from a lot of damage.

Is there anything new/incriminating in the Epstein emails? I don't necessarily mean related to Trump, but anyone at all. The stuff I've seen so far hasn't been mind-blowing, but perhaps someone here has actually gone through more than what the pundits have been chirping about.

The impression I've gotten from writings of Cim and others is that Epstein was clearly a sex addict who mostly got up to stuff in his personal life and that's it.

And at the same time there's a small amount of information out to suggest that he did get up to some shady business with a few people.

You'll see a few credible people in the political and news class who have claimed to see specific lists of people but they won't go on record because they are 100% sure they'd get sued to death (Mark Halperin has talked about this for example).

Likely a large piece of this is that the information available isn't smoking guns but is instead lists and manifests that don't give enough proof to separate from the dinner parties and other social events Epstein famously held quite often.

But to give an example - that would include for instance, Bill Gates. You can see some actual news coverage on how this might be related to his divorce but I also know some people who don't have first hand knowledge but are in the same social class who think that's real.

Circling back to your original question you can expect that as soon as something gives them actual cover you'll see a punch of journalists punch out with already planned and researched stories. Since we haven't seen anything......doubt it, just the Trump bullshit.

The newest revelation I've seen was the USVI house delegate texting Epstein while questioning Cohen (Trump's attorney/Stormy Daniels fixer).

The blowing bubba thing seems like an out of context prison joke to me.

Not really culture war for the main thread nor a small-scale question, but nonetheless:

I predict we are shortly going to see platforms using generative AI + A/B testing to make "hyperslop".

Imagine a music service, or a TikTok-like platform with AI-generated shortform videos. The generator gets hooked up to an optimiser which tweaks its input parameters. These could be legible, such as "colour saturation", "cuteness", or "content variability", or entirely opaque weights somewhere. If a tweak is statistically established to increase engagement, it is applied and another A/B test begins.

You could even have specific optimisers which gets run on various subgroups, like "female American teens 16-18" gets their own sub-optimiser, as well as every subculture and every little attractor basin you can identify. This could go all the way down to tweaks for each individual user if content is cheap enough to be personalised.

All the prerequisites for this already exist. We've already gotten a taste of it from YouTube thumbnails, which have been A/B gradient-descended for years on the minds of a billion of mostly children to plaster those inhuman staring open-mouthed faces everywhere. It's just a matter of time before bulk AI generation gets cheap enough to speed it up thousands of times and apply it to the content itself.

From what I can tell, Spotify is already doing this. I don't have a Spotify account.

Yes, but as you mention we've been doing it for years. There's a ceiling to the effect you're going to get. There's only so much sugar you can put into cereal; only so much salt on potato chips; you can only get so high, so drunk, so sedated.

And those are all direct chemical effects; Dopamine hits are mediated. Look, screen addiction is already bad yes, and I think it will get marginally worse, but only so much directly from AI hyperstimuli, and groups of people will be hit differently. There's not some magical 'infinity-slop' that will eventually scratch everyone's itch.

A lot of screen addiction is a loop that comes from atrophied real world satisfaction. I'm at my worst with phone scrolling when 1. There's a lot of built up stress in my outside life, and 2. I enter habit-forming patterns of de-stressing. The habit is from the 'unplugging', and the stimulus only needs to be enough to keep the habit up.

What do people think about replacing batteries on modern smartphones?

My current phone is a 2-year old Pixel 8, and the battery is starting to get noticeably worse. Nothing too dire yet, but it is starting to seem beneficial to do some extra charging during the day in addition to leaving it on a charger all night. In the past, every time a phone of mine has started to see serious battery degradation, I've gotten a whole new phone, because at least one of the following was also the case:

  • Various minor physical damage had accumulated - screen cracks, scratches and scuffs on the edge or back, etc
  • It had become generally slow and flaky
  • I was actually excited about the new features and capabilities of the newer models
  • Total physical destruction or loss

Now, for the first time, none of those are the case. This phone is still in perfect physical condition, runs great, and there's nothing I find interesting about the newer models. It feels like a bit much to get a whole new one just because of the battery thing, so I'm wondering if it might make sense to replace just the battery.

On the other hand, I looked up the instructions for how to do it. Yikes. Apparently I would need like a dozen pricey specialized tools to do it myself and the whole process sounds really sketchy, like there's a dozen ways to accidentally break something if I do anything a little bit wrong. So maybe I take it to a shop to do it. I guess that might be a good option, but it's hard to see online how much that would cost or get a feel for how reliable such services are.

So I guess, has anyone else done it themselves or had a shop do it? I don't think it matters much exactly what brand or model phone, it seems like they all have similar construction and disassembly techniques and risks. Were you happy with the result? Was it worth the cost versus getting a whole new device?

I did it on an old iPhone (iPhone 5?) back in the day - I saw an immediate boost in battery life, and it was only like an hour to figure it out.

It has gotten substantially trickier on iPhones, starting with the X. Same overall process but it's very easy to accidentally damage the face ID hardware/ribbon cables, which permanently locks you out of using face ID ever again on that phone without sending it to Apple to replace both the face ID board AND the entire motherboard. Which costs more than the resale value of the phone itself.

The same "touch it and it bricks permanently" issue existed on touch ID iphones, but the placement of the face ID sensors and ribbon cable makes it even easier to accidentally break.

What do people think about replacing batteries on modern smartphones?

Haven't attempted it. My 6-year-old Pixel 4 generally gets through the day, although it's finally getting slow and flaky enough that I might upgrade to a 10a when it comes out (or the 10 now, I guess, since Verizon will give me one for $0 for a 3-year contract commitment).

There’s a Copt down thé street from me who fixes phones. Never had an issue and it’s way cheaper when you take into account thé large cash discount.

Before doing anything else, make sure you have backed up your phone and any vital information (esp things like 2FA keys).

I've done it pretty regularly, both for my own phones and for others at my workplace. That said, it is difficult and sometimes even dangerous: I've lit off one battery on an older iPhone removing it, and while that's mostly a result of that particular aftermarket battery being crap and badly swollen, it's definitely not a surprise most people want to deal with. iPhones are definitely worse than most Android phones I've worked on, but none of them are fun.

((Screen damage can fall into a similar boat; replacement (Non-OLED) screen modules are typically under 30 USD for a plausibly-legal model and replacement gasket, and it's step 1 of getting to the battery for most phones. But iPhones can be a particular pain in the ass, with the TouchID modules on iPhones gen5-9 being extremely fragile and impossible to replace and extremely unpleasant to repair if damaged.))

The iOpener is nice, but it's just a glorified non-condensing heat/ice pack (buckwheat with a mixed additive, maybe?), and in a pinch you can just use a hot air rework gun or hot air gun. Would not recommend a hairdryer. You definitely need something like it; most phone faces are hard enough to remove with heat, and impossible with it. The AntiClamp is more a convenience thing; it's mostly just giving you more space to hold the phone while . Almost all of the other tools will come with any Amazon-grade vendor's battery (even the crappy ones), and if you do phone repairs a lot you'll end up collecting a ton of these stupid weirdo screwdrivers.

While not listed on the iFixit guide, I would recommend a silicone work mat; you can buy repair-specific ones (personal recommendation, but discount stores like Five Below or Dollar General will often end up with cooking or art-intended ones that work and can be cheaper. The screws here are tiny and often not magnetic, so having a clean, uniform workspace is a must Grab something with individual cups or marked areas, or grab some small disposable shotglass-sized cups, because a lot of the screws look identical but have slight differences that keep them from being interchangeable (tbf, less a problem on Pixels than on iPhones).

I've mostly been happy with it. Screen and especially battery quality can vary heavily, especially if you're going to Amazon and sorting by price, but even the worst I've gotten have still keep the phone running for a couple years more, it's more a matter of whether if it lasts three before battery life falls off a cliff or if the screen's backlight has a hotspot. Tablet screens can be prone to getting dust specs or hair in them, so there's been one or two times I thought I was done and had to start over again. Do expect worse water intrusion resistance unless you're absolutely neurotic about gasket placement.

Again, damage or destruction is possible, but a manageable risk and you have to be doing something kinda stupid for it to happen. Don't pry on batteries with screwdrivers, be careful with ribbon cables, essentially.

For shops, Google does have an authorized repair program and that puts an effective cap (as does the iStore 'repair' system), albeit a pretty high one. Sticker prices usually start around 100-150 USD, depending on exact model; some smaller (non-authorized-by-google) mall stores will squeak under that a bit, but I'd be surprised by anyone going under 80 USD these days. I've heard they're pretty reliable and fast from people who do use them, although they tend to be normies only using recent phones.

I'm generally a fan of keeping older equipment running, but do be aware it comes with costs. The Pixel 8 is supposed to keep getting security and software updates until 2030, so you're good for probably two battery replacements... and some other software might not keep up with that. That's gonna depend a lot more heavily on what you use your phone for, but I've seen a few pilots who were forced to update not because of hardware but because of Foreflight, as one example.

I was trying to do some DIY projects lately so I needed 2 pieces of 250mm 2020 aluminum extrusions. Cheapest I could find in Europe was 11 euro with cutting and shipping. From temu with delivery - four costed 10 eur. PCB - from jclpcb 5 boards came at a lower cost than in EU they will charge you for answering your email. let alone production. Same with bearings, flanges, housings, transistors, resistors, capacitors and so on.

How do we unfuck ourselves from the situation where China can produce so much, at such a low cost, witch such a degree of automation that they don't even bother with paying low wages or producing low quality anymore. And they seem to accelerate in automation.

On a side note - the only EU company that produced cheap-ish PCB - only 3 times the price of jcl - had such a long lead times, that I am fairly sure they just group the orders and send them to jcl.

Robots.

America can afford massive expenditures on Capital. Americans will generally not accept the low wages for their labor that would allow cheap production of most manufactured goods. Too many well-paying jobs in non-manufacturing sectors.

The only squaring of this circle is industrial robots that can be put to almost any task needed.

What do our UFO/UAP enthusiasts make of 3I/Atlas, the interstellar object hurtling through space? I may be wrong but I somehow had @Primaprimaprima as the resident UAP expert.

I recently read an interview with Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb that makes him sound either overly imaginative or Cassandra-like in his analysis of the object, which he says:

is 10 times longer than it is wide

was pushed away from the sun for some reason

followed the plane of the planets around the sun

doesn't appear to have the expected comet 'tail'

All wild conjecture appreciated.

I did make a bunch of posts about it a while back, but I lost interest after it became clear nothing was going to happen and I haven't followed anything UAP related in like a year lol.

Of course if we do get confirmation about something genuinely anomalous then that would be wonderful!

Avi Loeb is somewhat famous for banging the ET drum for years at this point. No idea about this particular object though.

Yeah, his discussion around 1I/‘Oumuamua was one of my examples for crank-on-organization wars, and while that doesn't mean he's wrong (of other examples, Hirsch ended up winning his fight pretty clearly), it doesn't give a ton of strength on its own.

What are your friendships like these days?

Do you have a "best friend?" What is he or she like?

Do you spend much time with your friends? Are you trying to make more?

I am still in touch with my best friend from around age 8. Also in touch with HS and undergrad friends. Currently I have at least two very close friends in Japan, as well as a few drinking buddies from my doctoral program. A few female friends, one from childhood with whom I'll occasionally exchange emails though she sucks at staying in touch. One woman from college whose own kids are the age we were when we met. An artist. Used to quite fancy her until I didn't. I value old friends very highly and I consider myself loyal. I've been betrayed many times. Price of the ticket.

I have not had any "real" friends other than my wife (who I met 6 years ago) since I finished undergrad 10 years ago. I'm really bad at making new friends, or keeping in touch with old ones. I have some friends from highschool and undergrad who I would like to hang out with, but they live super far away and I'm too lazy to travel.

I spend tons of time with my wife. We talk, play games, live life. She has some casual friends who we sometimes play board games with, who I guess I would consider casual friends of mine...? We also live in the same town as most of her family and do like family gatherings and stuff semi-regularly, but they're kind of normies who do stupid things for fun that I don't want to do (but begrudgingly do anyway).

On a theoretical level it'd be nice to have another friend or two outside my wife, but I've never made a friend on purpose, it always just kind of happened. And I'm not sure I care enough to jump through whatever hoops that would have to take and sacrifice a bunch of free time on not being home. I like being home.

I have a best friend, and 7 great men total who are set to be my groomsmen. I have a lot of acquaintances at church and local dance stuff, also from the EA group I ran for a couple of years.

I spend probably 2-3 nights with friends each week, talk to my best friend most days on the phone for at least a half hour, though this is relatively new. It's pretty wonderful. I prioritize friendship extremely highly.

At this point I'm not trying to make more, just deepen and maintain existing friendships.

I have plenty of friends, some closer than other but it's rare that I go more than a few days without seeing or talking to at least one of them. As much as my bank account protests I'll usually wind up going to the bar at least a night or two a week due to getting bored with not talking to anyone.

If I have a problem with said friendships it's that seemingly half my friend group (early/mid 30s millennials) moved out of the city I live in over the last 18 months. I did pick up a new friend though, at a reddit meetup of all places. The date that ensued from that meetup was a failure, but the friend is entertaining (a touch crazy but actually smart and entertaining to talk to) and we'll be meeting up for drinks some time in the next week.

I had a best friend and have had a few others who are close. He was a total fuckup and disabled in his later years but a great conversationalist and drinking buddy and had a huge friend group, a real larger than life personality. We'd talk or exchange texts daily. He took his own life a few months ago. I'm glad he isn't suffering anymore or burdening his friends but I miss him. There's always something that I would've called him to talk about and well, I can't anymore.

Yeah, everyone moving all the time is extremely annoying. I think it's a really horrid part of our culture.

I tried keeping some friends between approximately 2012 and 2016, but found it not worth the effort.

For myself - I've been thinking about this question fairly often lately. I moved away from my home state in 2016, at age 27, and have never really achieved the same levels of friendship as what I had there. Moreover, this has increased the older I've gotten. I do have some close friends here in Ohio, but the total number of hangouts I've engaged in 2025 is probably around 5.

Certainly getting married is a major factor; I got married in January and so I hang out with my wife every day. Accordingly I have plenty of human contact. I also find that I have little desire to take steps to make more friends. I actually would say I've given up on meeting kindred spirits of that kind. I don't mean that in a depressing way, but rather - I'm close to halfway through my life, and I've met so few people that I share interests and worldview with that it doesn't feel worth expending energy on.

I had a "best friend" that I met in childhood. He was my best man in my wedding and we still talk quite often, but we live thousands of miles apart now.

This fellow, C, is a math-and-science nerd. Huge reader. Very interested in machines and physical systems; currently works for a municipality maintaining light rail vehicles. He came from a very broken, impoverished home; neither parent was a high school graduate. We went to uni together, and neither of us knew what to do there, as neither of us had parents or knew anyone else that had. He majored in history, for no real reason, and then upon graduating joined the Army. While stationed in Alaska, he met his now-wife, and they now have three kids and a nice stable life. We hung out constantly between 2005 and 2012 when he joined up; together we discovered the joys of alcohol and exploring abandoned buildings. We also spent that period of our lives together where you could just amble around WalMart together at 11:00 PM and call that "hanging out." Since he joined the Army in 2012, I've seen him about once every two years.

We diverged politically in the 2010s: from generic John Kerry-supporting centrists, we lurched in different directions. He became one of the people who celebrated Charlie Kirk's killing on social media; I bought Steve Sailer's book and talk to him on Substack every now and then. Our friendship has persisted because we never confront each other about these things, but this is also only possible because of the time and distance. It feels more like an artifact of history than anything else. I am genuinely repulsed by some of the things he believes, but as long as we have the detente in place where we simply don't discuss any of it, we can continue talking about the things we have in common.

Other people succeeded C as my "active" best friend - someone I actually saw regularly and hung out with often - but since I turned 30 this role is vacant. Now most social activities feel like interruptions of time I could be spending in my Strandmon chair reading.

My TikTok is suddenly filled with Trump, Clinton, Epstein and Trump giving Clinton a blowjob. Does anyone know WTF this thing started?

I’ve been amused at the homophobia implicit in most of the left-wing comments I’ve seen about it. The same people who’d scold anyone making gay jokes about Pete Buttigieg suddenly find it hilarious to make similar jokes about Trump. Just goes to show it was all about whose ox was being gored all along.

Huh?

I don’t know what specific comments you’ve got in mind, but there’s a pretty obvious difference.

Mark Epstein (brother) sent an e-mail to Jeffrey Epstein in March of 2018 that said, "Ask him if Putin has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba." "Him" possibly being Trump. Bubba being either Bill Clinton or Bubba Salisbury, son of Odessa oil industry magnate, Dick Sailsbury. Maybe as a joke (in the case of Clinton). Maybe hinting at a corrupt financial relationship (in the case of Sailsbury). This was post-Steele dossier.

Bubba being either Bill Clinton

Waiting for him to come out and say, "I did not have a sexual relationship with this man"

One of the Epstein emails democrats got released has a reference to pictures of trump blowing bill clinton. I assume it’s a joke, but you can’t expect people not to feed it into AI.

The Democrats trolling the Epstein files for anything that makes Trump look bad. It immediately turned into a weird 2-movies-1-screen soap opera and you have to tune in tomorrow for the next plot-twist, which will seem really cool but ultimately mean nothing.

In other words: Epstein gives off spiteful ex vibes and sent out lots of emails full of the kinds of things Boomers post on Facebook about Trump. Apparently there was some comment in there suggesting TrumpxClinton happened? I haven't seen anyone actually quote it, and they've quoted a ton else. Half of Asmon Gold's comments section is people calling Epstein patient 0 for TDS.

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