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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  1mo ago (text post)   569 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for November 18, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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I fundraised $500K for the nonprofit I'm running; it arrived a few days ago in our bank account. This means I get to run my small intelligence agency for another year.

One year?

For some reason I got the impression you were running it by yourself and all online.

The drafts I sometimes post on Thursday are by myself, but I have a larger team that does other things (e.g., parsing Twitter, reddit, making sense of stuff when wars start, etc.) We also wanted to have an emergency response team.

Glad to hear. A few friends sent me links to your application for the emergency response team when that came out, sounds like a fun gig, hope you can get funded to spin that up as well.

Wow, $500,000 for TheMotte? Great work man.

I realize that this probably is a joke (and if so it's a hilarious one), but just to avoid confusion I will link to the actual website.

The Motte is a pretty good intelligence agency though :), I wonder how we'd do in the case of another covid/world war/civil war/memetic strain/AI bamboozlement/whatever

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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