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PaperclipPerfector  18hr ago (text post)   780 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 27, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Emil Kirkegaard has a new test, a "Multifactor General Knowledge Test". Link here: https://taketest.xyz/mfgkt

It's short and takes maybe 5 minutes. The percentile rankings are fun. Surely The Motte can drag the distribution rightward.

My results. (Foiled again by my working class upbringing.)

No answer key after the end? Aw.

Beat you by 1 point though.

Which of these countries possess nuclear weapons?
Israel

Lmao.

There's also US nuclear weapons in Germany. They're under a shared US-NATO command structure. German officers are nominally in charge of delivering these weapons in a time of war. Does that mean Germany "possesses" nuclear weapons? Only the test author knows :(

My impression is that there were lots of ambiguous questions like this where some answers could be reasonably argued either way.

There were. The one that got me was the French colonies. I'm guessing that they wouldn't count India, and that most educated people wouldn't guess India, but only because most people don't know about the colony at Pondicherry.

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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."

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