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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   935 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.)

It is a fun test that shows how little I know about makeup and classical literature. I have a couple problems with it though. A few words appear to have spelling mistakes (the cancer is called is "leukemia" not "lukemia", for instance) so I am not exactly sure how those are counted. Am I supposed to notice them, or are they genuine mistakes by the author?

Some questions have a lot ambiguity to them. Like, one could use angstrom to measure distance, but is that a correct answer? And is a disease sexually transmitted if it can be transmitted through sex, but is not commonly thought of as such (would the common cold count as sexually transmitted)? Measuring book length in terms of pages is also weird, since it depends on the edition you got. Page and font size can be different, even if the content stays the same.

With that in mind, I can't take the test super seriously, but at least the categories are interesting, and legitimately span a wide array of topics.

The first spelling mistake (Cribbidge) fucked me up for a minute because I started second guessing if obvious-seeming answers were slightly misspelled as a trap (making it appear 6/10 are correct) until I realized they were just typos.

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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."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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