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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10839 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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So the conversation to expand the Motte might be

I guess it's worth noting that I'm not thinking about this in terms of "expanding the Motte". Like, yes, I would like that. But the goal is to build a larger spectrum of places that kinda work, not just "more political debate". There's some other subthread here where I mention a few possible starting points, and none of them are political, they are explicitly apolitical, and I do think that's the right approach; add some general-purpose stuff first and intentionally avoid the flamewar topics.

(those can remain here)

This has been a long tangent, but to sum it all up... To expand the Motte will inevitably lead to a righty-Motte and a lefty-Motte. A schism, so to speak, that has already happened. I do not believe that the death of lefty-Motte was a coincidence. Ring-fencing the topics of acceptable debate destroyed the entire purpose of the space. The magic (and the witches that casted them) was gone.

I guess it's also worth remembering that The Motte survived on Reddit, with probably more cross-political-side conversation than happens here. I think if we were able to return to Reddit we would probably see the same thing happen again. Yes, "the broader leftist intellectual sphere is intolerant", sure, but there are a lot of people who are left-aligned but still tolerant who would happily be part of a community with active disagreements.

From a pure monetary perspective, someone would say "there's a market there"; from a community-building perspective, I think what we can provide has a significant amount of demand. Not universal demand, absolutely not. But significant.

As soon as you create subforums out of the current Big Chum Bucket we have, this will happen. It is inevitable, and I don't think it can be solved with good moderation.

I do have some ideas for this, for what it's worth. I'm not completely convinced this is inevitable.

I agree it can't be solved with moderation, because moderation is a knife, and what this needs is a tide.

But I think it might be solvable.

I think you just run into network effects. It is hard to take on the incumbent because of network effects even if your replacement is better.

Absolutely true, yep.

But it's easier if the incumbent sucks :V

The blue tribe has Reddit.com The red tribe has scored.co which grew out of Reddit’s ejected The_Donald sub with 6m members at its high point. The grey tribe has lesswrong.com

There are others, but these are pretty big sites.

We really are about as active as a single subreddit. I’d love to see a philosophy thread here, focused on the abstract and non-culture-war, with these insightful and interesting folks, but I’ve gotten little buy-in on my threads.

However, I do have some ideas for a distributed problem-solving forum which might be integrated into the codebase.

The grey tribe has lesswrong.com

Whatever the place where the grey tribe discusses (non-AI) politics, it is certainly not LW. Politics is the mind-killer and all that. This does not mean that the grey tribe is apolitical (Scott certainly is not), just that they discuss politics elsewhere (e.g. ACX, or here).

Yes, "the broader leftist intellectual sphere is intolerant", sure, but there are a lot of people who are left-aligned but still tolerant who would happily be part of a community with active disagreements.

...So long as the prevailing powers that be in the space are ultimately on their side. They're content to be there when they still have the Global Rules they can get you sitebanned by the sympathetic admins under. They're content to be there when they know mama's watchful hand is poised to strike the mod team if they ever allow anything they consider truly contentious. Reddit Motte was not free; that's why it isn't on reddit anymore.

I don't agree with that.

And, like . . . okay I don't bring this up often, mostly because it's not often relevant. But I am one of those left-aligned people. It has been years since I voted for a Republican. My wife's the same way, both in terms of "left" and in terms of "interested in actual discussions".

I am not arguing whether there are people on the left who hate disagreement. We all know there are. But there's a lot of people on the left who are perfectly fine with it as well, and right now they just don't have a good place to live.

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!

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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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