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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   2469 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for September 7, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Reading a My Little Pony fanfiction of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Suddenly realizing something very important to my self-image:

I didn’t get D’s and Unfinisheds in college because of stupidity. I got them because I was too curious and didn’t want to stop thinking long enough to plough through the homework which didn’t require any thinking beyond rote calculation.

This is going to sound like a really silly question, but which one?

(what, you mean there's more than one HPMOR/MLP fanfic? Yes, I'm pretty sure there is)

As recently shared on /r/rational, Harry Potter and the Prancing of Ponies. Feels like A SLIGHTLY more accessible early HPMOR, with a similar focus on thinking, a lot less stress, no ticking clock, and the Toms’ personal war on hold. Spoilers for HPMOR almost up to the end of the original, so be warned.

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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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