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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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If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!

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naraburns nihil supernum 2d ago (text post) Edited 2d ago 2029 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for October 2026

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.

Quality Contributions to the Main Motte

@FiveHourMarathon:

"Liberals have been withdrawing from political discussion of all kinds since 2024, after a depressing series of losses that make you go "man this team will never get out of its own way." When their team looks like a contender for a ring, they'll be back."

Contributions for the week of September 28, 2026

@100ProofTollBooth:

"You need other women - preferably high social status as possible - to 'hold the line' on family and motherhood being the ultimate supreme good for women."

Contributions for the week of October 5, 2026

" She did not hurt anyone with her frankly wildly out of control actions, except possibly herself. What I'm interested in here is the men. What do I note from them, what do I see? How did they treat her?"

"I cannot be a feminist because my opinion of women is too high."

"Earlier today, big things happened in math. No, not Claude providing a sub quadratic 3SUM. OpenAI released hundreds of notable math results, in a GitHub repo."

"I'm not persuaded that a genuinely brilliant AI researcher with novel ideas about how to improve alignment (but unorthodox opinions about gender ideology, which he makes no effort to hide) would be welcome in the Bay Area, and I think that should be cause for concern for anyone who's worried about AI as an existential risk."

"Heisenberg supposedly said 'When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.'"

@YoungAchamian:

"As such I respect Scott as a writer of philosophy, psychology, and political theory, not as some stalwart intellectual thinker on ML/AI."

@KingOfTheBailey:

"Dræcina Malfoid and Male Romantic Fantasies"

@hanikrummihundursvin:

"America has no collective moral standard. So what else can one expect than complete chaos?"

@OliveTapenade:

"Malfoy's problem isn't that he doesn't have a conscience. He does. It's that he's a coward."

Contributions for the week of October 12, 2026

"How easy it would be, if only we could get our opponents to see reality! (Maybe they just need to go outside and touch some grass.)"

"This Week in Gambling"

@coffee_enjoyer:

"Shane Gillis and the Limits of Credentialism"

"I'm not interested in asking Blues permission to live in pursuit of my values. Why would I be?"

"It continues to be marvelously unbelievable how deeply dedicated the western liberal democracies are to ensuring that boomers have a comfortable and cushy final 20-30 years of life."

Contributions for the week of October 19, 2026

"At the risk of launching a Homestuck synopsis nobody asked for: Homestuck is inherently about the fracturing and rebuilding of the self."

"And yet a lot of teachers seem to be hyped as fuck at any hint that they get to do a big dramatic Very Special Episode type shit, just like the movies."

"The USAID takedown was a not-subtle shot across the bow of the largely non-legislatively-defined executive branch what had existed more by convention/inertia than as a statutory-defined structure."

@Primaprimaprima:

"Do woke feminists truly want female characters to be complex (meaning, multifaceted and sensitive, nuanced and reflective, yes, but also at times damaged, depraved, unloved and ostracized, perhaps even for perfectly valid reasons)?"

"What your post mostly made me think, though, was--yeah, as it turns out, people don't usually identify and discuss problems because they are interested in obviously relevant solutions."

"To be a young woman is like being given a million dollars, but being forced to carry it everywhere in a clear backpack, in the roughest neighborhood in town."

Contributions for the week of October 26, 2026

"Things like "the military spying on the President and leaking classified information to the press undermine his policies" not only happen, but can be successfully covered up for decades..."

@hanikrummihundursvin:

"Americans are greedy even now, to act as if they are heading for 'Brazilification' and not something worse."

"When you trap humans with incompatible values in a space together and force them to compete for resources, the result is escalating conflict until they find a way to segregate themselves by values again."

@SecureSignals:

"You can call it 'love' but from a different perspective it is an unforgivable neglect of your genetic inheritance and your own children."

"I (mostly) 'wage' the culture war because I believe that culture actually matters, and, in fact it matters much more than many people in modern society would like to admit."

"I myself remember seeing my own city, in the last 20 years or so, go from a place where it's hard but reasonable for a person who doesn't have a solid career to pay the rent with random jobs to a place where it's very difficult to do it."

"I think AI is a lateral change: you add more complexity and you add more capacity to deal with complexity, some people will cope, some won't, most people weren't coping very well with complexity anyways."

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Corvos 3hr ago

Class in the UK is genetic, of course, and used to be more so. You get some children who fall out, and some bright talents who climb up.

I think Rowling was drawing on this at least a little bit, though probably not consciously. Notably the Squibs in the books aren’t failsons, they’re lower-class coded (Filch, the cat lady). But smartest-in-the-class, daughter-of-two-dentists, charitable-work Hermione is definitely the kind of person rising through the upper-middle-class.

Context

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.

New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!

Rules

Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats

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