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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   1864 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for June 14, 2023

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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I'll miss you, for what it's worth.

Nowadays, I cringe when I get a comment. I feel anxious when I see a lit-up notification bell. Frequently the sort of responses I engender seem not to be positive or helpful engagement -- often just dismissive one-liners, low-effort commentary that half-makes a point while being maximally personal or inflammatory, without any empathy for other perspectives or attempt to try and understand where I'm coming from.

Yeah, I acknowledge this is a problem. We're running into various problems with long-term shifts, and it's unclear how to fix them; I have some ideas that I'm going to be trying out, but the core issue is just that value drift is hard to deal with. And I haven't come up with a good solution besides "frequent new mods who haven't value-drifted yet" or "clever tricks".

Honestly, maybe I should be doing Doge elections much more often and turn moderation into more of a rotating duty. It's tempting.

Honestly, maybe I should be doing Doge elections much more often and turn moderation into more of a rotating duty. It's tempting.

I don't see how this is supposed to help. It's not about the moderation, or the rules, it's the zeitgeist. We've been through too much to pretend everything is fine, we're all in the same boat, and just trying to figure life out.

I say give people something to do that is not culture war. Any of you degenerates want to mod a game, or something?

I don't see how this is supposed to help. It's not about the moderation, or the rules, it's the zeitgeist.

The idea is that you pick people who aren't jaded, and as they get jaded, they get rotated out. If you want to remain stationary but you're standing on a slow-moving train, you walk in the opposite direction of the train.

I say give people something to do that is not culture war. Any of you degenerates want to mod a game, or something?

This honestly makes me tempted to set up Reddit-esque subreddits. I'm not sure it would work, but it's tempting.

(The codebase did have this functionality, but we pulled it because it was completely bitrotted. Wouldn't be too hard to reintroduce it though.)

I think part of the problem is that we desperately do need a constant influx of new members, else we will turn into an echo chamber, but the problem with that is Eternal September.

And right now everywhere (not just in the USA) is polarised and drawn up in battle array on both sides of the Culture War, so the temptation is there for one-liners, cheap shots, building consensus, and the rest of it - among the old-times and the new 'uns.

I don't know the solution to that, apart from an influx of the Holy Spirit and the grace of God.

else we will turn into an echo chamber

I don’t think there’s been a single CW thread yet that I would describe as having an insufficient amount of disagreement.

I’m not sure what all the doom and gloom is about tbh. I think this place is fantastic the way it is right now. The only thing I would want to see change is more essayposts about a wider variety of topics (your Narnia post was an excellent contribution in this regard).

Yeah, and it's really really hard to figure out how to get new members. There are a lot of places that would simply ban us because we allow witches to participate, and the places that wouldn't do that are entirely full of witches. This makes it hard to build a community whose signature property is "some, but not all, witches".

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!


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