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CSpitz  8mo ago (text post)   2950 thread views

Married guys of The Motte, where are your wives hanging out and can I join in?

I’m looking to find out where I can meet other women/moms who value rationalist-style discourse, but are more interested in kids, family, community, and home than in Motte discussions these days.

I’m a long time Motte lurker with a deep respect for the tenets of this forum. I crave more of this type of discourse. The issue is, I’m a stay-at-home mom now and I’m choosing to spend my time elsewhere (kids, community-building, garden, etc). Most of my exposure to this community is now through my husband (who forwards me the quality contributions he thinks I’d like), and honestly I’m generally more interested in topics that relate closer to my daily life these days anyway. (e.g. I'm very interested in Culture War stuff, but with more of a focus on "how the heck do I raise my kids in the middle of this Culture War?")

I’m wondering whether I can somehow connect with other moms (maybe wives of Motte members?) who are similarly lurking but who’d enjoy Motte-style discourse a lot more than the kinds of discourse I’ve been finding on more-mainstream kinds of online mommy groups (ugh).

TL;DR Seeking moms who love the rationalist ethos, but are busy doing mom stuff.

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I'm far from a married, or being a father.

But you are looking for an exceedingly small group of people. And by that I mean people who are

  1. Mothers
  2. Can/Will talk like mottizens
  3. Actually uses the Motte

You are probably in the thousands of people worldwide at filter (2) and probably less than 10 people at filter (3). There are literally dozens of you.

I suggest;

  • Seek out mothers who won't necessarily give you the full motte experience, some of it. You can probably find conservative mom groups.
  • Just talk to parents on the motte?

You are probably in the thousands of people worldwide at filter (2) and probably less than 10 people at filter (3). There are literally dozens of you.

Is that not sufficient? If there are 10 people on this site who meet the criteria, and all/most of them eventually see this post (either directly or by someone recommending it to them), then OP has gone from 0 to 10 friends to discuss these things with, which appears to be what they're looking for. Once your last filter is "people who I will actually encounter" you can tolerate tiny numbers making it through, conditional on them wanting a small group to talk with rather than trying to form a brand new splinter-motte that requires a few hundred people.

It seems like ‘conservative mom groups’ are probably easy- there’s likely one at 70% of churches in the country, for example- to find, but she might be looking for high-IQ and contrarian mothers, which is harder.

Lol. “High-IQ and contrarian mothers” might be the best description to-date of my ideal friend parameters.

Yeah that will be just about impossible.

Which is why I suggested.. she just talks to us non mother mottizens. I dont think there is any massively insightful informarion that a motte mom might have more than the generic motte parent. The motte parent will be much closer to what she is looking for than a conservative mom even.

I, for one, am interested in more threads about parenthood, physical hobbies (I've been enjoying some on woodworking), education that's more about actually teaching children, less complaining about bad things happening in education, etc. For a while there were some posts, I think in the wake of Scott posting on "Raise a Genius" (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-genius/), about possibly trying out alternative education on one's own kids, but I haven't heard any updates about it lately. It would be interesting to hear back on how people's various attempts at child raising and education are going.

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