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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27716 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Happy Birthday Elon Twitter

We're almost at the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over Twitter X. How have your predictions fared? I'll answer below.

I don’t have a twitter account, mostly for my own sanity. One of the worst new features is that if you are not logged in to twitter you cannot get a chronological feed of an account, it sorts by most popular, which is more than useless. (You can change it if you’re logged in).

Also, unless you’re logged in, you can’t click on a link to a twitter comment and read the replies. Only the actual tweet is displayed.

On the other hand, This has caused my twitter usage to go down to less than a minute a week, which is great.

You can take any twitter url and replace twitter.com with twitter.com and get more or less the old experience without having to sign in. There are some companies that use twitter to post status message when there is an outage etc. and this has been helpful for me.

FYI, the forked code base running this site will autocorrect twitter links to nitter or vice versa depending on settings. So right now your comment says replace <url> with <same url>.

If you click on view source you can still see the original version.

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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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