site banner
PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2377 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for November 8, 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).

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Another test for the Motte:

The Moral Foundations test

I'm listed as being closest to libertarian, which I will admit isn't entirely incorrect, even if I'd prefer to term myself a classical liberal with libertarian tendencies. Ideally I'd prefer a test that broke things down in a more granular manner, but I suppose of the options available here, I can't complain too much it lumped me in with the libertarians.

My results below

/images/1699441366405206.webp

Your scores:

  • Care 75%
  • Loyalty 61%
  • Fairness 89%
  • Authority 67%
  • Purity 69%
  • Liberty 72% Your strongest moral foundation is Fairness. Your morality is closest to that of a Conservative.

I guess this is right. Feels close to what I was raised to believe were classic British values. Loyalty surprisingly low.

Your scores:

Care 58%
Loyalty 47%
Fairness 64%
Authority 47%
Purity 25%
Liberty 64%

You have no one strongest moral foundation.
Your morality is closest to that of a Libertarian.

Answered the questions mostly based on vibes, especially when they were ambiguous.

Your scores:

Care 78%

Loyalty 56%

Fairness 64%

Authority 67%

Purity 56%

Liberty 86%

Your strongest moral foundation is Liberty.

Your morality is closest to that of a Conservative.

Your scores:

Care 67%

Loyalty 42%

Fairness 58%

Authority 67%

Purity 42%

Liberty 78%

Your strongest moral foundation is Liberty.

Your morality is closest to that of a Conservative.

Guess I am a conservative after all then...

My condolences, especially since most "Conservatives" would find plenty of your views not particularly likeable!

Funnily enough I doubt most liberals etc. would find my views particularly likeable either. They don't seem to lie on the standard western belief spectrum cline so everyone basically matches me to "not one of us, so therefore likely one of them".

What a frustrating quiz. Is there some reason these are always left so ambiguous? Does Marl give up and close the tab the second he's forced to read more than 50 words in a row? Eg.

  • "Scott is hosting a dinner party. For dessert, he serves chocolate cake, shaped to look like dog poop." - I'm supposed to make a call about whether this is "morally okay or not" given no other information. Does this not obviously depend on who's at the dinner party, and their preferences, temperaments, etc? Scott is hosting a dinner party for his football buds who find it hilarious. Laughs are had, poop-cake enjoyed, etc. Fine, yeah, morally okay! Good even. Scott is hosting a dinner party for his in-laws, who he knows don't appreciate his twisted sense of humour. They are disgusted. Scott knew they would be disgusted, and did it anyway just to see the looks on their faces. That's bad.
  • "Some men have a private, all-male club and feminists take them to court, demanding that they open it up to women." - What is even being tested here? Is it having a private all-male club in the first place or taking the club to court to open it up? Presumably the latter. From the perspective of the feminists, they likely have a sincere belief they are doing the right thing. I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to say about this. I personally think people should be able to have exclusive clubs, but also think you should be able to oppose exclusive clubs if you feel that way. I guess I'm neutral? Again, if the question was more specific, I could come down stronger on one side or the other.
  • "A group of parents, concerned about their children's risk of obesity, demand that the local store stops selling XL sized candy bars and soft drinks." - Again, what is being tested? The parents have a reasonable concern, make an unreasonable demand, which they are entitled to make, and the store is entitled to reject. "Is this morally okay?". Is what morally okay?
  • "Sarah's dog has four puppies. She can only find a home for two of them, so she kills the other two with a stone to the head." - a little more information please? Could Sarah not afford to house the puppies herself, or does she simply not want them? Does she have any other options? Is that the most humane way she could have killed them, or is she just trying to avoid a vet bill?

I don't think I'm being pedantic here.

This is a flaw of pretty much any poll or quiz, regardless of the nominal goal it seeks, the average person is an attention deficient idiot whose eyes glaze over the moment they spot a caveat in the wild, so everyone is forced to sacrifice clarity for the sake of just getting more responses.

I'm a Bayesian, and I implicitly consider what I think is the most likely/representative scenario. I think the odds of someone serving a shit-cake is far higher if they know they're in an environment where it's not going to make someone puke, and that informed my answer (a solid triple upvote because I'd be mildly tickled at the idea myself, combined with not considering it offensive or worthy of condemnation).

Similarly, I assume the woman euthanizing the puppies isn't being actively malicious, and if they ended up un-adopted in a shelter, most of them would be put down by other means. I imagine the researchers who made the poll were more curious about the visceral gut reaction to the idea of poor little puppies being stoned to death as opposed to trying to tease out more subtle moral considerations, and while I'm a fan of dogs in general, I don't think the scenario I envisioned is condemnable.

Your scores:

Care 67%

Loyalty 89%

Fairness 78%

Authority 39%

Purity 44%

Liberty 86%

Your strongest moral foundation is Loyalty.

Your morality is closest to that of a Libertarian.

I'm fine with describing myself as something like "libertarian, but with demands for interpersonal loyalty and fairness". I'm not a fan of state-enforced loyalty and fairness, but I think strong social norms to shun people that step outside those bounds are basically good.

The question that probably exemplifies that the most is one that reacted to more strongly than I'd expect, and it was the one about the guy singing along to the other country's anthem at a soccer game. Sure, the question is incomplete and I can imagine good reasons someone might do that, but under the generic situation, I don't like the guy. He's a contrarian, he's disloyal, he just likes to fuck with people. I don't like him.

Care 83%
Loyalty 69%
Fairness 92%
Authority 64%
Purity 64%
Liberty 75%

Strongest moral foundation is fairness and I got matched to conservative.

However, I do score much higher on care and fairness than a typical conservative apparently. Actually, except for the libertarian on liberty I score higher or (almost) equal on every moral foundation compared to any of the profiles. I don't know how good my morality is, but I sure do seem to have a lot of it.

Well, I ended up taking the test three times.

The first run through was entirely vibes-based and I tried to really weigh out what felt like a triple-immoral vs. a double-immoral vs. a single-immoral, and vice-versa, usually trying to pick a direction one way or the other. This one was also probably the most influenced by the order I got served the questions in, because I think I got less decisive over the course of it.

That run matched me to Left-Liberal:

  • Care - 83%
  • Fairness - 67%
  • Loyalty - 36%
  • Authority - 28%
  • Purity - 17%
  • Liberty - 64%

The second run through I tried to keep with a strong preference for "neutral/not applicable" and only give any affirmative push either way if something about the situation particularly moved me strongly.

That run also matched me to Left-Liberal:

  • Care - 63%
  • Fairness - 58%
  • Loyalty - 31%
  • Authority - 28%
  • Purity - 31%
  • Liberty - 58%

For the third run I went maximalist and selected (three thumbs up) if I would fight for someone's right to not face legal consequences for the action, (three thumbs down) if I would fight for the threat of legal consequences to be imposed on someone for the action, and (neutral) in all other cases.

That run matched me to Libertarian:

  • Care - 33%
  • Fairness - 50%
  • Loyalty - 8%
  • Authority - 0%
  • Purity - 0%
  • Liberty - 83%

To me the scale itself is a little confusing. I can get an intuitive sense of what three different levels of morally wrong should feel like. But, I had trouble imagining what it means for something to be a little morally okay, quite a bit morally okay but not fully, or extremely morally okay.

I didn't interpret any of the options as communicating "this is a morally good action" so I wasn't really confident about my choices on that side of the scale.

In all three attempts I ended up giving a lot of "this is morally okay" answers to a lot of actions that would absolutely negatively impact the way I thought about a friend, colleague or stranger if I knew that they had done the action. I don't know if that means I've missed the point of the exercise or not.

(Sorry for the deletion of the previous iteration of this comment, I'm on mobile and replied as a top level instead of a comment accidentally.)

Thanks for taking the time to redo it multiple times, there's no clear guidance as to whether something is morally laudable/condemnable or whether you personally approve (assuming hypocrisy of some sort where the two diverge), so I personally went with the latter, since there were examples, like the officer covering up a friendly fire incident, where I think it would be morally superior for him to come clean, but I personally think it's excusable if he knows there will be severe consequences for an accident of war.

Care 31% Loyalty 31% Fairness 50% Authority 22% Purity 56% Liberty 83% Your strongest moral foundation is Liberty.

Your morality is closest to that of a Libertarian.

I definitely have libertarian sympathies, but I would still consider myself more conservative than libertarian, especially among popular social issues. What I find surprising is that I personally find loyalty very important in friendships and relationships, so that loyalty is so low is something surprising to me.

I've already shared a political compass poll, so I won't repeat it, but this one just condenses everyone down into 3 buckets of left liberal, conservative and libertarian. I certainly am closer to a libertarian than the other alternatives, at least I think that's the directional improvement, but on the full compass I was dead center.

As an Enlightened Centrist, I suppose I need to get a grill sooner rather than later!

I probably poll more libertarian at the moment because I don't highly respect authority (probably because authority seems to keep getting it wrong in the worst ways possible). I've taken a few political compass map polls and I tend to lean conservative in those, though less so than I would expected for myself.

Grilling is definitely a hobby I'm interest. And breadmaking. A personal goal is to smoke a brisket but I'll probably never have the time/disposable income/space to do it.

  • Care: 60
  • Loyalty: 80
  • Purity: 60
  • Liberty: 60
  • Fairness: 72
  • Authority: 86

Interestingly I answered ‘neutral’ to maybe half the questions, in that I didn’t really consider them moral issues (hiring the hotter over the more competent intern isn’t immoral, it just may or may not be poor business practice; killing a rabbit on TV is neither particularly immoral nor moral, nor is serving dog meat). My strongest positions related to respect for parents and authority, but I also thought the man not greeting the other parent at school because he was a janitor was very rude/wrong. Buying your kid all the toys so the others can’t have them is just deliberately petty and therefore wrong too.

Generally speaking, prosocial behavior is good, antisocial behavior is bad, libertarianism cannot effectively handle defectors, fanatics and degenerates, who are three primary risks to an advanced society (the NAP means that, by definition, libertarianism or even classical liberalism in general requires the great majority of the population to be ideologically libertarian to work).

killing a rabbit on TV

Yeah, I had to go neutral on this one. If it's for sadistic reasons, this is plainly evil. If it's because the animal was caught in a snare and they're going to butcher and eat it, well, that seems like a positive.

I think killing an animal just for views is antisocial. Now if it’s a documentary on farm life, and perhaps they even eat dogs, that’s fine.

Who even defends the NAP? At this point it’s just a club to attack classical liberal opinions generally, who of course did not wait for the NAP to come into being. And said ideas do not need to be implemented wholesale, they usually work fine and debate well one-on-one on the issue du jour.

"While on a live on-air tv show, a man kills a baby rabbit with a knife."

It doesn't specify whether this was done for shock value, not that you can rule that out. I don't see it making a difference myself, I value the life of a rabbit at roughly nil either way.

I mostly agree with you, which is why I'm mildly surprised our scores differ so much.

Your criticism of pure-blooded libertarianism is precisely why I don't consider myself a card carrying member, if someone was say, building an unaligned AGI or performing dangerous GOF research or maybe raising malaria ridden mosquitos in their backyard, I reserve the right to stop them by force, even if I'm tolerant of less pernicious activities.

Care 83% Loyalty 17% Fairness 67% Authority 0% Purity 33% Liberty 100%

Your strongest moral foundation is Liberty. Your morality is closest to that of a Libertarian.

nice, 0 auth, 100 liberty. I did treat every question as binary. Didn't know I was that caring, but I guess if there's no cost involved, I technically care.

I did treat every question as binary. Didn't know I was that caring, but I guess if there's no cost involved, I technically care.

Pollsters who go to the effort of having 7 different options in shambles.

I think that unless you strongly opine on a matter, the correct way of approaching this is to hit the neutral option. I'd be curious what your results would be if you re-did it with judicious use of the same, instead of maximally preferring one side of a binary!

Oh but I do strongly opine. Sorry, ‘a little bit okay’ is just okay. I could redo it, but the results would be those of a wishy-washy, incorrect version of me.

I would say that I highly prize fairness, I just have a different definition of it from the one used in the poll.

For example, I see nothing/little wrong with the manager privileging the prettier intern over the more competent one (this is grossly true in practise, see the halo effect, but that's orthogonal to the issue of whether that's good). Sure, I can agree that focusing on looks overly much over competence in an employee might be an example of misalignment from the idealized version of themselves that would be best for a business, but given that the two of them only had a minor difference in terms of competency, I don't particularly care. I see nothing wrong with women who opt for the casting-couch route for getting ahead either.

And depending on the job, being attractive might well be extremely important, people are more likely to return to a restaurant with a pretty and flirtatious waitress, even if she might occasionally get an order mixed up, and that's broadly true in most fields, especially anything people-oriented like sales.

Sure, I can agree that focusing on looks overly much over competence in an employee might be an example of misalignment from the idealized version of themselves that would be best for a business, but given that the two of them only had a minor difference in terms of competency, I don't particularly care.

My view on the matter seems common in practice, but uncommon to articulate, which is that being around attractive people is more pleasant and that all else equal, I would always choose the more attractive person. In the United States, so many people are grotesquely fat that it's easy to opt into being way more attractive than the median simply by being reasonably physically fit, which also makes attractiveness a marker for character.

Yeah that was a tough one. I did put okay, because the not okay route runs into the problem of unenforceable thoughtcrime. There’s an ambiguity in seeing ‘okay’ as either the most commendable course of action, or just an act which does not require any kind of punishment.

Care 69% Loyalty 44% Fairness 78% Authority 44% Purity 39% Liberty 50%

Your strongest moral foundation is Fairness.

Your morality is closest to that of a Left-Liberal.

I don't think we would get along. :P

I bicker happily with most people on the Motte, but IRL I'm a pretty chill person who can mix with just about any crowd. I suppose that's largely because this place is designed to discuss contentious topics and deeply-held beliefs, and my stance on FDA delenda est, HBD or the like doesn't come up much in normal contexts haha

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