Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 25, 2022
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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Notes -
I sometimes see people ask here for some old blogpost or comments they have read and cannot find - and someone usually answers. There is obviously a certain advantage of asking a group of people - only one needs to remember and it seems that the group remembers. But I feel like some organization and order would help me personally to find stuff I already "know". Does anyone here have some good system/workflow for saving great content from here or some blogs?
I would like to use it as some form of "extended memory". Essentially I want something where I have link to the original, its title and a few words through which I can find it (for example ctrl+f) - could be a short description and/or some tags. And some excerpt (or ideally archive of the content). It should hopefully also last for a long time (and thus be sufficiently scalable)
Previously I have used browser bookmarks, Obsidian (basically a few markdown files) and just pasting the links in private discord channel. Bookmarks are not quite scalable and not that well searchable. Obsidian is probably closest to what I am looking for but only searching tens of files is timeconsuming.
Right now I am thinking of using some kind of txt file. Longevity guaranteed, ctrl+f for searchability. With some simple version of csv so it can be navigated by scripts. Do you have some cool strategy for keeping you reading list? Or do you just rely on your memory?
Sorry we didn't get one of these posted, multiple people posted them but no one was around to approve them. Please feel free to re-post this comment in the one approved thread. My apologies.
No problem. I was hoping that my thread would get approved but I did not get lucky.
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