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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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naraburns nihil supernum 2mo ago (text post) Edited 2mo ago 4390 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for February 2024

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.

We also had the problem with the database earlier this month, so some of these comments aren't available in their original context. However I am reposting the comments themselves below; it's not a perfect solution, but in various ways it beats the alternatives I could think of. That said, if you find any errors in need of correction (misattributed comments, for example) please feel free to @ me. The number of copy/paste errors I made in the process of trying to put this together is... not small.

Contributions Outside the Main Motte

"Mediated group hallucinations and consensus reality"

Contributions for the week of January 29, 2024

"But for us Germans, the state was never truly a democracy; the most we ever managed was to be handed whatever form of democracy our betters thought suitable for us, by the state and against the people."

Contributions for the week of February 5, 2024

@TitaniumButterfly:

"No, I don't think that captive animals, except perhaps those taken from the wild, have any idea what they're missing. But that doesn't mean they're not missing it."

"'Bob/Alice posts a public photo or video on a social media platform, and a bunch of people who don't know Bob/Alice create edited versions of said photo or video without Bob's consent' describes hundreds if not thousands of viral memes throughout the history of the internet..."

"The modern era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble."

"If we suddenly lost access to fossil fuels tomorrow, that would be an existential threat to civilization, perhaps even humanity."

@mitigatedchaos:

"But if it's OK to be white, then it isn't OK to do this sort of 'corrective' discrimination."

@felis-parenthesis:

"A good egregore teaches us eudaimonia instead of hedonism. It saves us, and since we are its substrate, it saves itself."

@100ProofTollBooth:

"Rationalism's core flaw, in my opinion, is that you're trying to debug the firmware with the firmware."

@FarNearEverywhere:

"Speaking as a former minor local government minion, I recognise this person. No, not the blankface..."

Contributions for the week of February 19, 2024

"There have been two recent high profile shootings."

"The reason talking about HBD is important is that so much policy is based on the false premise that not-HBD."

@curious_straight_ca:

"I think trying to prove a black-white IQ gap just via the existing income gap is a mistake, anyway."

"Mencken defined 'Puritanism' as 'the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,' but a better definition might be 'haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be doing wrong.'"

"I think national businesses have correctly gotten the message that Seattle now lacks the consistent political will to create a good business environment."

"The common online reputation of George Mason is basically totally wrong."

@SecureSignals:

"The real danger will be when Gemini and other Generative AI become so good at generating cultural images and motion pictures, with their output influenced by this latent anti-White alignment which is called 'AI Safety', that the agenda behind the underlying alignment will be nearly imperceptible."

"I think men and women think differently about stories, media and what matters in them."

"...I think people truly underestimate how utterly brainwashed people can be by media."

"Google, undoubtedly, put their finger on the scale to produce this absurd Gemini AI."

Contributions for the week of February 14, 2024

"Scott Alexander has written a piece about love and liberty"

"When enough such incidents accumulate, as I observe they did in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, I think it is reasonable to conclude that the democratic process is not only threatened, but has in fact been compromised."

"As I've tried to explain in some of your earlier 2020 election threads I feel like you are either misrepresenting or fundamentally misunderstanding the nature opposition's objections."

"Presumably the first 1,000 were selected basically at random and showed a 9.5% voting rate among people that had been deemed mentally incompetent and weren't allowed to vote."

"In Hungary, the biggest political scandal in years has been unfolding over the last two weeks, and has included the resignation of the (ceremonial) president of the republic, Katalin Novák."

"From a utilitarian perspective, I am better off minimizing the changes of unilaterally disastrous event, than trying to get billions."

"There is a process for laundering such leaks or rumors into consensus reality, often quite literally via the New York Times."

Contributions for the week of February 26, 2024

"There are always a small number of people that would have their lives radically improved if society rearranged towards their preferences. That still leaves everybody else."

"So I might be projecting, but when I hear someone say that 'maybe the religious doomsayers were on to something', it speaks to me."

@ControlsFreak:

"I cannot imagine five members of the Court will sign off on saying that the Constitution guarantees GMail the right to refuse private communications service based solely on their dislike of an individual's politics."

"Against Large Language Models as an Archive"

@Chrisprattalpharaptr:

"Probably we're again going to rely on godlike AI designing new methods for manipulating gene expression on broad scales, or maybe some Kwisatz Haderach breeding program over generations as we slowly introduce the changes we need."

@100ProofTollBooth:

"I categorically reject literal cellular biological modification when we have already developed, employed, and enjoyed a social, cultural, and legal mechanism to address the problem. Namely; monogamous marriage."

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drmanhattan16 2mo ago

How far am I supposed to take this analogy? Because if I take Hlynka's position and apply it here, then we are left with the idea that outsiders have no obligation to actually consider the probability of fraud occurring, and that they should be free to accept payment to accept the idea that no fraud occurred.

That doesn't strike me as particularly rational and virtuous, respectively.

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Context

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

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