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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   3494 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 21, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm on Meyer's In Defense of Freedom. It's an effective statement of right-libertarian ideas, and surprisingly critical of Kirkian conservatism. Meyer's defense of freedom and reason is in large part against "New Conservatism's" defining of freedom as the freedom to do one's duty. It's surprising considering that the system related to his name is "fusionism." I'll have to dust off my Kirk sometime.

I'm currently reading Molecular Biology Of The Cell. It's a big biochemistry text that's over 1,700 pages, a topic which I've long planned to cover in full but have never managed to get the time to do so. I plan to finish it by the end of next month, and have been making notes when I read so as to aid in memorisation of the concepts covered.

In conjunction with this, because deep time is fascinating, I have been reading a large variety of papers on biospheric evolution during the Precambrian while drawing up a timeline of events - there's a long, complex fuse that led up to the explosion of animal life at the beginning of the Phanerozoic and that as far as I can tell is still poorly understood. There is so much from back then that would've been like nothing the world has seen since (the Snowball Earth(s), the Ediacaran biota, and so on - there is even some evidence showing incipient multicellular life all the way back in the early Proterozoic that went nowhere, a dead branch on the evolutionary tree which featured relatively complex lifeforms large enough to be visible to the naked eye). I've been including links in my notes so I don't lose the original sources, I might put it up TheMotte at some point once I'm happy with it.

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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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