What is The Motte? (Part 1)
Originally posted in response to Le Bon Motte.
What is The Motte? There's the obvious historical answer: We used to post in the culture war threads on /r/slatestarcodex, but got Scott did not want to be associated with us for various reasons, so a spin-off subreddit called The Motte was formed.
One obvious observation is that the community that is now referred to as The Motte already existed prior to /r/TheMotte being created. It existed as part of the broader Slate Star Codex community. This is still a critical part of its essential character, in that the influence of Scott on this community is much higher than the influence of say, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and much much higher than the influence of say, John Oliver, Tucker Carlson, Trevor Noah, etc. I think it's also fair to note that there are a fair number of other significant influences on the community.
One particular influence that is difficult to ignore is the influence of the NRx "movement," and in particular Curtis Yarvin's writing at the blog Unqualified Reserverations (UR). This is hardly ever given as a suggestion when somebody asks for an introduction to The Motte, but I don't think anyone can seriously deny its influence. In order to provide plausible deniability, we link to Scott's Anti-Reactionary FAQ and call it a day, but at the same time, we all know that UR is about far more than the parts that Scott refuted. It's not even clear that most readers ever took the parts about monarchy or joint-stock republics seriously. Probably the single most influential idea from UR is the idea of "the Cathedral," a concept which even got repeated on Fox News (I would link to the clip, but I can't find it). You all know about it.
What's so special about The Motte, really? Well, very simply, it's one of the few high-quality forums that does not worship the Cathedral's religion. /pol/ doesn't worship the Cathedral's religion, but the content is merely low-quality trolling. Here, effort posting is highly encouraged, and we have a lot of talented writers. If you could transport these writers 150 years into the past, they would no doubt have achieved some notoriety. But instead, they're in a present, where good writing is not a particularly rare skill, rallying against the religion of our time in a place that the priests have not yet found a suitable pretense to destroy (or that they are simply unware of).
Here at The Motte, free from the Cathedral's control, some really unpopular ideas have achieved some level of consensus. Most of the long-time posters have long-since acknowledged that the effect size of HBD is greater than zero. It doesn't get debated much anymore, because it doesn't need to be. HBD is quite literally racism, in the original sense of "belief in racial difference," and is the single greatest sin under the Cathedral's religion.
(If you're reading this from the Cathedral: The above is a crazy unfalsifiable conspiracy theory about The Motte that only kooks believe. Here at The Motte, the vast majority of us believe, in the words of Chipotle Mexican Grill, that "racial and social injustice is unacceptable and we want to do our part to create an equal society. With that said, we still believe America stands for hope and opportunity and we see lots of brave people finding ways to create positive change." Furthermore, we share the view of our friends at Yelp that "our country has a long and fraught history of systemic oppression and anti-Black racism that we have shamefully not yet come close to overcoming. Recent events, starting with the brutal murders of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, have made racial injustice something that we must deal with immediately as a society." I just wanted to make this clear.)
Similar with sex differences. You don't have to go all PUA, but there's some truth to the difference in reproductive strategies between men and women. How could you believe otherwise, unless you're caught in the grips of religious dogma? Here's another one: Many people here believe incels, extremism aside, have a legitimate grievance. The sex drought is an empirical fact. None of these beliefs are debated here actively anymore because 1) it's a bad look, and 2) some flavor of them are essentially background assumptions at some and there's no need. Do we need to legislate Jensen vs. Flynn for the 666th time? No, we're good. Can you say that about literally anywhere else on the internet?
But probably the most important underlying unpopular idea here is a total distrust of experts. Are we Flat Earthers? Anti-vaxxers? Have we congealed around a crackpot theory of physics? Obviously not. This forum has the superpower of distrusting experts without becoming totally insane. Maybe it's not even a superpower, maybe it's just that few smart people have tried.
This distrust of experts dates back at least to Eliezer Yudkowsky and LessWrong. Eliezer pointed out, rather convincingly, that mainstream philosophy is a total mess, and that taking a philosophy course is not a great way to improve your thinking. Most likely you'll waste your time learning about Pythagoras or something. Many of have realized that slowly incorporating "mainstream" historical philosophers can be profoundly rewarding. Read the History of Philosophy Backwards emphasizes some of these benefits.
Some may even say this was the point of LessWrong. The sanity waterline of the official religion of the Cathedral is shockingly low. Even university professors, how can you put it... They're not idiots, many just seem to know so little. They're nothing more than specialists. They don't deserve the title of Doctor of Philosophy. Most probably don't even know how to give philosophy its yearly exam, never mind perform advanced philosophical surgery. The concept of the sanity waterline reminds of the oft-quoted David Foster Wallace bit:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
What the hell is The Motte? I can't say that we've had any world-changing intellectual output. Maybe it's just low-grade entertainment. Maybe Sneer Club is right and it's just a giant circlejerk. My view is this: We may not have discovered what the hell water is, but the community has at least noticed it, and that's more than most of us can say about any other community of which we are a part. What we do with this discovery, if anything, remains to be seen.
[To be continued?]