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The internet has made defensive writers of us all

pchiusano.github.io

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Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#111

Post by munificent »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #24
WalterBright wrote: post #5

One of the common methods people use to attack posts with ideas they don't agree with is to take the prose literally. This is much like the "work to rule" form of protest that unions use, and the "letter of the law" rather than the spirit of it, and of course all those "zero tolerance" policies.

One approach to resolving this would be to not make statements that are literally not true and to correct statements that are literally not true to not be literally not true.

A response like this is exactly what the article is about.

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#112

Post by zem »

noonespecial wrote: post #95

The phenomenon of the nitpicky someone-on-the-internet-is-wrong type comment is so prevalent, I thing we need an acronym like tl;dr for it. How about "willful misinterpretation; doesn't justify response"? Wm;djr

or bf;wr (bad faith; won't respond). i prefer the term "bad faith" since it covers more cases than "wilful misinterpretation"; i've been using it to good effect on facebook to disengage with malicious arguments, though i didn't think of acronyming it.

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#113

Post by iamcurious »

angersock wrote: post #88
mhurron wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As engineers, we are hardwired to nitpick. This is just not true. You are not 'hard wired' to react in such a specific manner, and being an engineer does not mean ripping things apart. You may be an engineer and choose to make a joke about something. You may be an engineer and something may make you go off and learn about something you didn't know about before. You may be an engineer and react in all sorts of ways…

Your comment here rather illustrates the point, I think. :)

Interesting. So to convince people to disagree I should voice agreement?

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#114

Post by geowwy »

noonespecial wrote: post #95

The phenomenon of the nitpicky someone-on-the-internet-is-wrong type comment is so prevalent, I thing we need an acronym like tl;dr for it. How about "willful misinterpretation; doesn't justify response"? Wm;djr

Scott Adams suggests calling it "outragism". http://blog.dilbert.com/post/109482303301/outragists-are-the...

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#115

Post by jxramos »

m52go wrote: post #105
proksoup wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently watched Slavoj Zizek speak about how political correctness is a more complete totalitarianism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tndXr-oQxxA I am optimistic the video has some relevance to this discussion.

Mises recently published an excellent article on this topic, titled "PC is About Control, Not Etiquette" https://mises.org/library/pc-about-control-not-etiquette-0

"PC is best understood as propaganda" what a bold statement! I like this critical exploration of the whole concept of PC, pretty fascinating.

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#116

Post by jxramos »

zem wrote: post #112
noonespecial wrote: post #95

The phenomenon of the nitpicky someone-on-the-internet-is-wrong type comment is so prevalent, I thing we need an acronym like tl;dr for it. How about "willful misinterpretation; doesn't justify response"? Wm;djr

or bf;wr (bad faith; won't respond). i prefer the term "bad faith" since it covers more cases than "wilful misinterpretation"; i've been using it to good effect on facebook to disengage with malicious arguments, though i didn't think of acronyming it.

I vote that some of these get adopted, definitely solid concepts worth formalizing.

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#117

Post by openfuture »

zem wrote: post #112
noonespecial wrote: post #95

The phenomenon of the nitpicky someone-on-the-internet-is-wrong type comment is so prevalent, I thing we need an acronym like tl;dr for it. How about "willful misinterpretation; doesn't justify response"? Wm;djr

or bf;wr (bad faith; won't respond). i prefer the term "bad faith" since it covers more cases than "wilful misinterpretation"; i've been using it to good effect on facebook to disengage with malicious arguments, though i didn't think of acronyming it.

I like the ;wr part (won't respond) better than the ;djr (looks complex).

But we should make sure to decide on a single one* to use, I like a bit of both: wm;wr cause of symmetry.

*maybe it would be more effective to have multiple and see if any of them catch on but I feel like it'll just cause unnessecary confusion

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#118

Post by sawwit »

kornish wrote: post #13

A great quote from the article: "The defensive writing style also encourages another sort of ugliness, which is that “avoiding saying something wrong” becomes a primary focus of the writing, rather than communicating or exploring ideas which the author might himself be unsure of." One thing that's great about Gwern Branwen's writing is that Gwern's essays are accompanied by a "belief tag". That tag gives the ability…

How about introducing a simple convention for indicating your degree of belief in similar manner to the sarcasm indicator /s: One could write for example /p1 .. /p9 to refer to the probabilities 0.01% .. 99.9%.

That could resolve a lot of issues that occur in text communication. /p7

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#119

Post by jxramos »

enqk wrote: post #8
WalterBright wrote: post #5

One of the common methods people use to attack posts with ideas they don't agree with is to take the prose literally. This is much like the "work to rule" form of protest that unions use, and the "letter of the law" rather than the spirit of it, and of course all those "zero tolerance" policies.

For which the Principle Of Charity was created: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

fantastic... "...avoid attributing irrationality, logical fallacies or falsehoods to the others' statements, when a coherent, rational interpretation of the statements is available.", I like that essentially "snapping" our interpretations to their best fit interpolations within some rational space of ideas.

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#120

Post by delecti »

13thLetter wrote: post #101
delecti wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often, when people are referring to racism, they're referring specifically to Institutional racism. As a general rule (because everything is naturally full of gray areas) it's considered to be impossible for whites to experience institutional racism in countries where we're the majority. So while a PoC could certainly be bigoted against whites, it wouldn't be accurate to say that they're inflicting institutional raci…

" As a general rule (because everything is naturally full of gray areas) it's considered to be impossible for whites to experience institutional racism in countries where we're the majority." Sorry, what? Considered by whom? Because we should have a word with these people about how unimaginative they are. For one thing, there are plenty of ways a member of group X could experience institutional racism in an X-majorit…

I know it's lazy to just link to a Wikipedia article on the subject, but I'm going to anyway, because I'm too lazy to address all the things in your post when you can do your own research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism

The fact is, the occasional inconvenience on whites in America (as a convenient example) from occasional pockets of bigoted blacks is fundamentally different from the regular impact on blacks from the institutionalized racist tendencies in society.

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