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The internet has made defensive writers of us all

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Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#161

Post by kornish »

jandrese wrote: post #158
kornish wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link, that's fascinating read! It seems that many people who I would call "intellectually honest" end up developing speech patterns to avoid (1) speaking in absolutes; and (2) making statements of opinion articulated as statements of fact. An example of (1) is to use the words "many" or "most" instead of "all". An example of (2) is to start opinions with "I think". Those speech patterns, though, can le…

I'm having trouble justifying the tradeoff between: "That's well reasoned but far too wishy washy" and "So forceful! So eloquent! Factually wrong but the way you said it completely sold it to me! Amazing!" It's Obama vs. Trump.

Sure, except that Trump doesn't make a disclaimer before or after all his statements that he might be wrong to some degree.

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#162

Post by chroma »

linkregister wrote: post #63
OvidStavrica wrote: post #43

I am fairly new to Y-Combinators Hacker News. Unfortunately, I've run head-long into this very issue on this forum. It ruins the experience. There is value in communicating figuratively and/or with metaphors. When creatively solving problems, looking for trends or drawing a hypothesis out of the ether, it is often desirable to avoid specifics. In my opinion, one's inability to comprehend and respond to any given stat…

I think that HN is one of the rare forums where this article doesn't apply. Usually the top comment in a particular thread contains the least hedges and most enthusiastically espouses a particular opinion. The comment is not usually overly bombastic (though it sometimes is). The comment almost always adopts the majority opinion on HN. Posting a comment not aligned with the majority opinion carries a risk of at most -…

> Posting a comment not aligned with the majority opinion carries a risk of at most -4 points. I assert that downvotes more often correlate with disagreement than failure to abide by the standards of discourse. Since the penalty is limited, that's okay.

A comment can have far worse consequences than the loss of a few karma points. If you say the wrong thing, your reputation and (potentially) your livelihood are at risk. That's why, for anything remotely controversial, I use pseudonymous accounts. It's simply not worth it to have my real-world reputation ruined. I can't imagine the deluge of hate that would descend upon me if some of my views were known; doubly-so for misconstrued versions of them. I can already hear the haters: "Chroma approves of torture!"[1][2], "Chroma is sexist!"[3][4], "Chroma is ageist!"[5] "Chroma hates muslims!"[6][7], "Chroma hates the Amish!"[8], "Chroma hates pilots!"[9], "Chroma wants to slaughter all lions!"[10], "Chroma thinks motorcycle riders are mentally ill!"[11] Etcetera.

That said, I agree with you on defensive writing. When expressing anything controversial, defensive writing is mostly a waste of effort. Simply holding the opinion is cause enough for others to downvote and denigrate. Unless it's something very close to your audience's views, you might as well aim for good prose and avoid hedges.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10531577

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8725500

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10443021

4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4321440

5. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8889897

6. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9530853

7. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8879389

8. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9280711

9. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10417447

10. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10476699

11. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8569078

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#163

Post by dang »

13thLetter wrote: post #147
delecti wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 impac…

Sorry, no, I'm not going to click on that link. As you pretty much realized yourself, just linking to Wikipedia and saying "read this, I'm too lazy to explain my point of view" is not going to convince anyone of anything. This is a discussion, not a classroom. You're going to have to do the legwork yourself.

Please don't post personally abrasive comments here.

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#164

Post by foxhill »

madaxe_again wrote: post #19
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one of the surprising side-effects of the Internet that anything whatsoever you might say in a public forum can potentially offend someone, somewhere, somehow.

Look, I'm not being racist, but I am mortally offended. You know what you said. Edit: in case you missed it, this was sarcastic.

you're being down voted because your response does not contribute to the discussion; we all get it, people can feel offended from almost any statement - that is the point of this article.

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#165

Post by dclowd9901 »

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…

So timely. In another HN thread, I simply raised a point that drunk driving wasn't the largest threat to road safety based on statistics, and was labeled an apologist drunk driver.

The real problem is that if you put your ideas out there, and someone says something like that, and you don't respond, they've gotten the last word, and your silence is a patent acceptance of their point (as it would be in a face-to-face debate). So we try to guard our opinions with "This is just my opinion" (duh, whose else opinion would it be?), or try to beat others to the counterpoints, and when you are constantly setting up defenses to your ideas, your idea loses a lot of potency and clarity.

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#166

Post by antimagic »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #77
WalterBright wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Babies are not smarter than dogs, but they are certainly people. There are also people in vegetative states.

In what way are dogs smarter than (or equivalent to) babies? What value is there in such a statement: This dog is at least as smart as this baby? What does smart even mean?

Some dogs can be trained to herd sheep in a remarkably precise way, with just hand gestures and whistles to control them. There are plenty of people on this planet, born with mental defects, that would be incapable of learning to do this. Nevertheless, "People are smarter than dogs" is a usefully true statement, even whilst not being 100% correct. It certainly communicates the idea better than: "People, after having attained a certain level of mental development after birth, and not counting those born with mental defects or receiving cerebral injuries after birth, are smarter than most dogs, putting aside for the moment the possibility of a dog being born with a mutation allowing it to reason at a much higher level than is usually seen in the dog population".

One version of that sentence concisely articulates the core idea. The other, whilst more correct, hides the core idea under a large number of sub-clauses trying to deal with unusual corner cases.

To bring this back to the technical world, this debate is very similar to the way that programming language designers go to great lengths to try and help programmers right error handling code that doesn't get in the way of understanding the nominal case - it turns out that this is an exceptionally hard problem to solve though when dealing with computers because they are so precise. Thankfully human brains can be a lot more forgiving if we so desire (see the Principal of Charity mentioned previously in this thread).

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#167

Post by antimagic »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #77
WalterBright wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Babies are not smarter than dogs, but they are certainly people. There are also people in vegetative states.

In what way are dogs smarter than (or equivalent to) babies? What value is there in such a statement: This dog is at least as smart as this baby? What does smart even mean?

Some dogs can be trained to herd sheep in a remarkably precise way, with just hand gestures and whistles to control them. There are plenty of people on this planet, born with mental defects, that would be incapable of learning to do this. Nevertheless, "People are smarter than dogs" is a usefully true statement, even whilst not being 100% correct. It certainly communicates the idea better than: "People, after having attained a certain level of mental development after birth, and not counting those born with mental defects or receiving cerebral injuries after birth, are smarter than most dogs, putting aside for the moment the possibility of a dog being born with a mutation allowing it to reason at a much higher level than is usually seen in the dog population".

One version of that sentence concisely articulates the core idea. The other, whilst more correct, hides the core idea under a large number of sub-clauses trying to deal with unusual corner cases.

To bring this back to the technical world, this debate is very similar to the way that programming language designers go to great lengths to try and help programmers right error handling code that doesn't get in the way of understanding the nominal case - it turns out that this is an exceptionally hard problem to solve though when dealing with computers because they are so precise. Thankfully human brains can be a lot more forgiving if we so desire (see the Principal of Charity mentioned previously in this thread).

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#168

Post by TeMPOraL »

gaius wrote: post #156
TeMPOraL wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bravery is overrated. You learn to pick your battles and your opponents - you either talk just to charitable people, or under the protection of the Mighty Banhammer wielded by a charitable mod.

Who's the mod on Twitter say? You will encounter people on there who actively choose to follow the opposite of that principle. That's what I mean by public.

Oh, I what you mean now. I too am afraid of the public Internet, and sincerely hope to never have to deal with it.

For most of the time, even on Twitter the social network / filter bubble works, if you're not a celebrity. But I am afraid of saying anything non-PC there.

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#169

Post by TeMPOraL »

jandrese wrote: post #158
kornish wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link, that's fascinating read! It seems that many people who I would call "intellectually honest" end up developing speech patterns to avoid (1) speaking in absolutes; and (2) making statements of opinion articulated as statements of fact. An example of (1) is to use the words "many" or "most" instead of "all". An example of (2) is to start opinions with "I think". Those speech patterns, though, can le…

I'm having trouble justifying the tradeoff between: "That's well reasoned but far too wishy washy" and "So forceful! So eloquent! Factually wrong but the way you said it completely sold it to me! Amazing!" It's Obama vs. Trump.

Do you actually believe what you wrote? How sure are you that this is an accurate portrayal of your thoughts? Is it true that this trade-off can be best described "Obama vs. Trump"? Do you expect your opinion to change in time, or stay the same?

Write down the answers in a few words, then slap them in brackets at the beginning, and there, you've created your first belief tag :).

Re: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

#170

Post by rcxdude »

jxramos wrote: post #121
geowwy wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"I coined the word outragism so victims of it will have a powerful word of self-defense", what a fantastic idea! Word equipment/equipping, good stuff.

It's important to be careful that such mechanisms don't become a thought-terminating cliche, however.
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