Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

avc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 102 posts

Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#91

Post by swayvil »

skybrian wrote: post #74
swayvil wrote: post #39

I think that by "personality" he means "story". Like, a cool story that you can somehow attach to the product. So when people see the product they also think the story. And then they think, "woah, what a great product!". (But what they really mean is "woah, what a great story!") I see this in the art scene. It's like the art-piece isn't enough for people. They want an artist's statement. A philosophy. Who made it, wh…

Without cultural context, you might as well be looking at a mysterious ancient artifact from a lost civilization, or maybe procedurally generated random content from a video game. It's nice when you can get the joke without it having to be explained to you, but that just means you share enough culture to get it, where a foreigner wouldn't. It doesn't mean you're smarter, it means you happened to have the education ne…

The thing here is, there is no joke. There is no associated story or explanation necessary for appreciating the artwork. The artwork contains the whole of what the artist intends to deliver.

We've got this weird situation where people can't just look with their eyes and hear with their ears. For them it's all about thinking. They want something to think about. They want a story/joke/explanation. For them the action is all in their head.

Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#92

Post by skybrian »

swayvil wrote: post #91
skybrian wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without cultural context, you might as well be looking at a mysterious ancient artifact from a lost civilization, or maybe procedurally generated random content from a video game. It's nice when you can get the joke without it having to be explained to you, but that just means you share enough culture to get it, where a foreigner wouldn't. It doesn't mean you're smarter, it means you happened to have the education ne…

The thing here is, there is no joke. There is no associated story or explanation necessary for appreciating the artwork. The artwork contains the whole of what the artist intends to deliver. We've got this weird situation where people can't just look with their eyes and hear with their ears. For them it's all about thinking. They want something to think about. They want a story/joke/explanation. For them the action i…

It's almost never self-contained. At the most basic level, if you don't know the language, writing is just meaningless scribbles. Scales and chords have no particular meaning by themselves. Associating a major scale with happiness and minor with sadness is something you learn.

Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#93

Post by bsanr »

jackpirate wrote: post #35
grecy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're all symbols of the most extreme cases, and we latch on to them because they're recognizable, inflammatory, and get us riled up to want to do something Having moved from Australia to the US then Canada and having spent over and month in more than 50 countries around the world, I can tell you the US does this more (better?) than other countries. The entire US system and political discourse is setup as right/w…

you can bet your bottom dollar nobody would ever listen to someone from the other side and perhaps learn something. One problem with listening to the other side is that most people are so ridiculously misinformed about issues (on all sides), that listening to the average person of the other side is unlikely to make you learn something. You have to actively seek out the smartest people from the other side and listen t…

The smartest people on the "other side" might not even be people you want to listen to. Are they arguing in good faith? Are they subject to conflicts of interest? Do they represent a special interest, or an ideology?

Then, for some, you are dealing with an "other side" that represents an existential threat. Do you listen to seemingly-rational statements from someone who, at turns, has suggested it would be better for you or people like you to starve, or be killed, or be thrown in jail? If character speaks to the intention of an act, can an act that seems righteous still be trusted?

Do you see how this can become complicated very quickly?

Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#94

Post by sterlind »

bsanr wrote: post #93
jackpirate wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can bet your bottom dollar nobody would ever listen to someone from the other side and perhaps learn something. One problem with listening to the other side is that most people are so ridiculously misinformed about issues (on all sides), that listening to the average person of the other side is unlikely to make you learn something. You have to actively seek out the smartest people from the other side and listen t…

The smartest people on the "other side" might not even be people you want to listen to. Are they arguing in good faith? Are they subject to conflicts of interest? Do they represent a special interest, or an ideology? Then, for some, you are dealing with an "other side" that represents an existential threat. Do you listen to seemingly-rational statements from someone who, at turns, has suggested it would be better for…

Exactly. As an example, I'm transgender. While most feminists are very supportive of trans rights, there's a tiny minority, the TERFs, which see gender identity as a radical ideology and trans women as men appropriating femininity and invading women's spaces. I spent months debating in good faith with TERFs on the internet, and it did a number on me. They're quite articulate, but they don't argue in good faith - they bully, they dehumanize, they aren't willing to be convinced or see the human behind the text. And I can't debate in good faith either - I know I'm a girl, I needed hormones and transition to keep myself from suicide, I can't change my view at all! So it became a war of words.

So many of these conflicts have smoldered for decades and they're now coming to a head. Maybe the US isn't so backwards in its discourse, we might just be the front line of an ugly but inevitable war.

Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#95

Post by belorn »

jpfed wrote: post #83
belorn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say it is both a mostly symbolic movement and a collection of real personal stories that most people know a victim that is either have a friend or friend to a friend. Lets imagine we had a movement like metoo here in Europe talking about violence from immigrants. You would get thousands of personal stories documenting people being robbed, beaten, threatened, raped or target of other forms of crime. The people…

I would be very surprised if these situations would be mirrors of one another. The way MeToo played out in my social media, I never saw friend A sharing an experience that friend-of-friend B posted. Rather, friend A shared their direct experience. Re-shared stories would have no doubt caused an inflated sense of actual prevalence... but that's simply not what I observed. I have many friends that reported their own di…

Interesting. I have the opposite experience with no friends talking about sexual harassment but several who are victim of crimes committed by immigrants.

It make some sense however given that data here in Sweden. 6% of people are victim of either sexual assault or harassment and around 6% of people are victim of either assault or robbery. Sexual assault has mostly female victims and assault and robbery has mostly male victims.

And the blame towards immigrants shows up clear in the data. Immigrants in Sweden are 400% over represented for assault and robbery and almost 500% in regard to sexual assault. For those cities which has a very high proportion of immigrants this translate to directly to a lot of people being victims of crime committed by immigrants.

The data is what the data is. We can discuss different interpretation of it, but the general point is that movement like MeToo is not about informing the public about crime statistics. It is a symbol by one political side about an issue they find important, which they highlight through the use of mass reports of personal experiences. The right could do the exact same thing, and I remember a few times they tried and failed to do so.

Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#96

Post by Mirioron »

blotter_paper wrote: post #87
coldtea wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ever work a shitty job in the food industry? Not all men are harassers, but anecdotally it seems like maybe 10-25% of men at these jobs will systematically harass every female employee below the age of 30. 10-25%? So, in all probability less than 1 in 4, and even close to just 1 in 10? If only in all areas of life people (men and women) were jerks with merely those odds...

10-25% of people not saying "thank you" is acceptable. 10-25% of people spitting in your face would be totally unacceptable. Let's not brush off sexual assault as if it were a minor inconvenience.

I consider somebody spitting in my face to be much worse than somebody grabbing my ass or giving me an unsolicited backrub. I think it would be useful to break that statistic down into further categories based on how egregious something is. Somebody giving me an unsolicited backrub in my mind is a lot less wrong than somebody grabbing my ass. Lumping all of these together might provide for a big statistical number, but it also makes it more likely that people won't take the statistic seriously.

Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#97

Post by Mirioron »

stephenbez wrote: post #88
stcredzero wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about any movement out there at present -- MeToo, conservative agenda, liberal agenda, organic produce, gentrification, almost any major movement. If you really get into the issue, you find that the symbol of the thing is actually a very, very small almost non-representative case of the situation as a whole. Also, sometimes the symbol becomes the focus, instead of the actual underlying value. https://www.youtub…

> Here's how ordinary, regular people can help. When people start being extreme and a bit divorced from reality and engaging in violence, unsavory almost-violence, and untruthful agenda pushing, people need to call it out, and also call it out from their own sides. I've done this before on Hacker News (on a different account). I've pointed out that an asserted fact was untrue and linked to a PDF compiled by a governm…

I have run into the same situation that you described so many times. It's one of the most off-putting points about discussing the world with people. I wish people understood that basing an argument on bad facts makes it easy to "disprove" the argument in the mind if the person you're trying to convince.

Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#98

Post by ithkuil »

jackpirate wrote: post #90
coldtea wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One problem with listening to the other side is that most people are so ridiculously misinformed about issues (on all sides), that listening to the average person of the other side is unlikely to make you learn something. That's the very mindset that prevents people from listening to other sides. Instead of focusing on the "misinformation" of those on the other side on a matter (which could even be misinformation o…

That's the very mindset that prevents people from listening to other sides. I don't think it is, and I have a personal example to "prove" my point. Personally, I'm a pacifist. The average non-pacifist knows nothing about things like middle eastern geopolitics or nuclear weapons policy. If I want to understand these topics better in ways that challenge my pacifism, I should be reading/listening to experts like David P…

I try to listen to the "average person" (family member, next door, colleague) of the "other side" mostly not because I want to learn more about the merits of the other position but rather as a way to better understand human nature, which in turn might also have the side effect of making me change my mind about that (or other unrelated) topics.

Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#99

Post by coldtea »

Mirioron wrote: post #96
blotter_paper wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10-25% of people not saying "thank you" is acceptable. 10-25% of people spitting in your face would be totally unacceptable. Let's not brush off sexual assault as if it were a minor inconvenience.

I consider somebody spitting in my face to be much worse than somebody grabbing my ass or giving me an unsolicited backrub. I think it would be useful to break that statistic down into further categories based on how egregious something is. Somebody giving me an unsolicited backrub in my mind is a lot less wrong than somebody grabbing my ass. Lumping all of these together might provide for a big statistical number, b…

Heck, I consider grabbing a stranger's ass very wrong (I'd say as wrong as spitting in their face).

What I'd want to know is whether those terrible things the parent describes are of that level, or merely trying to get a dinner with some coworker, or telling them they look good, etc -- which is often classified as some kind of horrible harassment to pad the numbers.

Meanwhile, tons of men to men, men to women, women to men, and women to women, animosity incidents and abuse of no sexual kind in the workplace is glossed over.

Re: Minimum Viable Personality (2011)

#100

Post by coldtea »

jackpirate wrote: post #90
coldtea wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One problem with listening to the other side is that most people are so ridiculously misinformed about issues (on all sides), that listening to the average person of the other side is unlikely to make you learn something. That's the very mindset that prevents people from listening to other sides. Instead of focusing on the "misinformation" of those on the other side on a matter (which could even be misinformation o…

That's the very mindset that prevents people from listening to other sides. I don't think it is, and I have a personal example to "prove" my point. Personally, I'm a pacifist. The average non-pacifist knows nothing about things like middle eastern geopolitics or nuclear weapons policy. If I want to understand these topics better in ways that challenge my pacifism, I should be reading/listening to experts like David P…

I'd listen to "experts" such as Petraeus less -- their salaries depend upon them not understanding a lot of things.

Now, your mother or some random person X might not be able to eloquently compare the merits of pacifism vs realpolitik, but tons of average persons have good arguments, grounded in reality.

Even more so if those persons are not in some US state that had no contact with war and global politics since forever (aside from some local poor people getting into the army), but e.g. from countries that had actual first hand experience with neighborhood countries, foreign invasions, etc, and have a pragmatic understanding about those things.

Post reply on HN