121–130 of 186 posts
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...
I'm not sure I buy this argument at all. I've certainly heard the argument enough times that it's less critical to get everything right on the first pass on the Web because you can always update it. I'm not a particular fan of this mindset but it's out there. And I'd note it's the offline pubs that are far more likely to still have people in a fact checker role--however vestigial. And making errors of fact too many t…
> I'm sure we could all name columnists/bloggers who are more interested in being controversial than in being correct I can't name any, so your comment is wrong, and I don't care to respond to the rest of it, or even acknowledge that I read it. Of course I don't really mean that, but I feel this is the kind of pedantry the article is talking about, and not true factual incorrectness. The Twitter account linked to onl…
Edit: I've written in a relatively public sphere, albeit not at politics level, for long enough to have a pretty thick skin. I realize not everyone is in that position.
It's sort of tangential, but knowing anything I write can be found by Googling my real name has certainly made me write defensively. It's why my main Twitter account is not public.
(disclaimer: IRC is any number of very different places so your experience may vary - oh, how meta-on-topic! And while we're at it: "on IRC, all talk is offensive, not defensive, IRC is part of the internet, therefore the whole post is wrong")
Personally, this whole idea that excessively hedging arguments can be seen as a bad thing is completely new to me. I do it all the time, from a simple AFAIK to explicitly stating all the givens that might be attacked, just in case. I state my opinion, or even just a write a little devil's-advocate "please try to understand how it looks from that perspective" piece, not a properly deweaselified wikipedia entry. But i do like to think of my usage as an enabler for posting bold, speculative ideas. In scientific terms (i'm not a scientist) i would rather be wrong with an outlandish causality hypothesis than with misinterpreted correlation noise. Maybe the knowledge that i am a linguistic offender will help me making the use of defensiveness more deliberate and to the point.
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
As engineers, we are hardwired to nitpick. Coming up with counter-examples is the default response. Instead, I try to say a supporting example first. This helps me learn from other people's point of view. Edit: Though I admit I don't do the best job on HN. :/
> 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…
Maybe it's not true for engineering in general, but it certainly is true in software development. When writing code, I am continuously guarding for the totality of my implementation. When reviewing code, I am mainly looking for ways it can fail, corner cases that have been missed, non-total evaluations, etc.
Maybe it's not exactly hardwired, but my nitpicking skills are carefully and purposefully honed.
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.
I get the feeling a reactionary effect has been an increase of traffic on anonymous image boards like 4chan. There the only value you have is in your argument; there is no profile to judge. People can say whatever they want there - and they certainly do - but if their argument is invalid or poorly constructed it is shot down or ignored, which serves as a lesson about the strength of a point made in a sterile environm…
I would much rather we have an anonymous set of opinions (because to be quite honest, I will never meet most of you, or be able to connect on a personal level, even if you are awesome) than a people looking to appeal to the crowd.
Unfortunately on 4chan et all this ends up making certain ideas the same as an established figure, ideas(memes in this community) which propagate whether or not they are good, just because they are established.
Few people would call me a drab or unopinionated writer. Yet I write in a way that I believe protects me from those who would seize on any misstep to disparage me or even to sue for libel. And I've only slightly relaxed the safeguards I used in my earliest business writing, when I was a stock analyst subject to SEC regulation.
The keys to safe and ethical writing are:
1. Don't lie or deliberately mislead. 2. Be clear about the support for your stated opinions -- including doubts or lack of support.
Or, equivalently, adhere as best you can to The Golden Rule of Opinionated Non-Fiction Writing:
Give readers the tools to make informed decisions as to whether they should or shouldn't accept what you say.
Beyond that, I'd say -- and this is something else that goes back to my experience a stock analyst:
A. Your job isn't to tell readers what to decide. B. Rather, your job is to make the best contribution you can to your readers' decision processes.
Ultimately, their decisions are their own responsibility -- and if they forget that fact, then bad on them.
I engage the ones who have actual points to discuss or critique and just ignore the trolls. I want to engage with educated people anyway to enrich my own understanding, not bother defending myself from trolls. I figure and educated reader will see through the troll anyway.
They hate lack of attention and will starve off or be seen by the masses as annoying. I think the age of the troll is coming to an end. Society or at least the more educated are starting to see it for what it is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I once had a discussion like this with a marketing VP. She didn't understand engineers and how they talked to each other. Conversations between engineers always seemed like arguments to her when in reality they were just poking holes in logic and programs to make things better.
Which is great for code reviews, but terrible for sensitive topics like diversity, etc.