Comment by memexy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by memexy | Hacker News Reader

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andrewprock already found an example and I agree with his assessment. If you have snippets that you think are worthwhile then feel free to post them. Associating assassination with people, even as a question, is sinister. A polite and kind person would not make that association or even ask the question because it implants the idea in the reader's mind and they start thinking antagonistically towards certain groups that he's suggesting should be "assassinated".

It's terrible and dreadful writing (it elicits terror and dread in the reader).

Should people ask taboo questions? Yes, they should ask such questions in private conversations with people they trust. When the interpretation is out of your hands then you need to be really careful what information you are making available to the public / audience. It's clear he doesn't think through the logic and wants to come across as smart. It's juvenile. Adults speak with intent and they address people directly and respectfully. I have never seen any adult conversations on SSC, I've only ever seen people that are peacocking their intelligence.

Let me quote perhaps the most important part of the essay and the part that I believe truly defines this ethos.

-- begin quote

When I was young and stupid, I used to believe that transgender was really, really dumb. That they were looking for attention or making it up or something along those lines.

Luckily, since I was a classical liberal, my reaction to this mistake was – to not bother them, and to get very very angry at people who did bother them. I got upset with people trying to fire Phil Robertson for being homophobic even though homophobia is stupid. You better bet I also got upset with people trying to fire transgender people back when I thought transgender was stupid.

And then I grew older and wiser and learned – hey, transgender isn’t stupid at all, they have very important reasons for what they do and go through and I was atrociously wrong. And I said a mea culpa.

But it could have been worse. I didn’t like transgender people, and so I left them alone while still standing up for their rights. My epistemic structure failed gracefully. For anyone who’s not overconfident, and so who expects massive epistemic failure on a variety of important issues all the time, graceful failure modes are a really important feature for an epistemic structure to have.

-- end quote

I read the humility and desire to not to harm even when you're wrong inherent in that passage as the exact opposite of "peacocking intelligence" - and I find your choice to use PUA terminology to describe the behaviour to be either unintentionally gross or deliberately unkind depending on whether or not you were aware that was what you were doing.

Yes. I was aware of my characterization and the word peackocking (to make a vainglorious display; strut like a peacock) was used before it was co-opted by PUA community (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/peacocking).

Let's rewrite that paragraph and use fewer emotionally charged words.

--

As a younger person I thought transgenderism was about seeking attention. But being trained in the liberal arts I decided to question this assumption and not act antagonistically towards them because of my personal interpretation of their situation.

As I got older I realized my initial assumption about attention seeking was incorrect and I took responsibility for and corrected my beliefs.

I guess it could have turned out differently if I hadn't been trained in the liberal arts. So I'm glad my training included keeping an open mind and accepting people different from me and with different life circumstances.

--

Same exact content, none of the emotional baggage and vainglory.

Notice all the words I took out because I knew they would elicit negative reactions in the reader: stupid, dumb, mistake, very very angry, upset, homophobic. He repeated those words enough times that a perceptive reader would have picked up on the subtext of him trying to distance himself from those negatively valenced words. He's not trying to educate the reader, he's trying to put distance between himself and certain associations. That's why it's not good writing. It's about him, it's not about the reader. And in his attempt to "peacock" he's putting associations into the reader's mind that are detrimental to the reader's thought processes all the while elevating himself as a paragon of goodness. As the term "peacock" suggests, his writing is vainglorious.

That rewrite completely loses the point though.

The point is not "accepting people different than me", it's "having suitable principles to still fight in favour of people I might otherwise rightly or wrongly dislike".

You completely removed the part where he not only didn't act antagonistically towards them but actively opposed other people doing so as well.

And that part was the single most important part, and the principle he was arguing in favour of.

If you think your rewrite was the same exact content, then I'm afraid I don't think you understood what he was saying at all.

> If you think your rewrite was the same exact content, then I'm afraid I don't think you understood what he was saying at all.

Bingo!

He's obviously not a very good writer. I don't need to argue for freedom of speech and equal rights and justice for all because in my world those are givens. I don't need to justify to myself or others why those truths are self evident. Nor do I need to recount a story about being young and stupid. Everyone used to be young and stupid, that's also a given. There is no need to write it on a blog and show how you're so much better than what you used to be. Let your actions show how you are better. I don't need to be told when I can infer directly from someone's actions whether they're good or not. Words are deceptive, actions are truthful.

I don't put words like "very stupid", "angry", "I'm afraid", "fearful", etc. in my writing because I don't identify with those things and I don't want anyone reading my words to identify with them either. If I intend to say something then I say it without flowery language about my youth or emotionally charged words because I reserve those words for private conversations with people that I trust.

> I don't need to argue for freedom of speech and equal rights and justice for all because in my world those are givens.

The article was about somebody who was arguing that using falsified numbers about rape statistics was not only acceptable feminism but was actually a good thing and that anybody who disagreed with that deserved to be destroyed.

Speaking as somebody who believes that the truth is quite sufficient justification for feminism to win, and that lying serves only to hand our enemies means to attack us, I believe that sadly we live in a world where that argument does need to be made.

I would prefer to live in a word where these arguments don't need to be made. I would prefer to live in a world where those truths are self evident.

But we don't yet, as both Adria Richards and David Shor have found out to their detriment. So making the argument that we should continues to be valuable.

Then there are better ways to make those arguments. Recounting stories about being "young and stupid" is not one of those ways.

I am entirely fine with you believing that there are better ways to make those arguments - in fact, given any specific argument is almost certain to be imperfect, one would assume that there are.

But I would note that "there are better ways to make those arguments" is quite a distance from your original position.

What was my original position? More precisely, what did you think was my original position?

> It's hard to explain but his intention in much of his writing was coded. He would consistently use certain keywords and phrases to make certain associations and when you follow through the logic it becomes very sinister.

Yes, and you provided an example of such associations with "youth", "stupidity", "anger", "fear", "transphobia", "homophobia", "atrocity", "anger at others", "anger with self", "dislike of others", "opposition to others", etc.

> When I was young and stupid, I used to believe that transgender was really, really dumb. That they were looking for attention or making it up or something along those lines.

> And then I grew older and wiser and learned – hey, transgender isn’t stupid at all, they have very important reasons for what they do and go through and I was atrociously wrong. And I said a mea culpa.

> The point is not "accepting people different than me", it's "having suitable principles to still fight in favour of people I might otherwise rightly or wrongly dislike".

> You completely removed the part where he not only didn't act antagonistically towards them but actively opposed other people doing so as well.

What word other than "sinister" would you use to characterize the cluster of words I quoted which are implicit in the writing I quoted?

> andrewprock already found an example and I agree with his assessment.

But do you have a dispute for the counterpoint from mst? If so, what is it?

Which counterpoint? Several such points have been made already. Do you have a specific one in mind?

You apparently know which one it was, and can look up the response. It isn't a very long response either.

I'm not going to quote it here, because it gives you a chance to talk about it at me rather than with the original person who brought up the counterpoint.

So then you weren't asking the question in good faith. When I asked you to clarify you dodged the question. I wouldn't ask if I knew, I asked because I didn't know what you were referring to.

If you want me to talk to you then make a direct point instead of confused remarks about what I know and don't know and conversations I had with other people that were unrelated to you.

> So then you weren't asking the question in good faith.

Yes, I was.

> When I asked you to clarify you dodged the question. I wouldn't ask if I knew, I asked because I didn't know what you were referring to.

If you didn't know what I was referring to, then you didn't know who you were referring to when you said the following: >> andrewprock already found an example and I agree with his assessment.

> If you want me to talk to you

I have no desire for you to talk to me: that was exactly why I asked you to respond to the other person and not me.

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