Asterisk magazine has much more vivid, down-to-earth writing than "bay area rationalist magazine funded by effective altruism" would evoke.
One of the articles in that same issue was the one that pushed me to finally become vegetarian.
One of the articles in that same issue was the one that pushed me to finally become vegetarian.
*bottom article on the front page: "Rarely is the Question Asked: Is Our Children Learning?" should be "are our children learning".
ps what is the article that convinced you to go vegatarian, sounds interesting
Snow_Falls is so contemptuous of Asterisk that he sees a blatant 'error' which 'somehow' evaded the writers and editors all this time, and assumes that this means they are that incompetent; he doesn't consider the modus tollens, that the error is deliberate and he is the one failing to understand what is a well-known GWB allusion. If he had a higher opinion of Asterisk, he might have instead checked (if he took even a second to google the title "Rarely is the Question Asked: Is Our Children Learning?", the first 5 hits all explain the allusion), or at least withheld judgment - but he didn't, so he just snarks here and gets to be embarrassed when someone politely explains the joke to him.
This happens all the time in places with 'context collapse', especially on Twitter - I don't know how many times I've seen someone retweet something 'stupid' or 'obviously wrong', where actually the original tweet was a pretty amusing reference that the retweeter didn't get. (For example, if someone tweets something along the lines of 'They spent $X, for that much money, they could have given every American $Y million dollars!', others might get angry about the arithmetic being wildly wrong by multiple orders of magnitude, thereby demonstrating utter innumeracy... Because the original tweeter is making fun of a famous instance of innumeracy.) It is a particularly infuriating kind of criticism because it often is done in bad faith, due to contempt and laziness and assuming the worst possible interpretation of something one has written with great effort, and it is especially irritating to be condescended to by someone who is so ignorant compared to you that they don't even realize their ignorance.
It's a pity because it makes it hard to write publicly in any way but the most boring way for the lowest common denominator, given that inevitably someone is going to come along and take your Socratic ignorance for genuine ignorance, or your playful misspelling as proof you can't even run a spellchecker, etc, and you can hardly explain every joke without vitiating them.
You don't outright call me acting in bad faith, but you sure imply it. I am not embarrased at all, though I am grateful for the other commenter explaining the very nation-specific joke.
edit: I checked the video, it's thirteen years old! I wouldn't even expect an american to remember that.
I don't think you were being contemptuous, exactly, but I do think the train of thought you were describing is one often found on Hacker News, that boils down to "stop at the first problem I see and declare the rest is probably not worth considering". Maybe that process works well for filtering out things you don't want to spend attention on, but it's going to have false positives, and maybe it's a little grating when you confidently present one of these false positives as a rebuttal to other people praising the overall quality of the writing.
(See also: that guy in this thread who got flagged for replying "Do they claim to?" implying they only engaged far enough to read the headline and come up with a sarcastic reply.)
Which article was it?
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/01/making-sense-of-moral-chan...
> C: It doesn’t require a great deal of moral or ethical insight to see that treating a human being as a thing, not a person, is wrong. Just about every sort of spiritual, ethical or moral system has described slavery in one form or another as “against nature.”
> But historically, people also thought of slavery as a product of civilization and therefore found ways to justify it. They created ways to explain, for example, why specific groups of people should be enslaved, or why a particular system of slavery is justified, even a form of progress over a previous system.
> I’ve always thought that the best analogy is how we regard eating meat. [...] We also know that eating animals is unethical. We’re doing something cruel and unnecessary. But we do it because that’s just what we do. It wouldn’t be surprising to me if 30, 50 or 120 years from now, people look back on this time period and ask, “What was wrong with these people? They must have been like moral infants. They must not have realized this is a cruel way to treat animals.” But we know it perfectly well. It’s just what we do.
> A: I don’t eat pork or chicken for animal welfare reasons. And the line of thinking that convinced me to actually do this was that if I was alive in the 18th century, I’d want to be the kind of person who’s boycotting sugar.
That line of thinking convinced me too.