I’m knowingly breaking social norms. I reject the social norms that are in place as maladaptive, in the same way that Martin Luther King rejected social norms around segregation as maladaptive.
And no, I’m not going to apologize for analogizing myself to Martin Luther King on account of it coming across as a status grab: even if I’m totally inconsequential, I still identify with him strongly, and whatever other people think, it’s not a status grab.
I reject the social norms that are in place as maladaptive
Do you expect the social norms to accept your arguments, and should they, given the evidence (i.e. what is the role of addressing them in this context, expressing disapproval of certain responses)? That’s the frustration of hard-to-communicate facts: you can (1) give up, (2) turn to the dark side and cut through your audience’s epistemology with a machete, insisting that they accept the conclusion based on insufficient evidence and appeals to on-reflection irrelevant things, or (3) put in so much work that the result isn’t worth the trouble.
(I personally dislike the machete more than the breaking of social norms, but that might be unusual.)
Sometimes you can make subtle changes to your wording to communicate the same facts with different status modifiers. I’ll give it a shot:
If a social norm is maladaptive, sometimes breaking it, even in a brazen way, can be the best response. We’ve got historical examples of agitators like Martin Luther King (one of my heroes) who succeeded with this approach. But let me know if you’ve got any evidence that it’s a bad idea.
Let me know if you thought I failed in my objective to communicate the same facts while appearing humbler :P
I’m knowingly breaking social norms. I reject the social norms that are in place as maladaptive, in the same way that Martin Luther King rejected social norms around segregation as maladaptive.
And no, I’m not going to apologize for analogizing myself to Martin Luther King on account of it coming across as a status grab: even if I’m totally inconsequential, I still identify with him strongly, and whatever other people think, it’s not a status grab.
Do you expect the social norms to accept your arguments, and should they, given the evidence (i.e. what is the role of addressing them in this context, expressing disapproval of certain responses)? That’s the frustration of hard-to-communicate facts: you can (1) give up, (2) turn to the dark side and cut through your audience’s epistemology with a machete, insisting that they accept the conclusion based on insufficient evidence and appeals to on-reflection irrelevant things, or (3) put in so much work that the result isn’t worth the trouble.
(I personally dislike the machete more than the breaking of social norms, but that might be unusual.)
Sometimes you can make subtle changes to your wording to communicate the same facts with different status modifiers. I’ll give it a shot:
Let me know if you thought I failed in my objective to communicate the same facts while appearing humbler :P