A general principle that I think is sufficient for this case (there are alternative reasons also sufficient on their own) is that in most situations, you should only assert things when you expect justified agreement from nontrivial portion of your target audience. So when you say “I’m not going to apologize for who I am”, this assumes the context of your assertions about who you are, and I don’t think you’ve given good arguments about that.
Environmental conditions don’t reliably determine the outcome, so even though you might correctly have private knowledge about that, pointing out environmental conditions doesn’t communicate sufficient evidence for your audience to accept the conclusion (whose meaning/application also wasn’t very clear, but that seems secondary in this case). There are many high-status geniuses trained in excellent environments who are both confident and confused in particular domains outside of their areas of brilliance, such as reasons for their success or correctness of some non-mainstream theory.
Without establishing agreement on such details, you can’t rely on their influence on social norms that you’d expect in situations where they can be communicated. The acting social norms are implied by what was successfully communicated, not by what you privately know. If you follow the norms implied by your private knowledge, you break the acting social norms.
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
A general principle that I think is sufficient for this case (there are alternative reasons also sufficient on their own) is that in most situations, you should only assert things when you expect justified agreement from nontrivial portion of your target audience. So when you say “I’m not going to apologize for who I am”, this assumes the context of your assertions about who you are, and I don’t think you’ve given good arguments about that.
Environmental conditions don’t reliably determine the outcome, so even though you might correctly have private knowledge about that, pointing out environmental conditions doesn’t communicate sufficient evidence for your audience to accept the conclusion (whose meaning/application also wasn’t very clear, but that seems secondary in this case). There are many high-status geniuses trained in excellent environments who are both confident and confused in particular domains outside of their areas of brilliance, such as reasons for their success or correctness of some non-mainstream theory.
Without establishing agreement on such details, you can’t rely on their influence on social norms that you’d expect in situations where they can be communicated. The acting social norms are implied by what was successfully communicated, not by what you privately know. If you follow the norms implied by your private knowledge, you break the acting social norms.
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