I did read some of the other comments here, and also the article you linked about butterflies (which I enjoyed):
Since I am a relatively new member, I have ideas, and not that much experience with regard to LW site, technically or historically. I do have experience from various other communities and social arenas, and maybe something can be applicable here as well. Since I myself experienced getting down-voted and ‘attacked’ the moment I let out some butterflies here on the community, which even made me leave feeling hurt and disappointed, reading Duncan_Sabiens post Killing Socrates, and also seeing another person writing about MBTI having their butterfly squished, made me realize I wasn’t really evaluating my experience clearly, and I decided to re-activate my account and try to engage a bit more.
The situation with Duncan_Sabien and Said, to me, is similar to how people value PvP (Player versus Player) and PvE (Player versus Environment) in games. Both are useful, but opening up for both all the time can be a bit taxing for everyone involved.
Having a dedicated space, where arguments are more sharp and less catering to emotion or other considerations, is very good. But it creates issues when it is in the same room as the nursery.
Big idea: Is it possible to have something like a PvE zone/meta-tag here on LW; a Supportive, co-operative and/or nurturing zone/meta-tag, where both new and veteran authors/posters alike, can safely hatch/store their ideas? A place where the expectations and norms for comments are catered towards being PvE only?
And similarly, to have a dedicated PvP zone/meta-tag, involving more direct confrontation and battle of ideas, concepts, knowledge, wits and with, possibly, or possibly not, the goal of sharpening and improving ideas? Where you might want more direct confrontation or debate, and where the focus is more on skill than tact.
When posting an article/post, the choice of where to put things is clear, and you can have more stream-lined expectations of what you will get if you post under either-tag. And of course, you can always choose to add both at the same time.
With regard to the Front Page, or what should be seen as the most visible layer of LW, Ideas, concepts and texts should be hatched to a certain standard, and be available for both zones—at a certain standard. I am not very familiar with either Duncan_Sabien or Said, but if I intuit correctly, maybe Duncan_Sabien’s posts and also his stress level as an author would fare better if he could let new articles hatch more slowly and safely. And Said wouldn’t have to watch his words as much if he knew that posts on the Front Page, or with the particular PvP tag, were ‘available’ for a certain level of direct interaction.
Which means that a comment, that might be ‘flagged’ in the PvP zone, could be welcome in the PvE zone, and vice versa. It isn’t a complete solution, but I was hoping it could contribute somewhat.
On a side-note: With regard to the standards of comments, I hope to see a bigger focus on fostering good commentators. Highly skilled PvP players, should get recognition as good and useful players, as should PvE commentators that are good at meeting the criteria for the PvE section. And to differentiate good PvP comments from good PvE comments, why not simply let everyone choose their primary alignment (PvE or PvP) and then let the respective groups up-vote good commentators. A little distinction close to their names could also help in a quick evaluation of posters.
I do not have a good idea for what to do about the Front Page, but with more information, I might find some idea that could be worthy of pursuit.
Edit: This is just a rough sketch, and I might patch it out if given enough reason to. But Said said he agreed, even though he loves WoW, so for now I’m going to let it stand.
It so happens that I’ve spent a good deal of time playing World of Warcraft (as I havewritten abouta fewtimes), which, of course, also has PVP as well as PVE elements. And if I were analogizing participation on Less Wrong to aspects of WoW gameplay, I would unhesitatingly say that the sort of patterns of communication and engagement which I prefer (for myself) and admire (in others) are most like the PVE, not the PVP, part of WoW.
What I mean by that is the following. World of Warcraft famously includes many different “things you can do” in the game (the better to appeal to a broad player base)—you can do solo questing, you can advance trade skills, you can explore, you can go hunting for exotic pets, you can engage in “world PVP”[1], etc., etc. However, all of that is in some sense peripheral; there are three sorts of activities which I would consider to be “core” to the experience: roleplaying, organized PVP, and dungeons (including, and especially, raids).
Dungeons and raids are high-end PVE content, requiring the cooperative participation of anywhere from 5 to 40[2] people. Organized PVP is battlegrounds and arenas—that is, teams of players facing each other on defined battlefields, fighting to achieve some objective (or simply kill everyone on the other team before they do the same to you). And roleplaying is, by its nature, more amorphous and less inherently structured, but in overall form it boils down to using the chat functionality and the character emote features to act out various scenarios (which are defined wholly by the players—think of any text-based roleplay, except with character avatars being portrayed by WoW characters), possibly aided by some aspects of the “actual” game world[3].
Now, the thing about roleplaying in WoW is that there aren’t any “rules” or “game mechanics” that are imposed on it by World of Warcraft, the computer game. The players can, of course, define and follow whatever rules they like, but this has no more force than following the rules of a tabletop RPG (like D&D). It’s all just text. You can have your character slay purported dragons, just as you can in a TTRPG, but this is unconnected with any actual WoW-game dragons—it’s just text. Even if you have your actual WoW character take this or that WoW-game action—including the killing of actual game creatures—to add verisimilitude to the roleplay, the two things still have no connection with each other except that which is imposed by the shared fantasy of the roleplay.
In other words—in terms of the game mechanics of WoW—roleplaying is epiphenomenal. It does not involve or result in accomplishing anything. (Which is not to say it can’t be fun!) Any in-game character actions taken as part of roleplaying, per se, have no requirements imposed on them, and cannot in any meaningful way fail, since their WoW-game consequences as such as irrelevant to the roleplay.
This is very different from high-end PVE.
I’ve written about WoW raiding (see the links at the start of this comment). It is a very seriously and determinedly cooperative environment, and high-end raiding guilds/teams exhibit a degree of coordination, of unitary action, which is deeply impressive. (And it’s very easy to get used to this sort of thing, to start to take it for granted—until you try, for example, to defeat some difficult raid boss with a less experienced or more ad-hoc raid group, and find, to your dismay, that what seemed easy, even boring, for a team where everyone knows exactly what to do and calmly does the correct thing every time, is impossible for a team without that degree of both individual skill and group synchrony.)
In high-end WoW PVE (in raiding, in “heroic” dungeons, etc.), success and failure, for all that they are made up of only bits and pixels, nevertheless very much satisfy the condition of “not going away when you stop believing in them”. If you don’t perform the correct in-game actions, you simply will not defeat the encounters. You either do it right or you fail.
And there are all sorts of ways to try to ensure that everyone on your team performs as well as is required. But if someone is doing something incorrectly, which they must do in order for you to defeat some raid encounter, either they fix their mistake, or you replace them, or you don’t succeed. There aren’t any other options. Similarly, if your team is failing to defeat some encounter(s), either you identify the problem and fix it, or you don’t succeed. It doesn’t matter how anyone feels about the situation, or about each other, or about anything else. The game code has no concern for any of that. You must play correctly, or you will fail.
I emphasize again that WoW high-end PVE is a deeply, thoroughly cooperative endeavor. You cannot, by construction, gain any benefit whatever from causing any other member of your raid team to fail to defeat a raid boss—because it’s the whole team that succeeds or fails, together. If you cause any other team member to perform worse, you sabotage your own chances of success. (Certainly there are “free rider” problems, and similar game-theoretic concerns—but those can, at worse, motivate you to invest less effort than you otherwise might; they offer no reason to direct your efforts against other players.)
And (not unrelatedly, I think) almost all good high-end PVE guilds in WoW—and especially those raid teams which take on the most challenging of raid content—tend to be friendly, supportive places, with camaraderie aplenty… while, at the same time, expecting, and demanding, nothing less than one’s consistent best, from all their members.
My point is this: the sort of distinction you are proposing, seems more to me like the distinction between roleplaying and PVE, than like that between PVE and PVP. (I can think of no aspect of participation on Less Wrong which I would analogize to PVP in WoW or any similar game.)
If you wish to “play” in an unstructured way, explore, etc., that is fine. There is no reason to abjure such activities wholesale. But in order to accomplish anything non-trivial—to collectively take on a real challenge of any sort—one has to make demands on those who wish to take part. This has nothing to do with opposition, with any adversarial context or attitude. It’s not PVP, in other words. It’s PVE with real stakes.
One might also think of this sort of roleplay as “LARPing, but in WoW instead of in real life”. (This in contrast with, for example, having your WoW characters sit down, in-game, at a table in an inn, and then playing Dungeons and Dragons, using the in-game chat in place of something like IRC or Discord.)
Thanks for the suggestion, I think it is one worth giving thought, though tricky to implement in practice.
LessWrong (in its first incarnation) had different sections like “Main” and “Discussion”, but it didn’t work great in the end. People became afraid to post on Main, so everything ended up Discussion. And then, while this might work for a niche community, as LessWrong becomes more and more of a destination (due to the rising popularity of AI), we’d still have to enforce a minimum standard on Discussion/PvE before the quality diluted catastrophically, which means you end up facing the same challenges again (but with more people).
I’m interested in solutions here, but it is tricky. Right now I’m interested in Open Threads that have lower bars. Shortform was is also supposed to be more of a Butterfly place, though I’d want to give it more thought before making it a more 101 sanctioned area. But lots of things to explore.
You are welcome. You answered before I had time to write:
Edit: This is just a rough sketch, and I’ll be happy to patch it up if prompted.
Yeah, I imagine I am missing a lot of nuances, history of LW and otherwise.
If you want my specific help with anything, let me know. I’m only on the outside looking in, and there is only so much I am able to see from my vantage point.
I do believe I could make my idea work somewhat, and I understand it would have to accommodate a lot of different issues I might not be aware about, but I would be willing to give it a try.
With regard to PvE, I do not mean it as a sleeping pillow where anything goes. Or PvP as a free for all. There would be just as strict rules on both sides, but there would be different nuances, and probably different people giving the down-votes and commenting. It is more the separation between typical communication forms and understanding. So, maybe the whole analogue is bad (Blaming you for this Said :)
I wish you all the best whatever you choose to do, and hope you find a solution that errs a little bit less—as hoped for.
So, maybe the whole analogue is bad (Blaming you for this Said :)
Hah.
For what it’s worth, I do, actually, agree with the overall thrust of your suggestion. I have made similar suggestions myself, in the past… unfortunately, my understanding is that the LW team basically don’t think that anything like this is workable. I don’t think I agree with their reasoning, but they seem sufficiently firm in their conviction that I’ve mostly given up on trying to convince anyone that this sort of thing is a good idea.
(At one time, after the revival of Less Wrong, I hoped that the Personal / Frontpage distinction would serve a function similar to the one you describe. Unfortunately, the LW system design / community norms have been taken in a direction that makes it impossible for things to work that way. I understand that this, too, is a principled decision on the LW team’s part, but I think that it’s an unfortunate one.)
fwiw I think we’ve considered this sort of idea fairly seriously (I think there are a few nearby ideas clustered together, and it seems like various users have very different opinions on which ones seem “fine” and which ones seem pointed in a horribly wrong direction. I recall Benquo/Zack/Jessicata thinking one version of the idea was bad, although not sure I recall their opinion clearly enough to represent it)
I think there are a few nearby ideas clustered together, and it seems like various users have very different opinions on which ones seem “fine” and which ones seem pointed in a horribly wrong direction.
That does seem plausible (and frustrating).
I recall Benquo/Zack/Jessicata thinking one version of the idea was bad, although not sure I recall their opinion clearly enough to represent it
I would be very interested to hear from any or all of those people about their opinions on this topic!
I maybe want to specify-in-my-words the version of this I’m most enthusiastic about, to check that you in fact think this version of the thing is fine, rather than a perversion of rationality that should die-in-a-fire and/or not solve any problems you care about:
There are two clusters of norms people choose between. Both emphasize truthseeking, but have different standards for some flavor of politeness, how much effort critics are supposed to put in, Combat vs Nurture, etc. Authors pick a default setting but can change setting for individual posts.
Probably even the more-combaty-one has some kind of floor for basic politeness (you probably don’t want to be literal 4chan?) but not at a level you’d expect to come up very often on LessWrong.
I think the precious thing lost in the Nurture cluster is not Combat, but tolerance for or even encouragement of unapologetic and uncompromising dissent. This is straightforwardly good if it can be instantiated without regularly spawning infinite threads of back-and-forth arguing (unapologetic and uncompromising).
It should be convenient for people who don’t want to participate in that to opt out, and the details of this seem to be the most challenging issue.
Hmmm. I… do not think that this version of the thing is fine.
(I may write more later to elaborate on why I think that. Or maybe this isn’t the ideal place to do that? But I did want to answer your question here, at least.)
Nod. Since it somewhat informs the solution space I’m considering, I think I’ll go ahead and ask here what seem not-fine about it. (Or, maybe to resolve a thing I’m actually confused about, what seems different about this phrasing from what Caerulea said?)
I do believe the piece that is missing is emotions, human weakness, vulnerability and compassion.
If that isn’t enough, it is time to bring out the megaphone and start screaming “Misanthropy!” in the streets. I’ll join you, no worries. We can even wear matching WoW costumes.
NB: (I’m also blaming you for this comment, Said. Have you no shame?)
Hello Ruby,
I did read some of the other comments here, and also the article you linked about butterflies (which I enjoyed):
Since I am a relatively new member, I have ideas, and not that much experience with regard to LW site, technically or historically. I do have experience from various other communities and social arenas, and maybe something can be applicable here as well. Since I myself experienced getting down-voted and ‘attacked’ the moment I let out some butterflies here on the community, which even made me leave feeling hurt and disappointed, reading Duncan_Sabiens post Killing Socrates, and also seeing another person writing about MBTI having their butterfly squished, made me realize I wasn’t really evaluating my experience clearly, and I decided to re-activate my account and try to engage a bit more.
The situation with Duncan_Sabien and Said, to me, is similar to how people value PvP (Player versus Player) and PvE (Player versus Environment) in games. Both are useful, but opening up for both all the time can be a bit taxing for everyone involved.
Having a dedicated space, where arguments are more sharp and less catering to emotion or other considerations, is very good. But it creates issues when it is in the same room as the nursery.
Big idea:
Is it possible to have something like a PvE zone/meta-tag here on LW; a Supportive, co-operative and/or nurturing zone/meta-tag, where both new and veteran authors/posters alike, can safely hatch/store their ideas? A place where the expectations and norms for comments are catered towards being PvE only?
And similarly, to have a dedicated PvP zone/meta-tag, involving more direct confrontation and battle of ideas, concepts, knowledge, wits and with, possibly, or possibly not, the goal of sharpening and improving ideas? Where you might want more direct confrontation or debate, and where the focus is more on skill than tact.
When posting an article/post, the choice of where to put things is clear, and you can have more stream-lined expectations of what you will get if you post under either-tag. And of course, you can always choose to add both at the same time.
With regard to the Front Page, or what should be seen as the most visible layer of LW, Ideas, concepts and texts should be hatched to a certain standard, and be available for both zones—at a certain standard.
I am not very familiar with either Duncan_Sabien or Said, but if I intuit correctly, maybe Duncan_Sabien’s posts and also his stress level as an author would fare better if he could let new articles hatch more slowly and safely. And Said wouldn’t have to watch his words as much if he knew that posts on the Front Page, or with the particular PvP tag, were ‘available’ for a certain level of direct interaction.
Which means that a comment, that might be ‘flagged’ in the PvP zone, could be welcome in the PvE zone, and vice versa. It isn’t a complete solution, but I was hoping it could contribute somewhat.
On a side-note:
With regard to the standards of comments, I hope to see a bigger focus on fostering good commentators. Highly skilled PvP players, should get recognition as good and useful players, as should PvE commentators that are good at meeting the criteria for the PvE section.
And to differentiate good PvP comments from good PvE comments, why not simply let everyone choose their primary alignment (PvE or PvP) and then let the respective groups up-vote good commentators.
A little distinction close to their names could also help in a quick evaluation of posters.
I do not have a good idea for what to do about the Front Page, but with more information, I might find some idea that could be worthy of pursuit.
Edit: This is just a rough sketch, and I might patch it out if given enough reason to. But Said said he agreed, even though he loves WoW, so for now I’m going to let it stand.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
It is interesting that you use this analogy.
It so happens that I’ve spent a good deal of time playing World of Warcraft (as I have written about a few times), which, of course, also has PVP as well as PVE elements. And if I were analogizing participation on Less Wrong to aspects of WoW gameplay, I would unhesitatingly say that the sort of patterns of communication and engagement which I prefer (for myself) and admire (in others) are most like the PVE, not the PVP, part of WoW.
What I mean by that is the following. World of Warcraft famously includes many different “things you can do” in the game (the better to appeal to a broad player base)—you can do solo questing, you can advance trade skills, you can explore, you can go hunting for exotic pets, you can engage in “world PVP”[1], etc., etc. However, all of that is in some sense peripheral; there are three sorts of activities which I would consider to be “core” to the experience: roleplaying, organized PVP, and dungeons (including, and especially, raids).
Dungeons and raids are high-end PVE content, requiring the cooperative participation of anywhere from 5 to 40[2] people. Organized PVP is battlegrounds and arenas—that is, teams of players facing each other on defined battlefields, fighting to achieve some objective (or simply kill everyone on the other team before they do the same to you). And roleplaying is, by its nature, more amorphous and less inherently structured, but in overall form it boils down to using the chat functionality and the character emote features to act out various scenarios (which are defined wholly by the players—think of any text-based roleplay, except with character avatars being portrayed by WoW characters), possibly aided by some aspects of the “actual” game world[3].
Now, the thing about roleplaying in WoW is that there aren’t any “rules” or “game mechanics” that are imposed on it by World of Warcraft, the computer game. The players can, of course, define and follow whatever rules they like, but this has no more force than following the rules of a tabletop RPG (like D&D). It’s all just text. You can have your character slay purported dragons, just as you can in a TTRPG, but this is unconnected with any actual WoW-game dragons—it’s just text. Even if you have your actual WoW character take this or that WoW-game action—including the killing of actual game creatures—to add verisimilitude to the roleplay, the two things still have no connection with each other except that which is imposed by the shared fantasy of the roleplay.
In other words—in terms of the game mechanics of WoW—roleplaying is epiphenomenal. It does not involve or result in accomplishing anything. (Which is not to say it can’t be fun!) Any in-game character actions taken as part of roleplaying, per se, have no requirements imposed on them, and cannot in any meaningful way fail, since their WoW-game consequences as such as irrelevant to the roleplay.
This is very different from high-end PVE.
I’ve written about WoW raiding (see the links at the start of this comment). It is a very seriously and determinedly cooperative environment, and high-end raiding guilds/teams exhibit a degree of coordination, of unitary action, which is deeply impressive. (And it’s very easy to get used to this sort of thing, to start to take it for granted—until you try, for example, to defeat some difficult raid boss with a less experienced or more ad-hoc raid group, and find, to your dismay, that what seemed easy, even boring, for a team where everyone knows exactly what to do and calmly does the correct thing every time, is impossible for a team without that degree of both individual skill and group synchrony.)
In high-end WoW PVE (in raiding, in “heroic” dungeons, etc.), success and failure, for all that they are made up of only bits and pixels, nevertheless very much satisfy the condition of “not going away when you stop believing in them”. If you don’t perform the correct in-game actions, you simply will not defeat the encounters. You either do it right or you fail.
And there are all sorts of ways to try to ensure that everyone on your team performs as well as is required. But if someone is doing something incorrectly, which they must do in order for you to defeat some raid encounter, either they fix their mistake, or you replace them, or you don’t succeed. There aren’t any other options. Similarly, if your team is failing to defeat some encounter(s), either you identify the problem and fix it, or you don’t succeed. It doesn’t matter how anyone feels about the situation, or about each other, or about anything else. The game code has no concern for any of that. You must play correctly, or you will fail.
I emphasize again that WoW high-end PVE is a deeply, thoroughly cooperative endeavor. You cannot, by construction, gain any benefit whatever from causing any other member of your raid team to fail to defeat a raid boss—because it’s the whole team that succeeds or fails, together. If you cause any other team member to perform worse, you sabotage your own chances of success. (Certainly there are “free rider” problems, and similar game-theoretic concerns—but those can, at worse, motivate you to invest less effort than you otherwise might; they offer no reason to direct your efforts against other players.)
And (not unrelatedly, I think) almost all good high-end PVE guilds in WoW—and especially those raid teams which take on the most challenging of raid content—tend to be friendly, supportive places, with camaraderie aplenty… while, at the same time, expecting, and demanding, nothing less than one’s consistent best, from all their members.
My point is this: the sort of distinction you are proposing, seems more to me like the distinction between roleplaying and PVE, than like that between PVE and PVP. (I can think of no aspect of participation on Less Wrong which I would analogize to PVP in WoW or any similar game.)
If you wish to “play” in an unstructured way, explore, etc., that is fine. There is no reason to abjure such activities wholesale. But in order to accomplish anything non-trivial—to collectively take on a real challenge of any sort—one has to make demands on those who wish to take part. This has nothing to do with opposition, with any adversarial context or attitude. It’s not PVP, in other words. It’s PVE with real stakes.
That is, chance hostile encounters with players of the opposite faction, while traveling through the open world.
Depending on the particular dungeon/raid, and the expansion being played.
One might also think of this sort of roleplay as “LARPing, but in WoW instead of in real life”. (This in contrast with, for example, having your WoW characters sit down, in-game, at a table in an inn, and then playing Dungeons and Dragons, using the in-game chat in place of something like IRC or Discord.)
Yes, got it. Thanks for taking the time.
Hi Caerulea-Lawrence,
Thanks for the suggestion, I think it is one worth giving thought, though tricky to implement in practice.
LessWrong (in its first incarnation) had different sections like “Main” and “Discussion”, but it didn’t work great in the end. People became afraid to post on Main, so everything ended up Discussion. And then, while this might work for a niche community, as LessWrong becomes more and more of a destination (due to the rising popularity of AI), we’d still have to enforce a minimum standard on Discussion/PvE before the quality diluted catastrophically, which means you end up facing the same challenges again (but with more people).
I’m interested in solutions here, but it is tricky. Right now I’m interested in Open Threads that have lower bars. Shortform was is also supposed to be more of a Butterfly place, though I’d want to give it more thought before making it a more 101 sanctioned area. But lots of things to explore.
Hello again Ruby,
You are welcome. You answered before I had time to write:
Edit: This is just a rough sketch, and I’ll be happy to patch it up if prompted.
Yeah, I imagine I am missing a lot of nuances, history of LW and otherwise.
If you want my specific help with anything, let me know. I’m only on the outside looking in, and there is only so much I am able to see from my vantage point.
I do believe I could make my idea work somewhat, and I understand it would have to accommodate a lot of different issues I might not be aware about, but I would be willing to give it a try.
With regard to PvE, I do not mean it as a sleeping pillow where anything goes. Or PvP as a free for all. There would be just as strict rules on both sides, but there would be different nuances, and probably different people giving the down-votes and commenting. It is more the separation between typical communication forms and understanding. So, maybe the whole analogue is bad (Blaming you for this Said :)
I wish you all the best whatever you choose to do, and hope you find a solution that errs a little bit less—as hoped for.
Kindly,
Caerulea-Lawrence
Hah.
For what it’s worth, I do, actually, agree with the overall thrust of your suggestion. I have made similar suggestions myself, in the past… unfortunately, my understanding is that the LW team basically don’t think that anything like this is workable. I don’t think I agree with their reasoning, but they seem sufficiently firm in their conviction that I’ve mostly given up on trying to convince anyone that this sort of thing is a good idea.
(At one time, after the revival of Less Wrong, I hoped that the Personal / Frontpage distinction would serve a function similar to the one you describe. Unfortunately, the LW system design / community norms have been taken in a direction that makes it impossible for things to work that way. I understand that this, too, is a principled decision on the LW team’s part, but I think that it’s an unfortunate one.)
fwiw I think we’ve considered this sort of idea fairly seriously (I think there are a few nearby ideas clustered together, and it seems like various users have very different opinions on which ones seem “fine” and which ones seem pointed in a horribly wrong direction. I recall Benquo/Zack/Jessicata thinking one version of the idea was bad, although not sure I recall their opinion clearly enough to represent it)
That does seem plausible (and frustrating).
I would be very interested to hear from any or all of those people about their opinions on this topic!
I maybe want to specify-in-my-words the version of this I’m most enthusiastic about, to check that you in fact think this version of the thing is fine, rather than a perversion of rationality that should die-in-a-fire and/or not solve any problems you care about:
There are two clusters of norms people choose between. Both emphasize truthseeking, but have different standards for some flavor of politeness, how much effort critics are supposed to put in, Combat vs Nurture, etc. Authors pick a default setting but can change setting for individual posts.
Probably even the more-combaty-one has some kind of floor for basic politeness (you probably don’t want to be literal 4chan?) but not at a level you’d expect to come up very often on LessWrong.
There might be different moderators for each one.
Does that sound basically good to you?
I think the precious thing lost in the Nurture cluster is not Combat, but tolerance for or even encouragement of unapologetic and uncompromising dissent. This is straightforwardly good if it can be instantiated without regularly spawning infinite threads of back-and-forth arguing (unapologetic and uncompromising).
It should be convenient for people who don’t want to participate in that to opt out, and the details of this seem to be the most challenging issue.
Hmmm. I… do not think that this version of the thing is fine.
(I may write more later to elaborate on why I think that. Or maybe this isn’t the ideal place to do that? But I did want to answer your question here, at least.)
Nod. Since it somewhat informs the solution space I’m considering, I think I’ll go ahead and ask here what seem not-fine about it. (Or, maybe to resolve a thing I’m actually confused about, what seems different about this phrasing from what Caerulea said?)
You are taking punches like a true champ. :)
I do believe the piece that is missing is emotions, human weakness, vulnerability and compassion.
If that isn’t enough, it is time to bring out the megaphone and start screaming “Misanthropy!” in the streets.
I’ll join you, no worries. We can even wear matching WoW costumes.
NB: (I’m also blaming you for this comment, Said. Have you no shame?)