Did you find it obnoxious when Nancy outright ignored the part of the comment where I explained why having wide feet would lead to others being prejudiced against you? Or just the fact of me mentioning this ignoranc … er, “act of ignoring”.
This is what always gets me: no one cares when someone doesn’t read a comment and yet still replies to it—well, to a version of it. Yet when someone points out the rudeness of doing so—well, then that person’s just a terrorist!
What gives? If you’re going to criticize just one of those two, which one has priority?
Did you find it obnoxious when Nancy outright ignored the part of the comment where I explained why having wide feet would lead to others being prejudiced against you? Or just the fact of me mentioning this ignoranc … er, “act of ignoring”.
Neither. I found the manner in which you mentioned it obnoxious, not the mention qua mention.
This is what always gets me: no one cares when someone doesn’t read a comment and yet still replies to it—well, to a version of it. Yet when someone points out the rudeness of doing so—well, then that person’s just a terrorist!
You are mistaken. I’m not objecting to your pointing out that NL didn’t acknowledge your comment as you wanted her to. I’m objecting to the claim that she replied with a ‘pretense of ignorance.’
What gives? If you’re going to criticize just one of those two, which one has priority?
The one that employs immoderate hyperbole and launches an ill-grounded accusation of ‘pretense’ at someone else.
Just so we’re on the same page, could you please give an example of things I could have said instead for this comment, which you would not find obnoxious, but which would point out the rudeness and error on Nancy’s part?
I don’t think I’m capable of answering that question, since I’m not seeing the ‘rudeness’ in the parent comment posted by Nancy to which your linked comment replies. At any rate, I didn’t find that particular comment of yours obnoxious except for the ‘pity party’ snark, which I basically just wrote off as your usual level of prickliness.
The rudeness is in how she completely ignores the explanation I just gave in the parent comment, of why wide feet would lead to people being prejudiced against you, which obviates her question (the one I replied to and, in doing so, was deemed obnoxious).
So:
1) I explain why having wide feet leads to people being prejudiced against me. 2) Nancy replies, while ignoring the entire explanation I just gave. 3) [Insert comment I should have made instead of the one I did, which would point out how Nancy just ignored the explanation I gave, but which you don’t characterize as obnoxious]
The reason I belabor the point is that this issue comes up quite frequently, where people complain that “Yeah, Silas, you had a good point, but goshdarnit, the way you said it gives me sufficient pretense to ignore it wholesale and join the anti-Silas’s point bandwagon”, and I want someone to finally put their neck out and show me what comment would be an appropriate one to protest the (rude) ignoring of part of my comment when someone replies to it.
The rudeness is in how she completely ignores the explanation I just gave in the parent comment, of why wide feet would lead to people being prejudiced against you, which obviates her question.
There’s no explicit question in the comment of NL’s I think you’re thinking of, so I imagine you mean that the statements in her comment could be read as implying an already-answered question, which makes the comment rude. That hardly registers on my rudeness detector; unless it’s part of a systematic pattern of behavior, it’s innocuous IMO.
Still, let me pretend I’m SilasBarta and suppose her comment is rude.
So:
1) I explain why having wide feet leads to people being prejudiced against me. 2) Nancy replies, while ignoring the entire explanation I just gave. 3) [Insert comment I should have made instead of the one I did, which would point out how Nancy just ignored the explanation I gave, but which you don’t characterize as obnoxious]
OK, I’m SilasBarta. Nancy’s replied to me. Most of my comment seems to have gone right past her and she’s replied without having understood me. That means I have failed to make myself as clear to her as I’d like, and I want to fix that. It’s her first reply to me, she’s not being overtly confrontational, and people often write sloppily when replying to others on the Internet, so let’s assume good faith. As such, I reply to emphasize my more detailed explanation of how people with wide feet suffer prejudice, this time without any snitty rhetorical questions (or accusations of bad faith). I might write something like: ‘Let me clarify. Although people with wide feet may not suffer much direct prejudice, they nonetheless suffer effective prejudice indirectly because it hurts my ability to signal via e.g. choice of shoes, as I pointed out in my earlier comment.’
The reason I belabor the point is that this issue comes up quite frequently, where people complain that “Yeah, Silas, you had a good point, but goshdarnit, the way you said it gives me sufficient pretense to ignore it wholesale and join the anti-Silas’s point bandwagon”, and I want someone to finally put their neck out and show me what comment would be an appropriate one to protest the (rude) ignoring of part of my comment when someone replies to it.
I don’t believe I did use the way you said what you said as a pretense for ignoring its good points. I do think you might have been right when you tried picking out the pity-oriented subtext of NL’s original post, but just because I didn’t mention it doesn’t mean I ignored it wholesale—it just means I didn’t have anything to say in response to it. There are a lot of comments on Less Wrong that make good points—presented abrasively or otherwise—that I don’t reply to. (Also, I wouldn’t even have complained to you if you hadn’t solicited feedback on why people had voted down your original run of comments.)
Done. I’m looking forward to either Nancy’s substantive reply and apology, or your concession that the issue might be a bit more complicated.
I don’t believe I did use the way you said what you said as a pretense for ignoring its good points. I do think you might have been right when you tried picking out the pity-oriented subtext of NL’s original post, but just because I didn’t mention it doesn’t mean I ignored it wholesale—it just means I didn’t have anything to say in response to it. There are a lot of comments on Less Wrong that make good points—presented abrasively or otherwise—that I don’t reply to. (Also, I wouldn’t even have complained to you if you hadn’t solicited feedback on why people had voted down your original run of comments.)
Okay, but the part Nancy ignored when she replied bore directly on (and obviated!) her comment, so she shouldn’t have replied to begin with if that was all she had to say. The general point of yours (which I agree with) about the impossibility of replying to everything, doesn’t apply.
Done. I’m looking forward to either Nancy’s substantive reply and apology, or your concession that the issue might be a bit more complicated.
It seems to me that the issue’s already been complicated because you’ve already replied to Nancy impolitely. Now that’s happened, it is not really realistic to expect a substantive reply and apology from her simply because you (I, if we’re being pedantic) rephrased some of your original remarks more tactfully.
Okay, but the part Nancy ignored when she replied bore directly on (and obviated!) her comment, so she shouldn’t have replied to begin with if that was all she had to say. The general point of yours (which I agree with) about the impossibility of replying to everything, doesn’t apply.
OK; it sounds like I misinterpreted your earlier comment about ‘people complain that …’ as being directed at me, but based on your reply it sounds like it isn’t. In which case feel free to disregard the last paragraph of my grandparent comment.
What gives? If you’re going to criticize just one of those two, which one has priority?
Criticizing someone for (the perception of) being mean or otherwise anti-social generally has higher priority than criticizing someone for (the perception of) being wrong.
In human social interaction, it’s considered worse to be mean than to be wrong, unless you are wrong in a socially proscribed way. Social order is considered more important than everyone being right all of the time.
I wasn’t criticizing Nancy for being wrong; I was criticizing her for ignoring part of what someone said. That counts as being anti-social too, so it’s not an issue of “wrong vs. anti-social”; it’s anti-social vs. anti-social.
So, why is the anti-sociality of ignoring someone’s comment while pretending to reply to it worse than the anti-sociality of saying that someone, er, did that?
Also, would it be rude to point out that you also just did what I’m accusing Nancy of doing? ;-)
Did you find it obnoxious when Nancy outright ignored the part of the comment where I explained why having wide feet would lead to others being prejudiced against you?
Nancy didn’t deal with that point in detail for good reason: simply put, there’s no general prejudice against people with wide feet. it may be that in some circumstances they end up taking a status hit, but no one suffers a status hit for catering to wide-feet people the same way they do if they are perceived as actively catering to fat females. I tentatively suspect that Nancy didn’t reply about this because Nancy considered this to be obvious from context.
Nancy didn’t deal with that point in detail for good reason: simply put, there’s no general prejudice against people with wide feet
How many times am I going to have to explain this? People do have prejudices based on the fashions that others wear, and a major part of this is shoes. Therefore, having such sharp restrictions on what shoes you can wear will amplify this is existing prejudice. Therefore, people endure additional discrimination as a result of having wide feet, even though “wide feet” does not register as a negative quality in and of itself.
I explained this from the very first post where I brought up wide feet!
it may be that in some circumstances they end up taking a status hit, but no one suffers a status hit for catering to wide-feet people the same way they do if they are perceived as actively catering to fat females. I tentatively suspect that Nancy didn’t reply about this because Nancy considered this to be obvious from context.
… yeah. Or, you know, you could just quit coming up with ever-more-contrived theories and go with, “oops, Nancy must have missed that, probably should have been more careful.”
Let’s put issues with Nancy aside for a minute. Do you agree with my statement that “No one suffers a status hit for catering to wide-feet people the same way they do if they are perceived as actively catering to fat females.”?
Let’s put the store-side issue aside for a minute. Do you agree with my contention that, “A man with wide feet will look less fashionable—irrespective of any fashion sense he might have—as a result of not having access to the variety of shoes that people with normal feet have?”
Why does your question have more importance for this issue than mine? And why do people get to ignore the reasoning I give with impunity when replying to me?
“A man with wide feet will look less fashionable—irrespective of any fashion sense he might have—as a result of not having access to the variety of shoes that people with normal feet have?”
I’m not sure I agree with that. It seems plausible but I’m not sure people pay that much attention to shoes or for that matter to how “fashionable” people are dressed (there’s a necessary disclaimer here that I’m a math grad student. It might very well be different if one were talking about more status and signaling conscious professions like law and business.)
Why does your question have more importance for this issue than mine?
Because a yes answer to my question would imply that whether or not the answer to your question is “yes” the status issues being discussed in regards to clothing for fat people is not what is causing a lack of shoes for wide-footed males.
I’m not sure I agree with that. It seems plausible but I’m not sure people pay that much attention to shoes or for that matter to how “fashionable” people are dressed (there’s a necessary disclaimer here that I’m a math grad student. It might very well be different if one were talking about more status and signaling conscious professions like law and business.)
How justifiably confident can you (JoshuaZ) be about the impact of shoes on someone’s fashionability and the resulting prejudices people have on that basis? Like you say, you’re a grad student, with little real-world experience in this. Everything I’ve read about the matter says that the shoes men wear do matter.
Because a yes answer to my question would imply that whether or not the answer to your question is “yes” the status issues being discussed in regards to clothing for fat people is not what is causing a lack of shoes for wide-footed males.
But why would it have that impact? Fat women can, introspectively, understand why they don’t give a shit about helping wide-footed men, and why they’d take a hit to status if they did so. They are surely capable of inferring therefrom why higher status people don’t want to take a hit to help them out.
How justifiably confident can you (JoshuaZ) be about the impact of shoes on someone’s fashionability and the resulting prejudices people have on that basis?
Very low confidence. Hence my remark that your claim seemed plausible.
But why would it have that impact? Fat women can, introspectively, understand why they don’t give a shit about helping wide-footed men, and why they’d take a hit to status if they did so.
Missing the point. No one is going to take a status hit from helping out wide-footed men. People might get a status hit for helping out “people with crappy shoes” but that’s not the same category. Close to no one has the same negative status association of “wide-footed men” that they have with “fat women.” That’s the distinction. Let’s say you’re at a cocktail party. Which do you think we’ll have a larger negative status impact when asked what you do for a living? “Oh, I’ve started a company that makes clothing for fat women” or “Oh, I’ve started a company that makes shoes for men with feet that are wider than the norm?” These don’t have the same status result. And if you want to make it more stark, imagine a male who works as a model for wide-footed shoes as opposed to a female who models clothing for fat people. Which one do you think will cause more of a status hit on a random internet forum if an otherwise anonymous individual mentioned that as their job?
I don’t know, but it must be pretty big of a hit for the wide shoe model, since, um, there aren’t any.
Close to no one has the same negative status association of “wide-footed men” that they have with “fat women.” That’s the distinction.
But not the relevant distinction. If I show up at that cocktail party, all people know is that I have crappy shoes. And no, I can’t just say to them, “Oh, discount this aspect of me: I have crappy shoes because they don’t make them in my size; really, I totally get that nice shoes are important, I just can’t find any that fit.”
It doesn’t work like that.
Which do you think we’ll have a larger negative status impact when asked what you do for a living? “Oh, I’ve started a company that makes clothing for fat women” or “Oh, I’ve started a company that makes shoes for men with feet that are wider than the norm?”
Framing effects would dominate. What if you said, “wide variance women” instead of “fat women”? Or “men that are underserved in the high end shoe market” instead of wide-footed men?
Again, the only real difference is that fat women have made self-pity into an art form, while wide-footed men haven’t.
Framing effects would dominate. What if you said, “wide variance women” instead of “fat women”? Or “men that are underserved in the high end shoe market” instead of wide-footed men?
Let me tentatively suggest that in that circumstance framing would not dominate. In the first case many people would after hearing “wide-variance” be thinking “oh, he means fat ladies” or something similar and would only not say that explicitly out of politeness, whereas even if you said the second one without the framing, most people would ignore it.
But not the relevant distinction. If I show up at that cocktail party, all people know is that I have crappy shoes. And no, I can’t just say to them, “Oh, discount this aspect of me: I have crappy shoes because they don’t make them in my size; really, I totally get that nice shoes are important, I just can’t find any that fit.”
Is this the relevant distinction? It seemed like the topic of discussion was why there wasn’t any clothing of specific forms. That’s not the same question as whether or not status hits occur to the people in question. (And even then, if one is talking about say just online conversation, a status hit from being a fat woman is going to be much larger than “I’ve got wide feet.”).
Again, the only real difference is that fat women have made self-pity into an art form, while wide-footed men haven’t.
Let me tentatively suggest that the level of status issues here is so different that the difference of degree really does become a difference in kind. Indeed, our earlier discussion sort of highlights this. Even in situations like academia, where looks don’t matter that much, being a fat woman seems to have some status hit associated with it.
Did you find it obnoxious when Nancy outright ignored the part of the comment where I explained why having wide feet would lead to others being prejudiced against you? Or just the fact of me mentioning this ignoranc … er, “act of ignoring”.
This is what always gets me: no one cares when someone doesn’t read a comment and yet still replies to it—well, to a version of it. Yet when someone points out the rudeness of doing so—well, then that person’s just a terrorist!
What gives? If you’re going to criticize just one of those two, which one has priority?
Neither. I found the manner in which you mentioned it obnoxious, not the mention qua mention.
You are mistaken. I’m not objecting to your pointing out that NL didn’t acknowledge your comment as you wanted her to. I’m objecting to the claim that she replied with a ‘pretense of ignorance.’
The one that employs immoderate hyperbole and launches an ill-grounded accusation of ‘pretense’ at someone else.
Just so we’re on the same page, could you please give an example of things I could have said instead for this comment, which you would not find obnoxious, but which would point out the rudeness and error on Nancy’s part?
I don’t think I’m capable of answering that question, since I’m not seeing the ‘rudeness’ in the parent comment posted by Nancy to which your linked comment replies. At any rate, I didn’t find that particular comment of yours obnoxious except for the ‘pity party’ snark, which I basically just wrote off as your usual level of prickliness.
The rudeness is in how she completely ignores the explanation I just gave in the parent comment, of why wide feet would lead to people being prejudiced against you, which obviates her question (the one I replied to and, in doing so, was deemed obnoxious).
So:
1) I explain why having wide feet leads to people being prejudiced against me.
2) Nancy replies, while ignoring the entire explanation I just gave.
3) [Insert comment I should have made instead of the one I did, which would point out how Nancy just ignored the explanation I gave, but which you don’t characterize as obnoxious]
The reason I belabor the point is that this issue comes up quite frequently, where people complain that “Yeah, Silas, you had a good point, but goshdarnit, the way you said it gives me sufficient pretense to ignore it wholesale and join the anti-Silas’s point bandwagon”, and I want someone to finally put their neck out and show me what comment would be an appropriate one to protest the (rude) ignoring of part of my comment when someone replies to it.
There’s no explicit question in the comment of NL’s I think you’re thinking of, so I imagine you mean that the statements in her comment could be read as implying an already-answered question, which makes the comment rude. That hardly registers on my rudeness detector; unless it’s part of a systematic pattern of behavior, it’s innocuous IMO.
Still, let me pretend I’m SilasBarta and suppose her comment is rude.
OK, I’m SilasBarta. Nancy’s replied to me. Most of my comment seems to have gone right past her and she’s replied without having understood me. That means I have failed to make myself as clear to her as I’d like, and I want to fix that. It’s her first reply to me, she’s not being overtly confrontational, and people often write sloppily when replying to others on the Internet, so let’s assume good faith. As such, I reply to emphasize my more detailed explanation of how people with wide feet suffer prejudice, this time without any snitty rhetorical questions (or accusations of bad faith). I might write something like: ‘Let me clarify. Although people with wide feet may not suffer much direct prejudice, they nonetheless suffer effective prejudice indirectly because it hurts my ability to signal via e.g. choice of shoes, as I pointed out in my earlier comment.’
I don’t believe I did use the way you said what you said as a pretense for ignoring its good points. I do think you might have been right when you tried picking out the pity-oriented subtext of NL’s original post, but just because I didn’t mention it doesn’t mean I ignored it wholesale—it just means I didn’t have anything to say in response to it. There are a lot of comments on Less Wrong that make good points—presented abrasively or otherwise—that I don’t reply to. (Also, I wouldn’t even have complained to you if you hadn’t solicited feedback on why people had voted down your original run of comments.)
Done. I’m looking forward to either Nancy’s substantive reply and apology, or your concession that the issue might be a bit more complicated.
Okay, but the part Nancy ignored when she replied bore directly on (and obviated!) her comment, so she shouldn’t have replied to begin with if that was all she had to say. The general point of yours (which I agree with) about the impossibility of replying to everything, doesn’t apply.
It seems to me that the issue’s already been complicated because you’ve already replied to Nancy impolitely. Now that’s happened, it is not really realistic to expect a substantive reply and apology from her simply because you (I, if we’re being pedantic) rephrased some of your original remarks more tactfully.
OK; it sounds like I misinterpreted your earlier comment about ‘people complain that …’ as being directed at me, but based on your reply it sounds like it isn’t. In which case feel free to disregard the last paragraph of my grandparent comment.
Criticizing someone for (the perception of) being mean or otherwise anti-social generally has higher priority than criticizing someone for (the perception of) being wrong.
In human social interaction, it’s considered worse to be mean than to be wrong, unless you are wrong in a socially proscribed way. Social order is considered more important than everyone being right all of the time.
I wasn’t criticizing Nancy for being wrong; I was criticizing her for ignoring part of what someone said. That counts as being anti-social too, so it’s not an issue of “wrong vs. anti-social”; it’s anti-social vs. anti-social.
So, why is the anti-sociality of ignoring someone’s comment while pretending to reply to it worse than the anti-sociality of saying that someone, er, did that?
Also, would it be rude to point out that you also just did what I’m accusing Nancy of doing? ;-)
Nancy didn’t deal with that point in detail for good reason: simply put, there’s no general prejudice against people with wide feet. it may be that in some circumstances they end up taking a status hit, but no one suffers a status hit for catering to wide-feet people the same way they do if they are perceived as actively catering to fat females. I tentatively suspect that Nancy didn’t reply about this because Nancy considered this to be obvious from context.
How many times am I going to have to explain this? People do have prejudices based on the fashions that others wear, and a major part of this is shoes. Therefore, having such sharp restrictions on what shoes you can wear will amplify this is existing prejudice. Therefore, people endure additional discrimination as a result of having wide feet, even though “wide feet” does not register as a negative quality in and of itself.
I explained this from the very first post where I brought up wide feet!
… yeah. Or, you know, you could just quit coming up with ever-more-contrived theories and go with, “oops, Nancy must have missed that, probably should have been more careful.”
Let’s put issues with Nancy aside for a minute. Do you agree with my statement that “No one suffers a status hit for catering to wide-feet people the same way they do if they are perceived as actively catering to fat females.”?
Let’s put the store-side issue aside for a minute. Do you agree with my contention that, “A man with wide feet will look less fashionable—irrespective of any fashion sense he might have—as a result of not having access to the variety of shoes that people with normal feet have?”
Why does your question have more importance for this issue than mine? And why do people get to ignore the reasoning I give with impunity when replying to me?
I’m not sure I agree with that. It seems plausible but I’m not sure people pay that much attention to shoes or for that matter to how “fashionable” people are dressed (there’s a necessary disclaimer here that I’m a math grad student. It might very well be different if one were talking about more status and signaling conscious professions like law and business.)
Because a yes answer to my question would imply that whether or not the answer to your question is “yes” the status issues being discussed in regards to clothing for fat people is not what is causing a lack of shoes for wide-footed males.
How justifiably confident can you (JoshuaZ) be about the impact of shoes on someone’s fashionability and the resulting prejudices people have on that basis? Like you say, you’re a grad student, with little real-world experience in this. Everything I’ve read about the matter says that the shoes men wear do matter.
But why would it have that impact? Fat women can, introspectively, understand why they don’t give a shit about helping wide-footed men, and why they’d take a hit to status if they did so. They are surely capable of inferring therefrom why higher status people don’t want to take a hit to help them out.
Very low confidence. Hence my remark that your claim seemed plausible.
Missing the point. No one is going to take a status hit from helping out wide-footed men. People might get a status hit for helping out “people with crappy shoes” but that’s not the same category. Close to no one has the same negative status association of “wide-footed men” that they have with “fat women.” That’s the distinction. Let’s say you’re at a cocktail party. Which do you think we’ll have a larger negative status impact when asked what you do for a living? “Oh, I’ve started a company that makes clothing for fat women” or “Oh, I’ve started a company that makes shoes for men with feet that are wider than the norm?” These don’t have the same status result. And if you want to make it more stark, imagine a male who works as a model for wide-footed shoes as opposed to a female who models clothing for fat people. Which one do you think will cause more of a status hit on a random internet forum if an otherwise anonymous individual mentioned that as their job?
I don’t know, but it must be pretty big of a hit for the wide shoe model, since, um, there aren’t any.
But not the relevant distinction. If I show up at that cocktail party, all people know is that I have crappy shoes. And no, I can’t just say to them, “Oh, discount this aspect of me: I have crappy shoes because they don’t make them in my size; really, I totally get that nice shoes are important, I just can’t find any that fit.”
It doesn’t work like that.
Framing effects would dominate. What if you said, “wide variance women” instead of “fat women”? Or “men that are underserved in the high end shoe market” instead of wide-footed men?
Again, the only real difference is that fat women have made self-pity into an art form, while wide-footed men haven’t.
Let me tentatively suggest that in that circumstance framing would not dominate. In the first case many people would after hearing “wide-variance” be thinking “oh, he means fat ladies” or something similar and would only not say that explicitly out of politeness, whereas even if you said the second one without the framing, most people would ignore it.
Is this the relevant distinction? It seemed like the topic of discussion was why there wasn’t any clothing of specific forms. That’s not the same question as whether or not status hits occur to the people in question. (And even then, if one is talking about say just online conversation, a status hit from being a fat woman is going to be much larger than “I’ve got wide feet.”).
Let me tentatively suggest that the level of status issues here is so different that the difference of degree really does become a difference in kind. Indeed, our earlier discussion sort of highlights this. Even in situations like academia, where looks don’t matter that much, being a fat woman seems to have some status hit associated with it.