I don’t think I need to be polite when I’m having everything I write be downvoted and “argued” against by about twelve different people.
Consider the case where some mugger is pointing a gun at you. That should help give you a more practical perspective. Sure, the mugger doesn’t deserve politeness. It isn’t fair that politeness is necessary. But you still need to be polite to him if you wish to minimize the chance that he will shoot you in the head.
Sometimes other people really do behaving like dicks and be unreasonable or unfair. Yet that doesn’t mean you are obliged to sabotage yourself to get petty vengeance. You are free to follow whatever course of actions get you the best outcome. So what if that course happens to involve typing words that will cause other people to believe you are being polite to them? What matters is whether you get what you want in the end.
I was anticipating that people would evaluate my comments based on the arguments I made rather than on their general tone and I didn’t update when that was obviously false which was a big mistake. I was expecting that rationalists placed a low value on politeness, like I do. I still place that low value on politeness and I still think many of my arguments are correct but I’m willing to jump through hoops and am willing to accept the fact that others don’t accept my arguments.
I need the practice. Even though I don’t like being polite and don’t think it’s objectively good and don’t think that my previous comments were unjustified, I need to try to get better at being polite and make myself dislike it less, so that when I pragmatically need to be polite (like you advise) I’m capable of skillfully doing so.
I do expect that this specific comment will receive a minus or two because it’s not a capitulation, but that’s hardly going to effect my behavior at this point. Lolz. Nyfb, guvf pbzzrag vf n jnl bs grfgvat zl arj hcqngrq zbqry bs gur pbzzragref juvpu fnlf gung V’yy erprvir zber onq xnezn.
I was anticipating that people would evaluate my comments based on the arguments I made rather than on their general tone and I didn’t update when that was obviously false which was a big mistake.
Even once Harry-potter related arguments are granted you you are left with a bunch of arguments about humans, their words, their behaviors and their motives that are objectively wrong too. The fact that their intent was interpersonal incivility does nothing to excuse the fact that the reasoning contained therein was naive, irrational and all around terrible thinking. (No, no ‘intellectual’ high ground for you. You were being all round silly.)
I do expect that this specific comment will receive a minus or two because it’s not a capitulation, but that’s hardly going to effect my behavior at this point.
Wait, what? I think you’re misinterpreting a lot of what I was doing. My goal isn’t incivility, my goal is getting my point across. Incivility was a means toward that goal, a means which obviously fails utterly in the context of this website. But certainly you’ll agree that since I’ve started behaving I should no longer get negative reputations, correct? Or are you going to punish me for my sins?
I’d also like to have a debate about manners somewhere else, if you’d like. I hate them and think being polite is in and of itself bad, and I also think manners are kind of oppressive, etc. For the purposes of that debate I would use manners (new means to an end).
I’m pretty sure that Nietzsche was legit, and that you shouldn’t just willy nilly call his arguments silly. He’s universally recognized as a Pretty Smart Guy. I’d be willing to have a discussion about either Nietzsche or Hume with anyone, on the condition that I don’t get bad karma’d into oblivion for disagreeing with a societal convention (ironically that this happens when I disagree with manners bolsters the strength of the argument that manners are stupid).
What arguments about humans and their behaviors and motives did I even make here? I don’t think I made any. I think you just wanted to make a list so that you could act as though that summarized everything I’ve said so that you could conclude I was wrong without actually discussing specific things that I wrote.
What arguments about humans and their behaviors and motives did I even make here?
Specific humans, their behaviors and motives. For example accusing someone of being disingenuous hits all three checkboxes.
I don’t think I made any. I think you just wanted to make a list so that you could act as though that summarized everything I’ve said so that you could conclude I was wrong without actually discussing specific things that I wrote.
I think you are saying more false things about a human, his behavior and his motives.
I’m pretty sure that Nietzsche was legit, and that you shouldn’t just willy nilly call his arguments silly. He’s universally recognized as a Pretty Smart Guy. I’d be willing to have a discussion about either Nietzsche or Hume with anyone
I know a little about Nietzsche and next to nothing about Hume. Philosopher talk bores me. That is, all that ‘philosophy’ that consists of quoting historical Philosophical figures. Actual ideas are somewhat more interesting. If the big names happened to express a particular idea better than other available sources then they may be worth quoting.
, on the condition that I don’t get bad karma’d into oblivion for disagreeing with a societal convention (ironically that this happens when I disagree with manners bolsters the strength of the argument that manners are stupid).
I don’t think that necessarily follows, from the perspective of identifying potentially desirable game theoretic equilibria.
Hume’s problem of induction is pretty awesome, if you’re looking for specific arguments. Nietzsche is often misinterpreted, if you want to understand his ideas you should read any summaries which were written by Giles Deleuze who is another smart person.
Hume was one of the first and best naturalists and his stuff is very easy to read (unlike Kant’s stuff which is all either entirely wrong or a more confusing way of phrasing the arguments that Hume had already made). Wikipedia’s list of entries is fairly informative, many philosophers who are awesome think that Hume was really smart.
Attention to Hume’s philosophical works grew after the German philosopher Immanuel Kant credited Hume with awakening him from “dogmatic slumbers” (circa 1770).[98]
According to Schopenhauer, “there is more to be learned from each page of David Hume than from the collected philosophical works of Hegel, Herbart and Schleiermacher taken together”.[99]
A. J. Ayer (1936), introducing his classic exposition of logical positivism, claimed: “The views which are put forward in this treatise derive from the logical outcome of the empiricism of Berkeley and Hume.”[100]
Albert Einstein (1915) wrote that he was inspired by Hume’s positivism when formulating his Special Theory of Relativity.[101]
Hume was called “the prophet of the Wittgensteinian revolution” by N. Phillipson, referring to his view that mathematics and logic are closed systems, disguised tautologies, and have no relation to the world of experience.[102]
Hume’s Problem of Induction was also of fundamental importance to the philosophy of Karl Popper.
I strongly recommend Hume. Nietzsche is pretty tough to understand and he goes off into poetics too often to be easily understood, it’s a lot of work without a proportional amount of gain. But Hume was a genius and was very good at communicating. His writings are very concise and informative and will almost certainly benefit you. Treatise on Human Nature is pretty good for a starter, as is Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding. They are very short books and should only take about an hour or so to read.
Enquiry is a very short book, but the Treatise is not. I certainly couldn’t read it in an hour. The edition I have is about 300 pages long. Anyway, I agree that Hume is awesome. I think, though, that most what is of greatest value in his work (empiricism, the problem of induction, instrumental rationality, ethical anti-rationalism) is probably already part of the collective memeset at LW, in more sophisticated guise. So I’m not sure it would be worth it for the average LWer without a genuine interest in the history of philosophy to work their way through Hume.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, I think a lot of people here could learn a lot from.
I misremembered the length of Treatise. I agree that Hume will just tell you things that you probably already know if you visit this site. So people should read Nietzsche instead. Very good point.
To people who want to read Nietzsche: note that every secondary author except Giles Deleuze is probably misinterpreting Nietzsche’s work. Also note that Giles Deleuze uses Nietzsche like a historical sock puppet so that he can get his rhizomatic message of anticapitalism across. Deleuze is the best that I’ve found, but even his stuff is very selective. I didn’t do this personally, but I’ve often heard it repeated that new readers of Nietzsche should start with The Gay Science. That might be the best place to start.
The best parts of Nietzsche are the ones that no one seems to know about. The dangers of the safety of the “Last Man” is awesome. The parts where he talks about being a lion and recreating value is awesome. All of Zarasthustra is awesome. Twilight of the Idols is hilarious at times. The “pop culture” Nietzsche is nothing like the one in his actual books.
It helps to remember that Nietzsche was basically a Christian who found out that God was dead who then got incredibly sad and nihilistic and then worked his way through it by realizing his past and current ignorance, and becoming very critical of Christian ideals and he then found new and objective ideals to work for, and became awesome. He’s anti Christian, but he doesn’t criticize literally everything about them and they share some common ground. He hates them, but he also hates his past self. He also managed to fix his past self, and his books are meant to try to fix other people as well. He does feel empathy, he’s still human.
Also, he’s not responsible for the Nazis. That was his stupid evil sister’s fault.
He hates Schopenhauer, maybe reading Schopenhauer should be done before reading Nietzsche. Not sure.
Agreed both that Hume is awesome, and that most of his valuable insights are incorporated already in our memeset. If you want a clear, easy and fast to read version of the proto-form of that memeset from 300 years ago, there is nothing better than his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Spinoza has also many early insights, complementary to Hume’s (roughly, you could say that Hume anticipates LW’s epistemology and metaethics, and Spinoza anticipates LW’s naturalistic metaphysics and computationalist philosophy of mind) but Spinoza is more difficult to read casually with profit because of his outdated terminology (e.g. “God” instead of “the Universe”) and his tiresome pretense of deducing everything from self-evident principles.
I do expect that this specific comment will receive a minus or two because it’s not a capitulation
Thinking in terms of “capitulation” or similar notions of losing, winning and surrender is not helpful. One doesn’t update views as much when one feels like something is at risk of being lost. Trying not to think that way may be helpful.
Please stop commenting on my comments for a while unless you’re actually making an argument instead of A Witty Remark.
I’ll interpret this like Alicorn did, and stop responding to your comments. We do have a weak norm in favor of respecting such requests.
If you’d actually like answers to the questions you posed in the parent, please restate them in a more readable fashion and let me know you actually would like a response.
I have upvoted this comment. Even though I’m not thrilled with the way chaosmosis has been conducting emself, “You’re being hurtful, I don’t like you, leave me be” is a reasonable sentiment and doesn’t need to be attacked.
I read the above (grandparent) comment not as “You’re being hurtful, I don’t like you, leave me be”, but instead as “I can tell that everything you say is a veiled insult, everyone’s against me, I am being punished by shadowy figures, when I act poorly it’s your fault”. Am I missing something?
I would go through and elaborate on how I read it, but it’s gone now. Apparently chaosmosis endorses my interpretation, which is at least some evidence that I had it right.
I have upvoted this comment. Even though I’m not thrilled with the way chaosmosis has been conducting emself, “You’re being hurtful, I don’t like you, leave me be” is a reasonable sentiment and doesn’t need to be attacked.
I downvoted the comment as a (mildly) inappropriate personal attack. It’s not all that much different in nature to other acts of social aggression against the reputation of an individual. Occasionally a context will arise where such an utterance is justified but this isn’t one of them.
Regarding the ‘leave me be’ in particular, people do not have the right to choose when others are permitted reply to public utterances—and such a power would be far too exploitable were it to be granted.
people do not have the right to choose when others are permitted reply to public utterances—and such a power would be far too exploitable were it to be granted.
I was anticipating that people would evaluate my comments based on the arguments I made rather than on their general tone
The content of comments usually matters more than the tone because usually the tone is OK; you only “lose points” for a bad tone (which is rare), you won’t get a lot of credit here if you combine lousy arguments with a great presentation (unlike on say a TV show).
You may want to look into Crocker’s Rules, which have been invoked a few times here, and cause much less friction than your “reverse Crocker’s Rules”.
Everyone can use Crocker’s Rules on me unless I tell them to stop.
Actually, everybody but thomblake, because he’s super annoying and would abuse the privilege.
I’ll be polite and say thankee sai and yes ma’am unless people tell me I’m allowed to do otherwise.
That’s basically what I said above.
Do you consider my evil supervillain comments to be rude? I meant them to be a not-rude alternative for expressing my sentiments, plus for them to have a little humor also. They’ve gotten negative karma but I think that’s just from the few commenters who love thomblake.
Everyone can use Crocker’s Rules on me unless I tell them to stop.
As per my standard policy I decline your invitation—because most of the social consequences for the speaker who follows said rules are not significantly influenced by the declaration.
Also, when people say “Make yourself at home” I don’t start walking around naked and eating all the food. In fact, in my typical experience when people actually say that I find that more formality and protocol is indicated than in more casual interactions where nobody considers the need.
(This isn’t a critique of your motives. It’s me expressing little faith in this particular signalling mechanism.)
Standard Disclaimer: I do not want thomblake’s opinion on this comment.
I advise against inserting this into comments. I also advise against mentioning thomblake in general; you should be aiming for and holding up your end of mutual nonmention and nonreply.
FWIW, feel free to be as rude to me as you want; I operate by Crocker’s Rules.
That said, I feel compelled to point out that—as far as I can tell—whenever Roland says “thankee sai”, he does so not as some sort of a minimum-effort implementation of social protocols, but because he genuinely respects the person he’s thanking. That’s an admirable character trait, IMO.
I use “thankee sai” whenever possible in the hope that people will catch the reference. I agree that Roland specifically is awesome, and I respect people who are legitimately polite even if I think that being concerned about politeness is a bad thing and that insisting on politeness is usually just a different way to be rude, etc. But Roland’s pretty admirable and I thought he was genuine. He’s also inhumanely vicious in attempting to complete his quest.
How did you like the ending (if necessary use rot13)? I loved it. It’s even better in the context of the fact that the literature juvpu jnf jevggra orsberunaq nobhg puvyqr ebynaq nyy srngherq znal qvssrerag irefvbaf bs ubj ur pnzr gb gur gbjre. Nyy bs gurfr irefvbaf pna or fvzhygnarbhfyl gehr haqre Xvat’f raqvat, nygubhtu gung cebonoyl jnfa’g uvf vagrag. Ohg vg znxrf gur raqvat rira orggre.
Everyone got a good ending but Oy, who deserved better than he got.
I haven’t been able to discuss the ending because no one I know has finished the series.
I haven’t been able to discuss the ending because no one I know has finished the series.
I hate to disappoint you, but I am one of those people :-( I am going through the series on audiobook, which means that I make progress on it only during long trips. I was pretty disappointed by the 4th installment, Wizard and Glass, because it’s basically a giant flashback where very little actually happens, so my reading speed declined sharply after that...
Everything past the first two books is boring and kind of suckish until the very ending, IMHO. You might just want to skip to the last book after reading plot summaries of the ones you haven’t listened to yet. The ending is the best part of the entire series, hands down (except that some people hated it, I think that’s because they got emotionally invested because of Roland’s long hard journey).
The Stephen King book about Annie, an insane woman, who kidnaps a hack writer because she’s his “number one fan” is a great book. I don’t remember the title. Also, IT is one of my favorite books.
I do expect that this specific comment will receive a minus or two because it’s not a capitulation
Just a note for those who might feel inclined to downvote complaints about downvotes—this is clearly a testable prediction about downvotes, which surely should be upvoted.
ETA: For those inclined to downvote discussion of voting and karma in general, I have happily provided a softer target.
“This comment will be downvoted” is a testable prediction, agreed. ”This comment will be downvoted because it’s not a capitulation” is not a testable prediction. Regardless of its testability, it is also an attempt to impose a specific interpretation on all downvotes. It asserts that my downvote is an expression of the desire for chaosmosis to capitulate, rather than an expression of the desire to have fewer comments like his on LW.
I jumped through hoops for you and acted politely, why would you do this?
Are you just a jerk?
(See how I’m still jumping through hoops and didn’t swear at you despite your obvious jerkishness, and also see how I lured you in with my Xanatos Gambit? Mwhahahaha! Evil triumphs again, you poor pitiful fool.)
I’m confused. What did I do that was jerklike? I was under the impression that you disliked downvotes, and my comment’s intent was to dispel a source of confusion that would cause some people to erroneously downvote your comment.
Several people (myself included) do tend to downvote comments for whining about downvotes.
Consider the case where some mugger is pointing a gun at you. That should help give you a more practical perspective. Sure, the mugger doesn’t deserve politeness. It isn’t fair that politeness is necessary. But you still need to be polite to him if you wish to minimize the chance that he will shoot you in the head.
Sometimes other people really do behaving like dicks and be unreasonable or unfair. Yet that doesn’t mean you are obliged to sabotage yourself to get petty vengeance. You are free to follow whatever course of actions get you the best outcome. So what if that course happens to involve typing words that will cause other people to believe you are being polite to them? What matters is whether you get what you want in the end.
I was anticipating that people would evaluate my comments based on the arguments I made rather than on their general tone and I didn’t update when that was obviously false which was a big mistake. I was expecting that rationalists placed a low value on politeness, like I do. I still place that low value on politeness and I still think many of my arguments are correct but I’m willing to jump through hoops and am willing to accept the fact that others don’t accept my arguments.
I need the practice. Even though I don’t like being polite and don’t think it’s objectively good and don’t think that my previous comments were unjustified, I need to try to get better at being polite and make myself dislike it less, so that when I pragmatically need to be polite (like you advise) I’m capable of skillfully doing so.
I do expect that this specific comment will receive a minus or two because it’s not a capitulation, but that’s hardly going to effect my behavior at this point. Lolz. Nyfb, guvf pbzzrag vf n jnl bs grfgvat zl arj hcqngrq zbqry bs gur pbzzragref juvpu fnlf gung V’yy erprvir zber onq xnezn.
Even once Harry-potter related arguments are granted you you are left with a bunch of arguments about humans, their words, their behaviors and their motives that are objectively wrong too. The fact that their intent was interpersonal incivility does nothing to excuse the fact that the reasoning contained therein was naive, irrational and all around terrible thinking. (No, no ‘intellectual’ high ground for you. You were being all round silly.)
For this sentence. Yes.
Wait, what? I think you’re misinterpreting a lot of what I was doing. My goal isn’t incivility, my goal is getting my point across. Incivility was a means toward that goal, a means which obviously fails utterly in the context of this website. But certainly you’ll agree that since I’ve started behaving I should no longer get negative reputations, correct? Or are you going to punish me for my sins?
I’d also like to have a debate about manners somewhere else, if you’d like. I hate them and think being polite is in and of itself bad, and I also think manners are kind of oppressive, etc. For the purposes of that debate I would use manners (new means to an end).
I’m pretty sure that Nietzsche was legit, and that you shouldn’t just willy nilly call his arguments silly. He’s universally recognized as a Pretty Smart Guy. I’d be willing to have a discussion about either Nietzsche or Hume with anyone, on the condition that I don’t get bad karma’d into oblivion for disagreeing with a societal convention (ironically that this happens when I disagree with manners bolsters the strength of the argument that manners are stupid).
What arguments about humans and their behaviors and motives did I even make here? I don’t think I made any. I think you just wanted to make a list so that you could act as though that summarized everything I’ve said so that you could conclude I was wrong without actually discussing specific things that I wrote.
Specific humans, their behaviors and motives. For example accusing someone of being disingenuous hits all three checkboxes.
I think you are saying more false things about a human, his behavior and his motives.
I know a little about Nietzsche and next to nothing about Hume. Philosopher talk bores me. That is, all that ‘philosophy’ that consists of quoting historical Philosophical figures. Actual ideas are somewhat more interesting. If the big names happened to express a particular idea better than other available sources then they may be worth quoting.
I don’t think that necessarily follows, from the perspective of identifying potentially desirable game theoretic equilibria.
Hume’s problem of induction is pretty awesome, if you’re looking for specific arguments. Nietzsche is often misinterpreted, if you want to understand his ideas you should read any summaries which were written by Giles Deleuze who is another smart person.
Hume was one of the first and best naturalists and his stuff is very easy to read (unlike Kant’s stuff which is all either entirely wrong or a more confusing way of phrasing the arguments that Hume had already made). Wikipedia’s list of entries is fairly informative, many philosophers who are awesome think that Hume was really smart.
I strongly recommend Hume. Nietzsche is pretty tough to understand and he goes off into poetics too often to be easily understood, it’s a lot of work without a proportional amount of gain. But Hume was a genius and was very good at communicating. His writings are very concise and informative and will almost certainly benefit you. Treatise on Human Nature is pretty good for a starter, as is Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding. They are very short books and should only take about an hour or so to read.
Enquiry is a very short book, but the Treatise is not. I certainly couldn’t read it in an hour. The edition I have is about 300 pages long. Anyway, I agree that Hume is awesome. I think, though, that most what is of greatest value in his work (empiricism, the problem of induction, instrumental rationality, ethical anti-rationalism) is probably already part of the collective memeset at LW, in more sophisticated guise. So I’m not sure it would be worth it for the average LWer without a genuine interest in the history of philosophy to work their way through Hume.
Nietzsche, on the other hand, I think a lot of people here could learn a lot from.
I misremembered the length of Treatise. I agree that Hume will just tell you things that you probably already know if you visit this site. So people should read Nietzsche instead. Very good point.
To people who want to read Nietzsche: note that every secondary author except Giles Deleuze is probably misinterpreting Nietzsche’s work. Also note that Giles Deleuze uses Nietzsche like a historical sock puppet so that he can get his rhizomatic message of anticapitalism across. Deleuze is the best that I’ve found, but even his stuff is very selective. I didn’t do this personally, but I’ve often heard it repeated that new readers of Nietzsche should start with The Gay Science. That might be the best place to start.
The best parts of Nietzsche are the ones that no one seems to know about. The dangers of the safety of the “Last Man” is awesome. The parts where he talks about being a lion and recreating value is awesome. All of Zarasthustra is awesome. Twilight of the Idols is hilarious at times. The “pop culture” Nietzsche is nothing like the one in his actual books.
It helps to remember that Nietzsche was basically a Christian who found out that God was dead who then got incredibly sad and nihilistic and then worked his way through it by realizing his past and current ignorance, and becoming very critical of Christian ideals and he then found new and objective ideals to work for, and became awesome. He’s anti Christian, but he doesn’t criticize literally everything about them and they share some common ground. He hates them, but he also hates his past self. He also managed to fix his past self, and his books are meant to try to fix other people as well. He does feel empathy, he’s still human.
Also, he’s not responsible for the Nazis. That was his stupid evil sister’s fault.
He hates Schopenhauer, maybe reading Schopenhauer should be done before reading Nietzsche. Not sure.
Agreed both that Hume is awesome, and that most of his valuable insights are incorporated already in our memeset. If you want a clear, easy and fast to read version of the proto-form of that memeset from 300 years ago, there is nothing better than his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Spinoza has also many early insights, complementary to Hume’s (roughly, you could say that Hume anticipates LW’s epistemology and metaethics, and Spinoza anticipates LW’s naturalistic metaphysics and computationalist philosophy of mind) but Spinoza is more difficult to read casually with profit because of his outdated terminology (e.g. “God” instead of “the Universe”) and his tiresome pretense of deducing everything from self-evident principles.
Wow. I might even read them instead of reading the Dresden Files for a 13th time. Get me some culture.
Thinking in terms of “capitulation” or similar notions of losing, winning and surrender is not helpful. One doesn’t update views as much when one feels like something is at risk of being lost. Trying not to think that way may be helpful.
The word was chosen on purpose, not to reflect my view, but to reflect the view of the hypothetical downvoters.
I’ve already read the core sequences, I don’t feel a need to oppose every argument made against what I’ve said.
Probably a good quality.
You’re being hurtful, I don’t like you, leave me be.
Edited to make my intent crystal clear.
I’ll interpret this like Alicorn did, and stop responding to your comments. We do have a weak norm in favor of respecting such requests.
If you’d actually like answers to the questions you posed in the parent, please restate them in a more readable fashion and let me know you actually would like a response.
I have upvoted this comment. Even though I’m not thrilled with the way chaosmosis has been conducting emself, “You’re being hurtful, I don’t like you, leave me be” is a reasonable sentiment and doesn’t need to be attacked.
I read the above (grandparent) comment not as “You’re being hurtful, I don’t like you, leave me be”, but instead as “I can tell that everything you say is a veiled insult, everyone’s against me, I am being punished by shadowy figures, when I act poorly it’s your fault”. Am I missing something?
Mostly the context of previous interpersonal conflicts.
Ah. Well, noted! Thanks.
I would go through and elaborate on how I read it, but it’s gone now. Apparently chaosmosis endorses my interpretation, which is at least some evidence that I had it right.
Fair enough!
I downvoted the comment as a (mildly) inappropriate personal attack. It’s not all that much different in nature to other acts of social aggression against the reputation of an individual. Occasionally a context will arise where such an utterance is justified but this isn’t one of them.
Regarding the ‘leave me be’ in particular, people do not have the right to choose when others are permitted reply to public utterances—and such a power would be far too exploitable were it to be granted.
Meh.
The content of comments usually matters more than the tone because usually the tone is OK; you only “lose points” for a bad tone (which is rare), you won’t get a lot of credit here if you combine lousy arguments with a great presentation (unlike on say a TV show).
You may want to look into Crocker’s Rules, which have been invoked a few times here, and cause much less friction than your “reverse Crocker’s Rules”.
Everyone can use Crocker’s Rules on me unless I tell them to stop. Actually, everybody but thomblake, because he’s super annoying and would abuse the privilege.
I’ll be polite and say thankee sai and yes ma’am unless people tell me I’m allowed to do otherwise. That’s basically what I said above.
Do you consider my evil supervillain comments to be rude? I meant them to be a not-rude alternative for expressing my sentiments, plus for them to have a little humor also. They’ve gotten negative karma but I think that’s just from the few commenters who love thomblake.
Removed for reciprocity.
As per my standard policy I decline your invitation—because most of the social consequences for the speaker who follows said rules are not significantly influenced by the declaration.
Also, when people say “Make yourself at home” I don’t start walking around naked and eating all the food. In fact, in my typical experience when people actually say that I find that more formality and protocol is indicated than in more casual interactions where nobody considers the need.
(This isn’t a critique of your motives. It’s me expressing little faith in this particular signalling mechanism.)
I advise against inserting this into comments. I also advise against mentioning thomblake in general; you should be aiming for and holding up your end of mutual nonmention and nonreply.
Fixed. It was sarcasm, but I see your point. I’ll follow that advice in the future.
But I’m leaving the specific mention in the context of supervillains for clarification purposes.
FWIW, feel free to be as rude to me as you want; I operate by Crocker’s Rules.
That said, I feel compelled to point out that—as far as I can tell—whenever Roland says “thankee sai”, he does so not as some sort of a minimum-effort implementation of social protocols, but because he genuinely respects the person he’s thanking. That’s an admirable character trait, IMO.
I use “thankee sai” whenever possible in the hope that people will catch the reference. I agree that Roland specifically is awesome, and I respect people who are legitimately polite even if I think that being concerned about politeness is a bad thing and that insisting on politeness is usually just a different way to be rude, etc. But Roland’s pretty admirable and I thought he was genuine. He’s also inhumanely vicious in attempting to complete his quest.
How did you like the ending (if necessary use rot13)? I loved it. It’s even better in the context of the fact that the literature juvpu jnf jevggra orsberunaq nobhg puvyqr ebynaq nyy srngherq znal qvssrerag irefvbaf bs ubj ur pnzr gb gur gbjre. Nyy bs gurfr irefvbaf pna or fvzhygnarbhfyl gehr haqre Xvat’f raqvat, nygubhtu gung cebonoyl jnfa’g uvf vagrag. Ohg vg znxrf gur raqvat rira orggre.
Everyone got a good ending but Oy, who deserved better than he got.
I haven’t been able to discuss the ending because no one I know has finished the series.
I hate to disappoint you, but I am one of those people :-( I am going through the series on audiobook, which means that I make progress on it only during long trips. I was pretty disappointed by the 4th installment, Wizard and Glass, because it’s basically a giant flashback where very little actually happens, so my reading speed declined sharply after that...
Everything past the first two books is boring and kind of suckish until the very ending, IMHO. You might just want to skip to the last book after reading plot summaries of the ones you haven’t listened to yet. The ending is the best part of the entire series, hands down (except that some people hated it, I think that’s because they got emotionally invested because of Roland’s long hard journey).
The Stephen King book about Annie, an insane woman, who kidnaps a hack writer because she’s his “number one fan” is a great book. I don’t remember the title. Also, IT is one of my favorite books.
Just a note for those who might feel inclined to downvote complaints about downvotes—this is clearly a testable prediction about downvotes, which surely should be upvoted.
ETA: For those inclined to downvote discussion of voting and karma in general, I have happily provided a softer target.
“This comment will be downvoted” is a testable prediction, agreed.
”This comment will be downvoted because it’s not a capitulation” is not a testable prediction.
Regardless of its testability, it is also an attempt to impose a specific interpretation on all downvotes. It asserts that my downvote is an expression of the desire for chaosmosis to capitulate, rather than an expression of the desire to have fewer comments like his on LW.
I jumped through hoops for you and acted politely, why would you do this?
Are you just a jerk?
(See how I’m still jumping through hoops and didn’t swear at you despite your obvious jerkishness, and also see how I lured you in with my Xanatos Gambit? Mwhahahaha! Evil triumphs again, you poor pitiful fool.)
I’m confused. What did I do that was jerklike? I was under the impression that you disliked downvotes, and my comment’s intent was to dispel a source of confusion that would cause some people to erroneously downvote your comment.
Several people (myself included) do tend to downvote comments for whining about downvotes.
lol
Your words would deceive only the feeblest of minds. The denizens of this site are not to be fooled so easily.
Every attack you make only serves to strengthen my ultimate power.
Xanatos shall not be denied.
Your doom approaches.
Edit: apparently the denizens are less clever than I thought.