I just … don’t see how obfuscating my thoughts through a gentleness filter actually helps anyone?
You could start by thinking “okay, I don’t understand this, but a person I explicitly claim to like and probably have at least a little respect for is telling me to my face that not-doing it makes me uniquely costly, compared to a lot of other people he engages with, so maybe I have a blind spot here? Maybe there’s something real where he’s pointing, even if I don’t see the lines of cause and effect?”
Plus, it’s disingenuous and sneaky to act like what’s being requested here is that you “obfuscate your thoughts through a gentleness filter.” That strawmanning of the actual issue is a rhetorical trick that tries to win the argument preemptively through framing, which is the sort of thing you claim to find offensive, and to fight against.
One last point for Zack to consider:
You could start by thinking “okay, I don’t understand this, but a person I explicitly claim to like and probably have at least a little respect for is telling me to my face that not-doing it makes me uniquely costly, compared to a lot of other people he engages with, so maybe I have a blind spot here? Maybe there’s something real where he’s pointing, even if I don’t see the lines of cause and effect?”
Plus, it’s disingenuous and sneaky to act like what’s being requested here is that you “obfuscate your thoughts through a gentleness filter.” That strawmanning of the actual issue is a rhetorical trick that tries to win the argument preemptively through framing, which is the sort of thing you claim to find offensive, and to fight against.
Without taking a position on this dispute, I’d like to note that I’ve had a similar conversation with Zack ( / Said).