What? Look, if you and I are having a conversation about animals and I bring up bats and you go “bats are evil and anyone who approves of them is evil” (which is an actual word PDV actually used in this conversation), I think it’s a reasonable response for me to go “uh, bro, are you okay? It sounds like you’ve got a thing about bats,” and we don’t have to go into it if you don’t want to but refusing to acknowledge the thing that just happened seems weird to me, even if I only care about epistemics, because if I’m right then everything you say about bats needs to be filtered to take into account that, I dunno, bats killed your family or whatever (and this consideration is orthogonal to respecting your boundaries around bats, whatever they are).
(Also, probably goes without saying, but just in case: I don’t think Val is making anything like this claim, and I think “but only talk in this fashion” is a strawman. I do still think there was something not ideal about Val using an NVC-ish frame here but I’m also sympathetic to his defense.)
Look, if you and I are having a conversation about animals and I bring up bats and you go “bats are evil and anyone who approves of them is evil” (which is an actual word PDV actually used in this conversation), I think it’s a reasonable response for me to go “uh, bro, are you okay? It sounds like you’ve got a thing about bats,”
I strenuously disagree. This would be an extremely annoying sort of response, and I would think less of anyone who responded like this.
People can have strong opinions without those opinions coming from, like, emotional trauma or whatever. Insinuating some irrational, emotional motivation for a belief, in lieu of discussing the belief itself or asking how someone came to have it, etc., is simply rude.
(It’s different if you explicitly say “you’re wrong, and also, you only believe that because of [insert bad reason here]”. But that’s not what you’re doing, in your bat-hypothetical!)
What? Look, if you and I are having a conversation about animals and I bring up bats and you go “bats are evil and anyone who approves of them is evil” (which is an actual word PDV actually used in this conversation), I think it’s a reasonable response for me to go “uh, bro, are you okay? It sounds like you’ve got a thing about bats,” and we don’t have to go into it if you don’t want to but refusing to acknowledge the thing that just happened seems weird to me, even if I only care about epistemics, because if I’m right then everything you say about bats needs to be filtered to take into account that, I dunno, bats killed your family or whatever (and this consideration is orthogonal to respecting your boundaries around bats, whatever they are).
(Also, probably goes without saying, but just in case: I don’t think Val is making anything like this claim, and I think “but only talk in this fashion” is a strawman. I do still think there was something not ideal about Val using an NVC-ish frame here but I’m also sympathetic to his defense.)
I strenuously disagree. This would be an extremely annoying sort of response, and I would think less of anyone who responded like this.
People can have strong opinions without those opinions coming from, like, emotional trauma or whatever. Insinuating some irrational, emotional motivation for a belief, in lieu of discussing the belief itself or asking how someone came to have it, etc., is simply rude.
(It’s different if you explicitly say “you’re wrong, and also, you only believe that because of [insert bad reason here]”. But that’s not what you’re doing, in your bat-hypothetical!)