NKCDT: The Big Bang Theory
Hi, Welcome to the first Non-Karmic-Casual-Discussion-Thread.
This is a place for [purpose of thread goes here].
In order to create a causal non karmic environment for every one we ask that you
-Do not upvote or downvote any zero karma posts
-If you see a vote with positive karma, downvote it towards zero, even if it’s a good post
-If you see a vote with negative karma, upvote it towards zero, even if it’s a weak post
-Please be polite and respectful to other users
-Have fun!”
This is my first attempt at starting a casual conversation on LW where people don’t have to worry about winning or losing points, and can just relax and have social fun together.
So, Big Bang Theory. That series got me wondering. It seems to be about “geeks”, and not the basement-dwelling variety either; they’re highly successful and accomplished professionals, each in their own field. One of them has been an astronaut, even. And yet, everything they ever accomplish amounts to absolutely nothing in terms of social recognition or even in terms of personal happiness. And the thing is, it doesn’t even get better for their “normal” counterparts, who are just as miserable and petty.
Consider, then; how would being rationalists would affect the characters on this show? The writing of the show relies a lot on laughing at people rather than with them; would rationalist characters subvert that? And how would that rationalist outlook express itself given their personalities? (After all, notice how amazingly different from each other Yudkowsky, Hanson, and Alicorn are, just to name a few; they emphasize rather different things, and take different approaches to both truth-testing and problem-solving).
Note: this discussion does not need to be about rationalism. It can be a casual, normal discussion about the series. Relax and enjoy yourselves.
But the reason I brought up that series is that its characters are excellent examples of high intelligence hampered by immense irrationality. The apex of this is represented by Dr. Sheldon Cooper, who is, essentially, a complete fundamentalist over every single thing in his life; he applies this attitude to everything, right down to people’s favorite flavor of pudding: Raj is “axiomatically wrong” to prefer tapioca, because the best pudding is chocolate. Period. This attitude makes him a far, far worse scientist than he thinks, as he refuses to even consider any criticism of his methods or results.
(I’m hoping the post is not intended to apply its anti-feedback rules to itself, it would be nice for this point to be clarified… Downvoted to express disapproval of disabling of feedback, and to a lesser extent of discussing the post’s subject matter.)
Edit: I hereby declare this subthread a special meta-discussion exception to which the anti-feedback rules don’t apply :-)
I upvoted you, by the way.
It is intended to apply it’s anti-feedback rules to itself. It’s an attempt to create a space of idle, social, agreeable, fluffy conversation where lesswrongers can have friendly discussions that don’t have to be about rationality or singularity or akrasia or anything like that, without fear of getting downvoted or the vested interest in getting upvoted.
This post is intended to be a first try-out of the idea.
What? If I think anti-feedback rules are harmful (and I do), I am downvoting this post no matter what (and I did). The post doesn’t need anti-feedback protection to allow us to try out the idea, only the comments do.
Unfortunately, just the presence of the rule or even implication that this is a rule is sufficient to counteract a lot of such feedback. It’s not enough for some people to ignore the anti-feedback convention and vote anyway, it might be necessary to take the anti-feedback convention down explicitly as well, to indicate clearly that it doesn’t apply to the post.
(Notice how the post managed to stay at exactly 0 Karma this whole time, with only temporary fluctuations.)
Edit: It seems that I was wrong, after several hours the post started going into the negative, and is currently at −10, despite no official change of rules; dissenting feedback was strong enough. This thread might have played a role.
Right, I agree with that and I suppose I should have stated more explicitly that I don’t want anti-feedback on the post to be the rule, not just that I intend to act as though there is no such rule.
And how will you determine success or failure? It seems to me like people upvoting or downvoting the OP based on whether or not they want to see this sort of thing on LW is a pretty good way to determine whether or not there should be more.
It’s possible to have a post that itself can be voted on, but that introduces a local convention of not voting on the comments within. That is, a “space of idle fluffy conversation” doesn’t need for the post that hosts this space to also be voting-immune.
The arguments that support introducing the no-voting areas don’t seem to support the rule that the posts containing no-voting areas shouldn’t be voted upon. If they do, please explain how they do so. An argument against this rule is that it creates a self-protecting dynamic that makes it more difficult to vote such posts out of the forum than similar posts without the rule, thus making expected quality introduced by these posts lower than average.
That’s the whole point. The objective of these threads is not to “introduce quality” (and Karma does not measure quality, but popularity, which unfortunately isn’t always the same thing); it’s simply to have fun. Lots of people are turned off this blog because they find us stuffy, self-important, and unwelcoming. Having threads that encourage another kind of attitude is, I feel, downright healthy.
In fact, I have half a mind to change the next experiment from “don’t downvote or upvote” to “please downvote or upvote according to niceness and civility, not “quality” or “intelligence”. I want there to be spaces in LW where people aren’t being snippy at each other, and where the response to a post you don’t approve of but can’t be bothered to actually argue against is to down-vote it.
There is only one circumstance in which I for one ever consider downvoting someone, and it’s if I feel they’re being unreasonable on purpose; wilfully ignorant, or deliberately and smugly obnoxious. I don’t down-vote on mistakes, beginner’s ignorance, or stupidity.
Please don’t do that retroactively; you’re violating tacit consent. If you’d done that from the start, I wouldn’t have replied to you in the first place, because I you and I have very different criteria for what merits an upvote or a downvote, and any interaction between you and me will turn to my disadvantage.
In fact, I find the entirety of the karma system insanely dangerous, and would merit a discussion thread of its own. Supposing your attitude annoyed me sufficiently, what’s to stop me from searching your post history and downvoting every single post you ever wrote under this handle at LW? I would never do that, because I think that would be evil and I don’t like to think of myself as evil,. but you only have my word for it. In fact, what’s to stop you from downvoting every single post I make, simply on the grounds that you don’t want someone like me on this blog?
(You’ve ignored my point about the distinction between posts and comments.)
“Karmassassination” does happen occasionally, but it’s limited to an extent by having available downvotes be a function of the downvoter’s karma.
Or the number of sockpuppets you have.
The sockpuppets still have to acquire karma to be able to downvote, although this practice would allow karma-having puppets to concentrate a single person’s vitriol against individual comments more forcefully.
If only someone with sockpuppets could think of a way to leverage their resources into producing upvotes. Oh...
?
The sockpuppets write and innocent comment or two… perhaps one in an introduction thread and a few rationalist quotes. The other sockpuppets all upvote it. If suckpuppets can be trivially used to generate karma then the need to spend karma in order to downvote is a rather trivial obstacle.
The ability for accounts with no reputation to provide reputation to others is a technical flaw in a reputation system. I didn’t follow the “Endless September” talk enough to be sure but I assumed from a glance or two that this is the kind of vulnerability it referred to. (Probable reason I didn’t follow the discussion closely: Endless September means nothing to me as a label. September? For a start, what’s wrong with September? It is one of my favorite months.)
AFAIK, it means “unending flow of noobs the veterans have to educate”
Sorry, that post is in the wrong thread.
Then it’s a good thing that I don’t do that. But I have been using this account (I’m Rational Brony) to neutralize the upvotes and downvotes on this thread. But I don’t think I’ve voted twice (i,e, with both accounts) on any single post, so I’m okay, aren’t I? I’m not committing any kind of defection, am I? Does it feel like I am? (The only reason I’m using two accounts is that I’ve lost the password to both of them and they’re on different workstations).
You used a sockpuppet specifically to deceive gwern. If you are surprised that observers interpret that as defection, pay attention to your surprise and learn something. I don’t know why you’re having conversations with yourself, but that is the very origin of the name “sockpuppet.”
That phrasing makes it sound like the purpose was malicious; “deception” seems to imply “defection” in a way that “trickery” or “guile” doesn’t. Despite the negative connotations, I’ll keep using the word you introduced, with the intent of signalling good faith. I’m perfectly comfortable using trickery and guile if the consequence is actually easing communication and decreasing level of hostility between members of this here community; what I did wrong was that I did not think it through and did not execute the deception competently, and so I did a disservice to my cause.
Said cause, I believe, is the furthering of this community’s goals, namely the avoidance of existential risks, which I believed is furthered by promoting cooperation and communication between memebers; if I find it optimal to use harmless sockpuppetry to help people here get along and understand each other better, that’s what I will do. I only wish that I had had the opportunity to offer an example of such an action that didn’t seem so self-serving.
Of course, if I had been competent in executing the deception, I wouldn’t have had to explain anything to anyone, and would have been free to do good without being so inconvenienced; once I’d have ascertained the effectiveness of the method, I would have been free to explain it, and, evidence in hand, encourage others to follow the example I’d had set. Nevertheless, because I believe in the soundness of what I did, and unless I’m persuaded to do otherwise by argument or by karmic force, I shall endeavour to find more evidently altruistic opportunities to demonstrate the goodness of this kind of deception. If you, or any other reader, wish to argue against me doing that rather than simply and effortlessly downvote me into oblivion, I’ll gladly hear them out.
I can’t say I’d be surprised if they did (although there isn’t much evidence that they really did, yet); I wish to believe what is true. That’s why I openly and candidly asked; to measure and probe the result of the experiment, look at the city, rather than merely speculate in a dark room. If some observers see it as defection and I don’t, that means we have different standards for what constitutes defection. It would be in my interest to conform to their standards, depending on their number, but I’d rather try first to convince them of the validity of my own, in which I sincerely believe. The result of this open and frank confrontation would be:
If they can convince me that my standards are invalid, I will change them, and my behaviour accordingly.
If I can convince them that my standards are valid, I will keep behaving as I have until now, and everyone’s standards will be improved.
Either outcome is preferable to the situation where I and them have different standards and I behave to accommodate them out of fear of reprisals rather than out of sincere conviction; that agree-to-disagree situation would be anti-rational. It is also quick and easy, so it might be what ends up happening, but I sincerely don’t wish for it; I’d rather be reasoned into changing my behaviour than persuaded by force.
As for your last point: when it comes to maintaining a conversation with myself, I’m trying to exemplify what I believe is exemplary behaviour in dealing with disagreements; that if one has to point out mistakes, one should do so calmly and politely, that If one has to take criticism, do so graciously and humbly, and that one should not take offence at the mistakes of others, nor should they take offense at others pointing out one’s mistakes.
To sum it up in the briefest terms; sorry if this looked bad, I was honestly trying to do good.
EDIT: After giving it additional throught, I’ve remembered this wonderful piece. Consider the arguing done; I am now convinced that what I attempted to do was ill-advised, and I apologize for not having noticed I was taking the wrong path sooner. I will from now on refrain from attempting dangerous utilitarian acrobatics and will stick to more conventional morality and simpler rules-of-thumb.
Not sure if you meant LW karma, but I will be downvoting every comment made by both accounts until you delete one of them.
Edit: Ritalin has deleted his Rational_Brony account and I have removed downvotes I felt were undeserved.
Did you even read what I wrote earlier?
I don’t know how to delete an account yet, but I suppose it’d be easy enough to go and find out. So it’s going to be force then? You’re not going to attempt to convince me?
Because, I mean, what’s to stop me from complying with the letter of what you’re attempting to coerce me into doing without respecting the spirit of it, by deleting this account too, and trying the same routine again with different accounts (that you don’t know of, that don’t exist yet...)? Both accounts lost, Ritalin and Rational Brony, would be relatively young and poor in karma, and I don’t feel especially attached to either of them. Heck, it would make things more comfortable for me; I’d actually know the password to all my new accounts. Perhaps I’d even bother to link them to emails.
Maybe I’d get caught, maybe I wouldn’t; after all, you’re banking on me learning something from karmic feedback, but, because you haven’t bothered to argue or convince, you have no control over what lesson, precisely, I learn.
Not to mention that I’d have the possibility of using any and all accounts existing future or past to downvote you as much as possible in petty revenge. If I were especially petty, I could invest quite a lot of effort in gaining karma, going as far as compromising my principles and posting the way I’d feel would be most popular, just for the purpose of gaining the power to downvote you as much as possible, going as far as abstaining from downvoting anyone else just for the sake of concentrating it all on you.
,Now, I’m not angry or mad or anything, just a little disappointed. And I solemnly declare that I have no intention to do any of those things (though you only have my word for it). Ethical injunction, remember? At worst, I’d simply not delete either, and create a new account from scratch. Or give up on commenting on this site altogether. I’m just showing you how I can do those things, and how your rash, violent decision, could at worst backfire and at best achieve nothing (which it already kind of does, since I already said I’ve given up on using RB). So how about instead of acting rashly and violently, you actually tried using those nice arguing skills rationalists are alleged to have?
I’m leaving this post public rather than PM it simply as more evidence of how the karma system is rather inadequate because of the lack of communication involved in it, and how easily it can generate illusions of simple and double transparency, ill will, and adverse and unintended reactions. We’d be better off with moderators and clear predefined, agreed-upon rules, rather than have everyone follow their fancy and let the recipient take a guess. People still willing to use the karma system against this account to, I don’t know, show solidarity with Robert, or disapproval of my tone, or dismissal of the problems I’m trying to point out, or whatever, are of course welcome to go ahead, for all the good (or lack thereof) it will do.[shrugs]
Right side of the page > Preferences > Delete
The preponderance of the evidence suggests you’re a troll, and as such I won’t engage in discussion with you. If you delete your sockpuppet, however, this would be substantial evidence against that, and I would reconsider. I downvoted your sockpuppet to a score well below zero, because that will remove any downvoting power it has. I probably should not have blanket downvoted Rational_Brony as much as I did (I think I only gave it around 10 downvotes, and most of those were on comments I would have downvoted regardless), since presumably you would keep that account. Should you actually confine yourself to one account, I will go back through and remove downvotes that I don’t feel are deserved. I downvoted Ritalin for a number of reasons though, primarily because you admit to having manipulated the karma system. Because you have said many times you have no respect for it as a system, it makes me even less likely to trust that you will not abuse it in the future. As good or bad as it is manipulating it makes it worse. My primary motivation was removing that sockpuppet’s ability to abuse the karma system.
I had actually assumed you would keep RB and give up on Ritalin, and if you delete RB, I am happy to go through and reconsider the blanket downvoting of Ritalin that I did, although it would be substantially more work.
So the posters with more clout function a bit like limited moderators, and, if there’s consensus between enough of them, a handle can be banned, with some effort?
Not really. Downvotes don’t add up to a ban unless one of us official mods decide they should. Although enough downvotes do throttle commenting speed.
Thank you, Alicorn. I think the lesswrongwiki could profit from having this sort of “game mechanics” developed in more detail.
I watched about a quarter of the first episode before I had to stop. I find awkwardness- and embarrassment-based comedy deeply uncomfortable, and the show relied too heavily on that.
Rumor has it that Abed of Community is a better geek/autie character but I’ve watched scarcely more of that; this is just what I’ve heard said from fandom.
This was my experience exactly.
He is. He is decidedly different but not in a way that provokes empathetic awkwardness. Come to think of it, the difference is hard to describe. Perhaps it is that BBT seems to be aggressively asserting norms and conveying that the individuals are breaking them and should be ashamed. Whereas Abed is just, well, Abed and he doesn’t care what people think of him and nobody really expects him to.
I find it repellent.
The first I remember really noticing it was on SNL, but it has spread far and wide. I probably have only watched a few minutes of The Big Bang, but it didn’t seem like a show for nerds, but a show about nerds, a Geek Zoo, where you could go to point and laugh at effete nerds.
Along those lines, anyone know of any shows about and for introverts? Where introverts are the central, sympathetic characters in the show?
Sherlock, perhaps?
Ooo, seconding Sherlock! (the BBC one, of course!)
Damn! Only 6 shows so far! I saw two seasons, and figured I had 20 shows to go through.
Yes, great fun. Very different feel than US shows. Hard to imagine any of them as characters in a US show. Too much ruthlessness for an American audience, I think.
Love Moriarty.
Thanks to both of you.
If Sherlock and Moriarty are so “bored” with the challenges presented by their simian neighbors, why don’t they fight Death or engage in some other science project to make themselves useful? If they’re such smarty boys, why don’t they take on the Universe instead of slightly evolved primates?
Hail Science!
Well, Doctor Who is hardly an introvert, but he’s probably the geek to outgeek all geeks, and he’s damn powerful too.
Arrested Development. Michael, pretty much the only ethical, responsible character on the show definitely seems to be at the introverted end of the spectrum.
Community in general and particularly Abed is exponentially better than the Big Bang Theory.
… That comment did not make a lot of mathematical sense, though I understand the gist of it. Perhaps “orders of magintude better” might be more appropriate?
Clearly, what FiftyTwo intended to say is that the difference in quality doubles with each successive episode of the respective shows.
he said “exponential” not “exponential with base 2 and time constant equal to 1.0 per show”.
It could just as easily be something else, like 3 times better per show.
Also, didn’t specify the axis and we are only assuming it’s per show. It could be that “tbbt” and “community” are points on some axis, and quality varies exponentially along it such that community is better than tbbt.
Oh, that makes sense.
Community is fantastic but is held back somewhat by the extremely cliched and sitcommy first couple episodes. It starts doing interesting/awesome stuff at episode 3.
I haven’t seen a more authentic Asperger’s character then Sheldon. I’m also not sure what distinguishes awkwardness-based comedy from ironic situations, so I may be approaching from the wrong angle.
One of my early comments was “People are going to think Sheldon has personality traits that have been exaggerated for comic effect.”, lamenting the fact that I am and know people further down the spectrum yet still fully functional.
From reading things like Reddit, I’ve learned that karma is useful however casual or whatever your conversation is. I don’t care if you want to have an off-topic casual conversation section, but being against karma is dumb
I’m not against karma, but it’s the reason why the largest subreddits have turned into trash.
Some people have reached the exact opposite conclusion from the same evidence; spending time on Reddit. Intelligent people, AFAIK. So not only does your last, categorically-stated statement seem counter-factual, it’s also remarkably rude.
If you think that’s remarkably rude you’re pretty poorly calibrated.
The fact that someone uses a calibration system different than yours does not make theirs “poorer” than yours. Otherwise, what’s to stop me from saying that “if you think it isn’t rude then you’re the one who’s poorly calibrated”?
It does, in a certain useful sense. The truth of how well a belief works is not directly accessible, so all you have is an estimate. If, after taking into account the fact that another person’s belief is different, your beliefs remain different, you should expect their belief to be worse than yours (otherwise, you should just accept their belief). They should sometimes estimate that their belief is better than yours as well, at the same time. In this situation, one of you is wrong about the estimate of whose belief is more accurate, but this is similar to how one of you has a more accurate belief than the other, that is one of you is more wrong about the fact in question that the belief estimates.
Suppose nothing does; even in that case it is not a relevant consideration. (In practice, it is the fact that it’s already known at this point in the conversation that the argument won’t be accepted by the interlocutor without additional justification.)
Well said. Then I suppose, if we want Aumanic about it, that I should ask “define your criteria for evaluating poor-ness of a calibration of rudeness” and “define what you mean by poor in the first place”. Then I suppose we could dissolve the question.
Oh it was definitely rude. I object to the remarkably. Especially considering I removed several far ruder things from that comment before posting it.
That doesn’t make what you said any less liable to be remarked upon. That your first impulse was to be ruder speaks poorly about your impulses, and highly about your ability to control them, but “it could have been worse” doesn’t make what it ended up being any less bad; thinking it does is evidence of a poor calibration method.
By your own standards, you mean?
I think I phrased it in a way that would work by any standards.… Er, haven’t I?
The show overall strikes me as one with good dialogue but bad characterisation and plotting, mainly because they are manipulated to serve the cause of whatever joke is in the moment.
Playing the game treating the characters as real people: They all have severe emotional problems and need professional therapy. Canonically Raj can’t talk to half the human race without alcohol (though apparently this is psyhosomatic) stemming from some weird family issues, Leonard and Penny both have serious self esteem and relationship issues stemming from their parents. Sheldon ironically seems most happy in himself, despite it having severe (and apparently undiagnosed) aspergers or autism.
To be honest I don’t think its a show meriting that much ananlysis in itself, though sociologically its interesting as an example of perception of intellectuals/scientists in wider society. Good discussion here
Thanks for letting me know I never need to watch this show.
Its what my mother would call wallpaper television, its amusing enough to watch while sleepy or doing something else provided you don’t think about it too hard. (Like most sitcoms)
That article made some good points, but on the other hand, I didn’t like some of its implications.
The author mentions that he/she is proud of his dedication to various fandoms, proud of how much he knows about the works he likes, etc. And that’s perfectly fine (if you believe pride is a legitimate emotion here). But then he goes on to imply that people who have more socially acceptable interests are “intellectually inferior.” Simply declaring yourself to be a nerd and describing how you meticulously alphabetize your DVDs and spend your days watching TV and reading sci fi doesn’t mean that you’ve established that you are highly intelligent or intellectual. Conversely, you can’t point out that someone likes socializing and sports and say that they must be unintellectual.
Also, the author was right in that The Big Bang Theory’s humor is based mostly on ridiculing nerdiness—but then, most humor is based on ridiculing something. In the early days of HPMOR, for example, there were shots at “stupid people”—if we are to judge a work of art on not offending anyone, HPMOR is no better than The Big Bang Theory. (After all, nerds can perhaps change their behaviors to avoid being ridiculed, but people of low intelligence cannot magically gain IQ points, so it’s arguably much worse to make fun of stupid people.)
We don’t judge a piece of humor on universal standards of kindness. If we like to think of ourselves as highly intellectual, we will raise our hackles at humor that mocks that. It’s not like we, in turn, refrain from mocking those we perceive to be in the out-group.
My takeaway was less “it is bad to mock my group” as “it is bad to mock a group while simultaneously exploiting them.” HPMOR doesn’t try to get attention or revenue from outgroup members, but the authors argument is that the BBT producers are being immoral/hypocritical by simultaneously mocking a group and marketing themselves to them. And that they are putting up with it because they don’t have any other mainstream media coverage. (Analogously, if some show mocks a stereotypical minority character for doing stereotypical minority things it would be strange for them to sell dolls of that character to the minority group).
Okay, that’s a good point—I guess I had just never thought of BBT as being marketed to geeks very much. It’s on at prime time on CBS, and it has a broad fan base, but I guess the criticism here is that they mock an out-group while pretending that they’re one of them. Thanks for the clarification. :)
And yet they do. For isntance, foreigners are often despicable heels in professional wrestling as a way of appealing to the lowest common deniminator, yet they somehow often end up being national heroes for said foreign nationalities.
And then there’s Barbie… “Maths are hard” indeed.
“but then, most humor is based on ridiculing something” I would contest this.
I don’t think HPMOR was shooting at “stupidity” so much as “irrationality”; rationality is, after all, a sort of martial art that everyone should be able to learn. Quirrell does take shots at “stupid people”, but I think one of the parts of Harry’s coming of age is him discovering that intelligence, as such, is overrated, and that it’s better to be kind than to be sharp.
“It’s not like we, in turn, refrain from mocking those we perceive to be in the out-group.”
… I do. Mocking people is bad. If there’s something wrong with their epistemiological or instrumental rationality, their notions or their choices, you should point it out as honestly and clearly as possible; doing so by mocking them seems counter-productive,
Certainly, few people would mock someone to their face. I agree that mockery is usually harmful and counterproductive, and I’m sorry if I implied that you, personally, have a habit of going around mocking people. I was referring to so-called “nerds” in the collective—I think the stereotype that exists within nerdy circles of nerds being virtuous, put-upon victims of others’ mockery is largely untrue. I saw that reflected in the article, and I was pointing out that in my experience, supposedly intelligent, sensitive “nerds” are no more or less likely to engage in vicious mockery.
Edit: I also don’t think mockery is by definition bad—it goes back to the article on Diseased Thinking. If mocking someone for dangerous or irrational beliefs significantly increases the probability that they’ll abandon those dangerous beliefs (even considering knock-on effects), why should we hold back in order to be more virtuous? Social disapproval in many forms has been a tool to moderate beliefs for tens of thousands of years. Jokes putting down others’ beliefs, habits, customs, and decisions seem to be pretty universal—that’s what I meant when I said “we” didn’t refrain from mocking our out-group. Sorry, I should have phrased it better.
I believe you are right, unfortunate though this fact is.
As for the second part, mocking is a form of violence, and it can be used both by people with healthy beliefs and people with dangerous ones. Saying that we should allow ourselves to mock other people to correct them through negative reinforcement is like a softer way of saying we should allow ourselves to gang up on them on the street and beat the shit out of them, because there’s no other way of getting the truth through their thick skulls.
As a matter of fact, many violent groups preach this exact concept. And when they meet, each one of them believes they are entitled to use violence on the other in the name of what they understand to be the truth. The winners, however, aren’t the ones that have truth on their side, but those who have the biggest sticks or best bodies or better training or lower combat inhibitions or other stuff that has nothing to do with whether they’re right. And there’s no guarrantee that the losers will integrate the winners’ ideology.
The same is true for a duel of mockeries; the winner is the quick and witty one, not the one with the most truth backing them up, and the defeated is more likely to feel resentful and grab onto their position than to try to join the winner under the light of truth.
Mockery is verbal violence. It may be useful or necessary sometimes; to keep the violence simile, you’ve got to shoot the Nazis, there’s just no way around it. But it’s still bad, achieves victory at a terrible price for both you and your victim, and also, let’s be honest, runs the risk of you losing and truth being set back in the public eye because you couldn’t think of a witty comeback in time.
What I believe should be done when faced with the ridiculous is to gently point it out. Put the facts together, in such a way that the question is obvious. O’Reily’s opponent during the “You can’t explain that” episode did an exemplary job of that I think.
Also, sorry for misunderstanding.
I really don’t think this is a fair comparison—it’s true that a “battle of wits” results in the wittiest person winning, not necessarily the most correct. But then again, any contest involving verbal argument tends to go to those who are best at verbal argument—why is mockery a special case just because it tends to hurt people’s feelings more than other strategies? People who come up with the most evocative metaphors, the more pertinent examples, the most confident supporters, they all tend to win arguments regardless of how true their beliefs are. Yet you can’t go after every single argumentative strategy just because argument winning tends to correlate more with effective rhetorical strategies than with truth. You can only try to help those who have true beliefs better publicize them.
Even if we were to put emotional and physical harm on the same scale and say that mockery is a form of violence, the fact remains that physical violence contributes to a norm of people beating each other up (which could lead to political instability, civil unrest, a disintegration of the rule of law, etc) while mocking people contributes to a norm of people exchanging cutting retorts (which is, in my opinion, much less harmful). Therefore, you might have the ethical injunction to never, ever respond to a bad argument with a bullet but might permit yourself to make your verbal counterargument more punchy.
It’s true that if the truth of a belief were sufficient to spread it, it wouldn’t matter if one were nice or polite. However, I believe that, as a long term strategy, mockery is not the best way to spread beliefs (though it might be a good way to destroy them), because no matter how right one happens to be, people don’t want to listen to a dismissive douchebag. Satire, sarcasm and irony are therefore weapons to be wielded with rather more care and precision than I have seen most of their users display.
It certainly is a matter of orders of magnitude. There’s a point from which quantitative changes take a qualitative character, and causing death is one such point.
I’m definitely in agreement there; I was just under the impression that you thought they should hands-down never be used (as I would say for physical violence in a verbal argument.) Sorry for the misunderstanding.
I think it’s plausible to make an ethical injunction to abstain from using them. It’s not like they’re required or necessary to convey one’s message, and I estimate that on the whole and between one thing and another they do more harm than good, on average.
Most people have severe emotional problems and need professional therapy. Undiagnosed and untreated ASD do not necessarily require professional treatment.
True, but you’d think he could benefit from some intervention that meant he didn’t have major distress periodically when someone breaks one of his rules.
If the intervention had that effect, it would be a benefit. Anecdotal evidence suggests that professional treatment is roughly as distressing as the effects it attempts to prevent, and is largely ineffective.
That article was indeed brilliant. However;
I think this is no longer true. The show has gone out of his way to expose Penny as a jerkass, a bully, a freeloader, a professional failure, and an otherwise despicable, pathetic person. Leonard, however, remains incredibly nice and virtuous, and you get a stronger and stronger feeling that he could be doing much better.
I agree, though Leonard has done some bad things as well. In general I just don’t see what is supposed to be pulling them together, they seem to both forget that there is an entire city of other people available. A charitable interpretation would be that they’re both emotionally crippled in similar ways so pulled together.
Yes, Leonard did some bad stuff; he’s a good guy, but not an inhuman saint. I think your interpretations is certainly interesting; it’s true that Penny is a damaged person, too.
The article isn’t saying Leonard isn’t the better/more moral person, it’s saying that he’s the underdog. That much is obvious. Ask yourself which is more likely, that someone like Leonard rejects someone like Penny, or that someone like Penny rejects someone like Leonard (short, socially awkward, cloying, and beset with infantile obsessions like comic books and video games).
.
If he had known Penny better and if, by the time he’d known her, he wasn’t already so invested emotionally that he’s blind to her faults, he would never have considered her as a viable partner in the first place
Unfortunately, many terrible love stories follow a similar pattern; initiated on insufficient information, and by the time information is found out such that, had it been known previously, the relationship wouldn’t have been initiated in the first place, a biochemical version of the Sunken Cost Fallacy sets in.
“Influence, Science And Practice” is one hell of a book.
I think that may be your own interpretation of the show depicting a few flaws.
I have only watched a few episodes (something about the show irritates me intensely), but I had the impression that Penny was your stock normal character / foil / straight (wo)man and indeed a bit out of Leonard’s league. Browsing the Wikipedia and BBT entries for Penny, they give me the same impression—a basically good normal character who in several respects is superior to ‘the boys’. And certainly not an all-around ‘despicable, pathetic person’.
You obviously didn’t get to the part where she spoke of her past as a bully in high school (and I mean the seriously violent kind of bully, not just the steal your lunch money and make fun of you kind) and where she stole clothes from one of those donation containers.
Or the part where she chides Leonard for selflessly and spontaneously helping her with college, alleging that she wants to be her own person and win on her own merit,; she gets a B minus for her work… only it turns out she had Amy and Bernadette do that for her.
In the same episode, she justifies her exploitation of Leonard as “that’s his job as my boyfriend, right? to make me happy”; her friends ask “what is your job then, as girlfriend?” “to let him make me happy”, she replies without missing a beat.
Let’s just say that there’s been character development. She’s not out of Leo’s league: it’s the opposite, he just fails to realize it.
With a tiny adjustment, this is actually a quite standard, old fashioned view of a heterosexual relationship, which largely resonates with me.
I’d exchange “make her happy” for “help and encourage her in her pursuit of happiness”, but other that, I’d say it’s about right. I remember reading that Men are from Mars marriage counselor author years ago, and was rather ideologically offended that he basically painted a man’s job as taking care of a woman, and a woman’s job to let him. But that seems about right to me these days.
I did some brief internet searches for traditional marriage vows, just as a point of reference to a difference in gender roles, and was surprised that the first half dozen were gender symmetric. WIkpedia had a section on the vows in the Book of Common Prayer, and how they’ve changed over time.
I for one went through the exact opposite trajectory.
A couple is an association of equals whose goal is to satisfy each of the parties’ values through love.
My values say that women are not children to be catered to or made happy by men. They are our equals, and we help and cater to each other, and we both let each other do that.
If, however, what satisfies your values is to be the altruistic party in the relationship, and the girl be the egoistic party, I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong; suit yourself.
In both cases, you’re applying normative standards to what you think the world should be like. I’ve found that relationships got easier, and life got better, when I started to focus on what the world is, instead of what I thought it should be.
When were relationships working? When was I happy? When was my partner happy?
You like the word “equal”, but I don’t see it applying to any discernible metric. Certainly no actual observation. When I started to actually pay attention to what was happening, I noticed that men and women are in general different in their wants, needs, desires, and satisfactions.
I once had much the same attitude that you had. Life got easier when I stopped acting on how life should be, and started acting more on how life is. I still have a ways to go in that regard.
It is amusing to see you call me “the altruistic party”. I’m actually ideologically egoistic, and a fan of Stirner. Selfishness isn’t about not making others happy, it’s about doing what you want. That’s what it is to “suit yourself”.
Well, then we’d be getting into a debate of Fake Altruism And Fake Selfishness And Fake Morality.
Thing is, if women from a specific generation or cultural backgound have been raised in such a way that their values are satisfied by a couple of assymetric power and function, and you think being with girls like that would satisfy your values, go ahead.
I for one find that “happiness” is far less important than “satisfying my values”. Since Celestia isn’t there to do that for me, I’ll need to work harder to at least get an approximation. But, yeah, duty and justice figure higher in my totem pole than joy or happiness or even peace, and it’s not a choice I’ve made.
As for how the world is, I haven’t really figured it out yet; people are mostly an enigma to me (a deliberate one, since most people are far less willing/driven to talk or even think about their goals, motivations, desires, and feelings than I am, which causes me no end of frustration and grief). And studying PUA and other “hard-nosed”, “pragmatic” sources is helping, but not much, and is costing me a lot in idealism, and motivation.
As for me, satisfying me is more important than satisfying my values. As I said, I’m ideologically egoistic.
Oh yes it is. To the extent that you’re a slave to duty, it’s because you choose to be one.
That’s the thing. People are quite predictable. In fact, you probably already know the predictive models, but are choosing instead to use your normative models to predict the world, or just as bad and much the same, modeling other people as if they have the same motivations that you do.
I haven’t delved much into the PUA literature, but my impression is that it focuses more on acquiring and controlling women than enjoying them once you have them. I don’t think that’s pragmatism, I think it’s missing the point.
If it’s costing you some idealism, it’s doing something useful. But if it’s costing you motivation, that’s not so helpful.
Would it really be so horrible if women are not what you think they “should” be? Would they be so horrible? A lot of things are not what you think women should be. Is a chair horrible for not being your ideal woman? A car? A spoon? You find uses for all of them, don’t you?
Look at the unwomen for what they are—are they so horrible? Entirely lacking in charm, beauty, warmth, intelligence? Maybe women don’t exist, and only unwomen do. What then? Time to throw yourself off a bridge?
The world is a wonderful place, and unwomen are among the most wonderful things in it. The world is a wonderful place, once you decide to live in it, instead of bemoaning that it isn’t what you think it should be.
… This sentence confuses me. Does the expression “I don’t know any other way to live” sound familiar to you?
I’ve tried that. It just gets me depressed, and doesn’t improve my predictive abilities at all; rather than make wrong predictions, I find myself unable to make any predictions.
It’s for this kind of insight that I frequent this community. Well-said. I knew something was bugging me. In trope terms, tt’s basically like wanting to take over the world, and not knowing what to do with it once you actually do win.
I can’t follow your chain of reasoning… It’s not a matter of them being women, that’s secondary to my needs. I wouldn’t mind a guy if being together with that person helped me fulfil my values (which don’t include “your romantic partner has to be of the opposite sex”).
How can the world be wonderful if it isn’t what I think it ought to be? The only way around that is to redefine my understanding of what it ought to be.
Otherwise, thank you for your post, this is being very interesting for me.
Should it? If this is an allusion, it’s going right past me.
I wasn’t trying to get at your sexual orientation with “unwomen”. That was meant to refer to “women who are unlike your ideal of what a woman and partner should be”. I think unwomen can be perfectly wonderful, and in fact, more wonderful than your ideal women. And even if they weren’t, unwomen have the merit of actually existing.
That’s half of it. There was something additional that I was trying to get at. They have a whiff of incompetent egoists about them. They seem to look for powers against and over women, instead of powers for what they want with women. It’s just a game they’re playing against women, and they “win” when they get control. But as you say, they don’t give a lot of thought to what to do with a woman once they have control.
That one really makes laugh. I mean that in a friendly way. You have an ideal in your mind that doesn’t correspond to the world, so you conclude that the world isn’t wonderful. You’ve set yourself a very tough standard for you being happy with the world. Your oughts don’t seem very conducive to your happiness. Why don’t you set them aside for a second, look at the world, and see what it has going for it in an unought way?
There are other ways. For my part, I don’t think that the world has a duty to be anything, and it sure as hell doesn’t have a duty to correspond to my moral preferences.
I mean whether you’re familiar with the feeling, the state-of-mind that would generate such a phrase, not the phrase itself.
I thought you didn’t mean my sexual orientation, I just wished to point out that “being a woman” was far less important than “being a sapient being with whom I can satisfy my values”. I honestly don’t care if it’s a woman, a man, a robot, an alien, or an uplifted banana (well, unless they’re very unpleasant in to the senses).
I also contest the notion that my “ideal” women don’t exist. I happen to know at least three such women, possibly seven (eleven people if I count the males), they just happened to be taken or live very, very far away from me at the moment, or unable or unwilling to be in a romantic relationship with someone of the same sex, chaste though it may be.
That’s the Dark Side of the Arts you’re describing. Non LW could also be under the impression that being a “rationalist” is about winning arguments and uplifting oneself by telling other people how stupid they are. They’d be mistaken. I hope. Doesn’t stop some posters here to act like insufferable smug pricks, including our boss here (the fact that that piece is funny, for a certain value of funny, is beside the point XD).
Oh, but I do that all the time. I’m not too unhappy with the material world, as such. It’s people that confuse me, including myself. What I approve of, what I want, and what I like, don’t correlate very well, and it creates a lot of conflict and suffering, and I don’t know how to deal with that.
The WP article did mention the bullying but immediately excuses it as she didn’t understand the suffering she caused and later tried to make amends. (I don’t recall either article mentioning your other 2 examples.) This is what I mean by your perspective perhaps differing from everyone else’s and the creators’.
Everyone has a perspective that differs somewhat from everyone else’s. Perspectives are taken from points that exist in a continuous, multi-demensional space, with directions and optics that are also points in vast spaces. There simply isn’t a perspective that is equal to another.
But, see, it doesn’t matter how different any perspective is from another, what matters is the evidence available, and whether your understanding can be made understandable to others based on that evidence. This perspective is known as “Death of the Author”, check it out.
As for Penny, that she didn’t understand the suffering she caused is what’s the most damning to me. She didn’t even realize her victims were human. They were in the outgroup, and so they somehow didn’t count. And that is simply a particular instance of the more general problem with TBBT.
As for her making amends, she only did so reluctantly and because her friends (with whom she has more of a servant-master relationship, and who had been bullied when they were younger) urged her to. As far as I could tell from reading her non-verbal language, she didn’t actually feel the slightest remorse, shame, or guilt. She’s stuck between the pre-conventional and conventional stages of moral development, and never made it to post-conventional.
So in other words you’re bloviating at us: you adopt a relativistic point of view that there is neither right nor wrong and all that matters is what you can persuade others of? “Your denial of the importance of objectivity amounts to announcing your intention to lie to us. No-one should believe anything you say.”
Then I have no interest in what you have to say, and stand by my summary of the general consensus as represented on Wikipedia and the Big Bang wiki: Penny is not a monster in the eyes of the audience and creators, nor is she intended to be.
That isn’t exactly true. Instead people should expect what he says to be true if the incentives (including risks of punishment) are such that it is in his best interest to tell the truth. Which, as it turns out, is approximately the rule of thumb I use when listening to any human. That most often I expect the falsehoods to be the result of instinctive hypocrisy than self aware intent to deceive is not significant.
I find that sort of mentality to be amazingly depressing. If the world were like that, why get out of the bed in the morning?
Because I can’t cook bacon from in bed. Bacon is delicious!
There is no rule “If I understand something about the world that differs from a simple ideology then I must make myself sad”. So I don’t do that.
As a matter of fact, that’s wrong when it comes to knowledge about humans; your expectations about a human (or rather, the signalling thereof) will change how said human behaves. Your beliefs (or rather, others’ perception thereof) change reality. If you expect someone to be good, they may well feel compelled to meet that expectation. If you expect people to respect you and find you atractive, all alse being equal, they will be more likely to find you respectable and attractive.
And if you expect people to be selfish assholes whose kindness is nothing more than a complex deception of themselves and each other, and they pick up on that, you’re more likely to get a treatment that fits that description.
It seems you have “detected” relativism and reacted strongly. However, I do not think Rational_Brony is pushing relativism. Instead, I think he is trying to rule as inadmissible the out-of-show statements by the creators of the show. That is not compatible with thoroughgoing relativism.
Either way, I think it’s stupid and leads to low-quality discussions, ideas, and conclusions. If it’s relativism, the discussions are meaningless, and if it’s refusal to draw on out-of-universe material, it’s shooting oneself in the kneecaps with a shotgun.
Aren’t you a fan of hyperboles? I don’t think he takes creator feedback as automatically inadmissible, so much that he treats it as unreliable; they may lie, they may be instinctively hypocritical, they may not have thought about the harm they did (like Penny), or they may be mistaken on their own work because it was informed by subconscious or interiorized compulsions that they don’t know of.
Privilege and sexism are a common source of that sort of dissonance; a work by a sexist will apply unfair double standards to women without the author, who is suffering from privilege blindness, noticing the insanity of what they are saying.
I don’t see anything in RationalBrony’s comments which adopts anything like your suggestion of taking out-of-universe material as an unreliable source and cross-checking it against other materials, previous statements etc. - as makes sense, since this is perfectly ordinary pre-Death-of-the-Author literary criticism & scholarship! (This is, in fact, the exact method I aspire to in my own Evangelion research & criticism.) Let me quote from the Wikipedia article on “Death of the Author”:
I don’t know how much plainer a denial of your suggestion one could get! Hyperbole nothing.
So RationalBrony is either so incompetent that he thinks the exact opposite of the actual view he is claiming to espouse, or you’re simply being way too charitable and forcing a sensible view onto someone who is not.
I suspect a case of semantic drift and cultural myopia to what happens outside his cultural environment (he did link to the TV Tropes article on DotA rather than the Wikipedian one). After all, we do call ourselves rationalists, yet, unless we link someone to lesswrong or engage in a lengthy explanation, people would call us out on “thinking the (near) exact opposite of the view we are claiming to espouse”.
On TV Tropes, when someone says “death of the author”, they mean “the author’s opinion and his precendents are an optional source of information, but can be disregarded”. When they say “deconstruction”, they mean “the work experiments with tropes by exploring (often unpleasant) implications that their predecessors seem to have (perhaps wilfully) ignored, often in dramatic and interesting fashions”, wich is quite different from the accepted academic meaning of the expression (insofar as it can be said that there is one; “postmodernism” and postomdern-derived terms seem to suffer from the same kind of definition fuzziness, which I suppose is kind of the point of post-modernism).
Either way, I don’t think “competence” is the issue here, and I suggest you calm down and sheathe your sword.
As for being excessively charitable, that’s my MO; often times people will make mistakes, and, once found out, will kiling to those mistakes and fight to justify them (not merely explain them, like I tried to do earlier with RB’s, but defend them as not-mistakes) if they feel their ego is being attacked. This is counterproductive. I’d rather give them the benefit of the doubt, and as much room as possible to acknowledge a mistake or defuse a misunderstanding without that feeling like the loss of a battle of egoes.
That, and, besides my love of truth, there’s a selfish motive; when you attack someone mistakenly, and your accusations turn out to be wrong, you’ll look… unwholesome, perhaps ridiculous, definitely rash (and in fact, will be put in exactly the humiliation-or-suicide situation I described earlier). I like to minimize the chances of getting stuck in such an uncomfortable position.
As an allegory, think of it as that one time in Les Miserables where Jean Valjean stole the bishop’s silverware, and, when the police arrested Jean and brought him before the bishop, the latter claimed the utterly unbelievable claim that he’d given Jean the silverware as a gift. How do you think Jean reacted to that?
Another parable would be that of the prodigal son; give people a line of retreat, and a reward for taking it.
People make mistakes. We all do. I think we can afford to be generous to each other. For instance, if we were unforgiving of irrationality in the people around us, when rationality is so rare in the world, wouldn’t we be in a perpetual state of anger, outrage, and disappointment? Wouldn’t we madden into misanthropy? I for one prefer to laugh heartily; I always think to myself “I can’t believe I used to fall for that” or “I could have fallen for that, in his or her circumstances!”.
I suggest that you confess to using a sockpuppet.
I confess to using a sockpuppet. You didn’t suggest that I give an explanation, and I don’t know if you’re curious, but since it’s the first time I do this (my inexperience must seem evident; I’m sure there’s many easily-avoidable mistakes that I didn’t notice making), I’ll give it anyway; I’m interested in feedback on whether it was a good idea.
My accounts aren’t linked to a mail address, and I’ve lost the password to both of them, so I use each one of them in the workstations they were created in. The plan was to keep it up until I lose the cookies, I suppose.
At first I thought it would be morally sketchy to support one account’s words with the other, but then I felt curious about the possibility of bypassing bias through them.
gwern seemed to have percipitously decided that RB was a relativist, and therefore a liar and an idiot, and seemed primed in that direction in a way that made it very hard for RB to disprove it.
I thought maybe Ritalin could come from the side and, not having been labeled yet by gwern, would be able to calm him down and explain to him RB’s position, thus defusing the conflict and reestablishing niceness and good cheer.
I understand that sockpuppets are bad if you’re trying to make your opponent feel outnumbered, as a swarming tactic of aggression. In a karmic system they’re also bad if you use them to tilt the votes in your favor. It’s also bad if you use the sockpuppet to build a strawman against your postition so that you can fake defeating them. I don’t think I did any of these things. Is my use of a sockpuppet (or rather, my speaking through two accounts) still bad, per se? And if it isn’t, should I stop doing it because it resembles something bad?
Also, amusing fact; because of a difference in spell-checkers, this account uses American English spelling and the other uses British English :P
And ‘Ritalin’ didn’t do anything to help that, so maybe you should consider the hypothesis you really are being extremely relativistic in your interpretation of fiction.
Define relativism and extremely relativistic.
It’s true, Ritalin and I are the same person. Sorry if it came off as deceptive. Still, when I say “be nice”, I don’t just mean “be nice to me”, I mean “be nice to all”.
I am not, to my knowledge, denying the importance of objectivity, and you’re providing a very good example of reaching a different conclusion from the author on what meaning can be derived from the author’s product.
The thing is, Penny’s behavior is the available evidence. The majority of the viewers may see it and evaluate it in roughly similar ways. The authors may or may not agree with them; they have their own perspective; for example, Alan Moore understood Rorschach as a psychopath, but a large part of the leadership finds him admirable. It’s not a case of one being wrong and the other being right, it’s a case of them using different criteria in distinguishing information from noise, and giving different weights and values to different evidence. What any single individual can do is explain what evidence and what methods they used to reach their conclusions, and leave it to others to see whether their selection of evidence and interpretation thereof is defensible.
Works of fiction are not natural phenomena; they are people’s behaviour. Completely different explanations and evaluations can make sense of the evidence just as well as each other, and have just as much predictive power as each other. Is Sheldon autistic? Is he irrational and conducting his science and his life following the thought patterns of a religious fundamentalist because he was raised in an environment of religious fundamentalists? Is he a selfish, petty, mean, malevolent prick full of hubris because he is insecure about his high intelligence and his worth as a human being? Is he unaware of the harmfulness of his actions, or is he willfully oblivious? Is more than one of these explanations true at the same time? Which of them are true at what time?
You can’t really tell. All you can say is; “it seems reasonable to pose this hypothesis in the light of the available evidence”. Whether this hypothesis is commonly adhered to by the fandom, or even the creators, is rather irrelevant. I say even the creators because the fun thing about moral issues is that they aren’t noticed until someone points them out; you can write a bad person, but, if you share the monster’s values, you won’t notice that, and you won’t intend to write them as a monster. It comes to the difference of values between you and me.
Once I’ve stated my case, what can be said objectively is that my interpretation of evidence and my evaluation of the caracter is or isn’t valid according to the evidence I’ve claimed to have noticed and the value system I’ve claimed to have used.
I never said Penny was an inhumane monster. I’m just saying she’s utterly mediocre morally as well as in every other sense. The sort of person that would have gone all the way in Milgram’s experiment; she’s only part of the worse two-thirds of humanity. That hardly makes her a monster. At least, not more of a monster than most people. The sort of person that does evil not because she’s got more cruel compulsions than average, or because she deliberately ignores others’ feelings, but because she doesn’t think to think about what she’s doing and what motivates it and doesn’t think to think about how others feel.
Unfortunately, save for Leonard (and to a lesser extent Wolowitz, Bernadette, and Amy), this is a problem that affects the entire cast, and probably the cast of any black comedy; it’s called Comedic Sociopathy. Check it out.
No, seriously, do it.
Short answer; please read this article so you can update your priors and learn more about mine (you seem to confuse my position with the more absurd forms of post-modernism, which should confuse you because why would someone with those beliefs want to have anything to do with a fiercely modernist community such as Lesswrong). It’s a well-written, fun article, and I think you’d enjoy it. Please have a look.
Couldn’t you have linked to that in the first place?
Yes, I should have. There seems to have been an illusion of transparency going on, and I could have averted it if I hadn’t been so myopic, as you said. Sorry.
Why doesn’t it matter? The article you linked doesn’t it seem to explain this aside from asserting that “Books are meant to be read, not written.” Barthes himself appears to have thought the point of focusing on the reader’s (or, in this case, viewer’s) reaction rather than the author’s intent was to promote ideological goals which I do not share—“to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.” While God is not exactly popular on LessWrong and opinions on the law vary, science and reason are surely things we care about. Why endorse a theory of criticism whose purpose is to reject them?
Genetic Fallacy; it’s not because something was born for bad reasons that the thing is bad itself. That, and the statement seems more like a hyperbolic, intellectual-hipster version of “against authority”. Seeing as we know that scientists treating their trade socially and irrationally rather than epistemologically and rationally, and using “reason” the way the classic-version “rationalists” (such as Descartes) did as a way of telling the world “I’m right, you’re all wrong, shut up and listen”, his mistake can seem more understandable.
As an amateur writer, keeping this notion in mind, that, whatever I intended to do, the reader will interpret my work from the evidence it provides, and that, if they are morally advanced enough, than they may accurately judge me (or, technically, “the narration”) as well as the characters and events, in ways I couldn’t have foreseen, has taught me to be very prudent in the way I present things.
Show Don’t Tell goes along the same lines; instead of telling the reader that character X is a good person or that place Y is scary, you provide them evidence from which they are free to deduce that character X is good or place Y is scray. Even then, the way you select the evidence to present may well lead them to say “the narration is trying very hard to make character X look like a good person, but in fact they’re not that good, because the implications of their actions are X, Y, Z”.
For example, a “no Endor Holocaust” situation; if the film hadn’t shown the party at Endor, the viewer might have been in his right to understand that the planet and its inhabitants were killed in the Death Star’s explosion, and judged the protagonists for it.
Or, the way “300” selects the facts that it shows, tells a lot about the values and political leanings of the writers, even though they swear and insist that they’re just writing entertainment.
BBT is a lousy show and it fails to depict high-intelligence nerds accurately. I think this is because of the common misconception that all nerds are smart. In reality, nerds seem to have about the same distribution of intelligence as non-nerd people.
The misconception that nerds are especially smart makes people miss the distinction between high intelligence and average intelligence nerds. Average intelligence nerds are much more common, and they really do tend to obsess over childish content like comic books, so that has been the general impression of nerds overall. In my experience, nerds of very high intelligence (like the BBT’s characters supposedly) would be more likely to care about rare art movies, Esperanto, or Go, not Star Wars or comic books.
Define nerd.
Aspergery.
Define aspergery.
You are a troll.
Unwarranted troll accusations can easily backfire. I’m simply asking you to taboo your words. Asking you to define the concepts you use precisely so as to minimize the chance of misunderstanding is not a form of trolling by any of the standard definitions of the term. Refusing to define them, however, can be said to be intellectually lazy at best.
In the spirit of cooperation (and a show of good faith), you might try adding guesses as to what the other person might mean, that it might be easier to see what you are confused about.
I honestly don’t know what knb means by aspergery. I’ve never met anyone who was diagonsed with aspergers. I find the fictional examples I’ve been told “looked like aspergers” to be vague and not really good evidence to extrapolate from, being very different from each other. I also don’t have a clear idea of what they mean by “nerd”.
On TVTropes, we define “geek” as someone with specialized interests, and “nerd” as someone with poor social skills. A nerd who isn’t a even a geek is Napoleon Dynamite. A geek who isn’t a nerd is Steve Jobs (or president Bartlet from The West Wing). But I hear that our definition is not universal, and that there’s a fair share of controversy.
I think I’m justified in asking knb to specify what he means by those words, given that there seems to be a lack of consensus or a vague consensus, if only for the purpose of this discussion.
Yes, I don’t know that I’d call it trollish behavior, but I also don’t appreciate comments that give you nothing to work with.
Define this. Taboo that. Stating a request in the form of a command is rather irritating, particularly when it’s a request for effort while you’re showing none yourself, and doing nothing to reduce the effort required.
Behaviour not confined to fiction..
I have only watched a handful of episodes, at the behest of my Chinese friends. (I had never heard of it before they introduced it to me. Apparently, a large number of Chinese people watch it.)
Throw in emotional suppression and lip service to rationality, and you have a recipe for Hollywood rationality.
I agree. Sheldon seems to be the kind of character that perpetuates the myth: “People who are extremely intelligent and/or rational are unfeeling, boring, and don’t understand social norms.” Which is funny considering Sheldon seems to act unreasonably fairly frequently.
Sheldon is not unfeeling so much as callous; he feels very much when it comes to him. He’s also hardly boring.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen either of them suppress emotion, ever. They’re rather more emotional and expressive than the average TV-show character, to say the least.
Also, again, Sheldon does have some basis in real people who use their immense intelligence to justify themselves and make themselves out to be right all the time.
True, they don’t seem to suppress their emotions.
I think the show is decent, but Sheldon’s character just isn’t funny. If they put less focus on him, I’d probably watch it more.
Sheldon has been the focus of much less attention as seasons advanced. Wolowitz in particular got a truly wonderful astronaut arc, and Leo’s romantic mishaps were rather interesting to watch. He’s such a good guy.
I feel that the Big Bang Theory is just another name for “Sheldon Says the Darnedest Things”.
What if the upvoted comment is mine (e.g. this)? :-)
Then trust in the good faith of your fellow lwers.
Basically: Sitcom comedy, because of its insular nature, requires most of the problems to be caused by the characters on the show. People who are rational/smart tend to cause few problems for themselves and their friends. This means that the characters while ostensibly intelligent need to functionally be a lot less clever than they are purported to be. This is why “smart” characters work somewhat better in things like Sherlock or House (though House still has the problem of the difference between how he uses his intellect on outsiders and how he uses it in his own life, for much the same reasons)
Hm. The West Wing had some truly wonderful examples of people being rational, smart, and efficient… and they had to be in order to solve the innumerable conflicts that came to them. Contrast with The Thick Of It, where the incompetent characters are the very image of Robin Hanson’s model of humanity while the competent ones (or rather competent one) are moved more by loyalty to an institution (which doesn’t reciprocate) than to the actual service of the public.
Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister were intermediate examples. Sir Humphrey is very intelligent. He’s also very arrogant because of his intelligence and culture, and completely heartless besides, utterly free of the burden of a consciousness. This can make him ruthlessly efficient at times, and at times a complete idiot, in fairly realistic and understandable ways. Bernard is very cultured, but is amazingly naive and tends to focus on small details to the point of pedancy. Jim Hacker, the titular Minister, is a man of average intelligence and average morality who struggles to survive as a politician (and who at least tries to do the right thing, or his limited understanding of it). The results speak for themselves.
In both TWW and YM/YPM, I find myself laughing with the characters more often than at them. If there’s laughter “at”, it’s at the struggles they’re facing and how sympathetic their difficulties with them are.
Forgive me (I haven’t watched the show), but isn’t it a sitcom? There are obvious reasons for real people to want to make themselves more rational… not so much for screenwriters to want to make their characters more rational. Comedies are neither about showcasing characters to serve as models for good thinking, nor about making the characters win more, or spreading the message that they won because of their rationality; they’re about making people laugh.
As I understand the show, its humor relies on scientific / “nerdy” mindsets, habits and quirks (mis)applied to everyday life; the point is that even smart people can be stupid in some ways or not understand very basic things. If the characters stopped making their silly mistakes, used better cognitive algorithms and won more in various aspects of their lives, the show would be way less funny.
I think Methods of Rationality proves handily that you can be rationalistic and still be utterly hilarious, and also make spectacular screwups. So sharp you’ll cut yourself. Too clever by half. These idoms do have a basis in reality.
A basis in reality, but not in rationality. The eighth virtue is humility.
There’s an ever so slight difference between being deliberately arrogant, and making an innocent mistake when calculating the soundness of your plans. Plans which you’ve dared to elaborate because you know yourself to be capable of elaborating them, based on previous evidence.
The smartest people make the hugest mistakes. To use a physical metaphor, only a weight lifter could inflict themselves this kind of horrible injury, but that’s because they’re amazingly strong in the first place.
I don’t know if I’m getting my point acorss.
I don’t think Einstein made the (arguable) mistake of telling the President about nukes because he was being arrogant.
I think that if your argument is “because Harry screws up spectacularly, spectacular screwups are part of high rationality,” you may not be reading MoR correctly.
Yes, power amplifies the effect of decisions. If you control for power, then one would hope intelligence would decrease the hugeness of mistakes (in distribution, at least).
I disagree with your political example, but do not see a reason to argue it here.
Er, not quite. I’m saing that learning from spectacular screwups is part of rationality (in the same way that getting your arm twisted in two isn’t part of the discipline of weight lifting), and that aspiring rationalsits are bound to make those in the process of learning to properly calibrate for risks. To use another metaphor, falling part of learning to walk, but not part of walking.
However, if you’re doing prakour, which is like super-duper-awesome-optimized-walking, you’re bound to get an Epic Fail every now and then. You shouldn’t, but, as a matter of fact, you do, and it’s funny because you’ve attempted something amazing and failed amazingly. If you hadn’t attempted something amazing, your failure would have been much smaller, and much less interesting and amusing.
Well, yes, the relative amount of mistakes VS successes would be smaller, but the absolute load of mistakes would be greater. There’s only one way to never make mistakes, and it’s to never leave one’s comfort zone, which I feel is not how one should lead one’s life, if one wants to grow.
Fair enough. That it’s arguable doesn’t mean we have to actually argue about it.
That is one of the many ways of doing it. I see no reason for assuming it should be the only one, or that there’s something broken, to be fixed, in media creations who try to achieve humor in a different way.
“Look! That one guy can write a super-rational character, and have him fail at many things, and make it all funny! Why isn’t this other randomly selected writer doing it similarly?” This is my interpretation of your line of reasoning. See what’s wrong with it?
Nope. One form of humor takes more work and brings up more interesting results than the other, which is lazy, cheap, mean, and cruel. I believe the former to be superior to the latter, and thus advocate for it.
These properties—“interesting”, “lazy”, “cheap”, “mean”, “cruel”—they look like objective properties assigned to actual things, but the only actual information you’re giving me here is that you have generally positive feelings about one of them and generally negative feelings about the other. So here’s a random consumer, you, that wants all fictional media of the type to be homogeneous on the exact content-related qualities that make him prefer one example of such media to the other.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with having preferences, and acting on them, but you’re neither the only, nor the most important consumer on the market. You can’t legitimately argue that everybody who doesn’t share your preferences for LW-style rationalist characters should not be catered to.
Oh, and by the way, all else being equal, the fact that something takes more work than the alternatives has never an argument in favor of that something.
Except I’m not doing that. My preferences are simply one route among many away from the way things are done in TBBT. I advocate against this type of comedy. And not on the grounds of taste; on the grounds of morality. Humour that is based on mocking and deriding and ridiculing, on objectification and dehumanization, is wrong and evil, because it makes us comfortable with hatred, because it takes joy in the pain of others, ,because it’s about raising yourself by lowering those around you, because it is a form of vicarious violence and cruelty. It is even worse if it’s in the service of aggressive mediocrity and anit-intellectualism.
If you need to express it in terms of existential threat, I’d say that at the end of that path lays a paperclip-maximized Earth. But that’s only the final stop in an utterly awful trajectory.
Problem is, all else is seldom equal; if you achieve a result of the same quality with much more work, that makes you inefficient, and perhaps even an idiot. Usually, more effort correlates with either more quality, more quantity, or both, and something that takes more skill and competence to achieve is more highly valued than something that doesn’t. It’s a heuristic—sometimes it fails, but it tends to give good results quickly.
As for the adjecives you listed, I’ll agree that “interesting” simply means “interests me and those like me”, and is thus subjective (it becomes objective when you make a survey of how many people turn out to be “interested”). “Lazy” is a value judgment; it means I evaluate that the creators have done less effort than they could have. Depending on the art form, there are objective criteria for determining that. “Mean” and “cruel” are perfectly objective; from someone’s behaviour and the available circumstantial evidence, you extrapolate whether they “take joy in inflicting pain”; You can be right or wrong in your extrapolation, you can misinterpret the evidence, but the statement is objective.
And the evidence is damning. This show’s creators make fun of nerds for being nerds. It systematically paints them as people to look down upon, either because they’re being pitiful or because they’re being despicable. It invites us to laugh at their misfortunes and their miseries and possibly their mental illnesses. If you have a moral code that emphasizes empathy, understanding, love, and tolerance, and rejects cruelty, sadism, and contempt, you will find this show wrong. If you don’t, then we don’t share the same morality, and it becomes an entirely different discussion.
Methinks you’re focusing too much of your energy against something that is really not all that bad. If your real issue with the show is that it doesn’t portray your pet group in as favorable a light that you think it deserves, it might serve your interest more to attack a target that is actually at the root of the problem. Like the ubiquity of promotion of values along the lines of “money, sex and status”, with absolutely no thought given to intelligence and personal development, for example. Or internet bullying and hatefests. You know, pick your battles.
The way I understand it, the show is not aimed at the general audience (because it would leave them scratching their heads at all the various references), nor at people with a serious scientific background (because they can do better than TBBT), but rather at pop science enthusiasts, who are supposed to get group identification points from understanding the concepts being discussed, but also to laugh at the collective perceived flaws of a sort of people that they’re familiar with. Kind of like self-identified Forever Alones saving pictures of the Socially Awkward Penguin internet meme, and being amused rather than embarrassed when they recognize themselves in the text. If it had been meant to get people to laugh at nerds rather than to get nerds to laugh at themselves, it would have been a different show altogether.
If you want to compare TBBT to HPMoR, to avoid any future misunderstandings I would start by saying that I don’t agree that the latter really has that much artistic merit. Sure, Yudkowsky is a good writer at the micro level (sentence, paragraph) -- publishably good, even --, but at the macro level he fails more spectacularly than many more inexperienced and untalented writers. If you look at the whole story, it is a mess. He overestimates the reasonable word-count-to-fictional-time-frame ratio by about an order of magnitude, takes the story to where it would never ever take itself, does not appreciate the value of subtlety in conveying one’s message through fictional devices, and generally does not seem to be able or willing to think synthetically about the story.
Moreover—and this is what’s most relevant to this discussion—it lacks the sort of self-awareness that is needed for good comedy. Many of MoR!Harry’s flaws and mistakes, other than the ones that are specifically intended to portray one’s transition from “traditional rationality” to LW-style rationality (in other words, the parts of Yudkowsky’s intellectual past that he himself currently rejects), come off as getting tacit (or not-so-tacit) endorsement from the author, because MoR!Harry is an author avatar for Yudkowsky, and what he doesn’t see as wrong with himself, cannot see as wrong with his characters. This is something that doesn’t seem to exist in TBBT and other similar works. And it is something that puts them in a category above MoR, at least on this aspect.
Finally, you say you’re motivated by moral considerations, but it’s at least equally likely that it’s just that you see a group you identify with being portrayed in a way you don’t approve of, or in which you don’t see yourself, and stand up for your group’s public image. You perceive the portrayal as a strawman that exists for opponents to be able to kick it down to low status, and would like a portrayal in which your group of choice is high-status. Whether it really is meant like that, that’s probably more accurately judged by people without an emotional investment in their identity, and who wouldn’t therefore be incentivized to make it seem worse than it actually is, to gain more debate ammo against the opponent in the form of sympathy points from bystanders. I don’t mean to be less charitable than the situation asks for, but I need to explain to myself what seems to me to be an overblown response laden with emotional investment.
?
I mean seeing the big picture, how everything relates to everything else; knowing which scenes feel like a natural part of the fictional universe and which seem contrived and full of “outside information” which the author has forced into the story; understanding how individual features fit into the fictional world from the point of view of someone inside the fictional world (as opposed to from the point of view of the author trying to teach readers a lesson); how the narrative tone varies throughout the course of several chapters (or even from scene to scene), and whether it should vary as much; what kind of image a character creates in the reader’s mind, if you take every written word about that character and consider all of them simultaneously (related questions: whether it matches the intended view of the character; whether they seem self-consistent and sane).
Like I said, Yudkowsky can manage his sentence- and paragraph-level writing very well; if you put small fragments of MoR up for criticism, even the fiercest critics cannot reasonably conclude that he’s absolutely hopeless at writing. But in fiction, the whole is more than the sum of its parts; a collection of superbly-written individual scenes do not a good story make.
Ï wouldn’t know about the first part. I feel rather satisfied with the technical aspects of the novel as it is. It keeps me wanting to turn to the next page. If there are more sophisticated considerations that should be taken, I do not know them yet.
As for the latter part, I think you underestimate the author’s self-awareness. Harry’s failings seem quite obvious to me, and it also seems quite obvious to me that the narration is completely aware of them.
Both points, however, are irrelevant to the discussion; I’m saying that it’s possible to achieve funny using a character that is intelligent and rational and acts intelligently and rationally on the information available to them, but fails due to many, many factors, some their own, some not. Not to mention the volountary funny acheived by the character’s own effort, wit, and ingenuity.
Yudkowsky’s HPMOR does that quite well, and I’d recommend the imitation of that aspect by comedies featuring intelligent and rational people. I don’t recall saying anything about the issues you mentioned.
Within the margin error allowed by the proven unreliability of introspection, I contest this argument. I despise humor that is based on laughing at others, regardless of whether it’s about people who I indetify with, or people who are identified with me, or whatever. There is a simple reason for that; I regard all of humanity as my in-group, and seeing a human suffer brings me pain. I only find myself comfortable with laughing at another’s pain if it is a laughter of solidarity, the sort that you give your child who’s just fallen from his bycicle and frets over a bleeding yet superficial scratch (“It’s okay, son, you’ll get better!” :D). I do have a sadistic streak, and the ability to laugh at others, but I choose not to use give in to it. When I do and I notice I do, I feel guilty, ashamed, and anxious; I feel less worthy as a human being.
If TBBT was written to appeal to popsci fans who like laughing at themselves, it wouldn’t treat the mere mention that some of them play D&D or collect figurines as comical in itself. It certainly wouldn’t get away with having Penny answer to someone’s question “What’s the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars” with “It’s exactly the same thing” being treated by the narration as if she had just said a great truth, rather than the most blatantly stupid thing I’ve heard in quite some time.
When the purpose of something is signaling and the effort is conspicuous, it often is an argument in favor, and humor is largely about signaling how much spare brainpower you have.
On the other hand, conspicuous lack of effort can also have signaling purposes—you might want to convey the message that you’re so skilled that you don’t even need to put effort into it for the results to be worthy of recognition. “Try-hards” and “wannabes” generally have a pejorative sense.
In any case, what does the first clause (technically, the first two) have to do with the second? Even given that you’re right about what humor is about, if you put more effort into signaling spare brainpower through humor and the results are not better than someone else’s, what positive thing does this say about you? You’d just be that guy who has to read joke lists to entertain people at the party, and it’s probably not the sort of thing you’d want to brag about. In status-competitive environments, people don’t give you pats on the back just for trying.
Conspicous lack of effort is often a huge lie, though, as research proves. In the very best of cases, it is the dividend for enormous cumulative amounts of previous and strenuous effort.
That seems like you’re reading too much into the criticism. Currently, TV shows in the US rely almost exclusively on awkwardness and stupidity based humor. Advocating for alternatives isn’t the same thing as advocating that all humor be some other kind.
But there are alternatives. He has just pointed out one. Failing that, he could of course try his hand to produce media tailored to his own tastes (easier said than done, I know, I know). But what I observe is that the OP has taken this one show and complained about some feature of it… as though it were a bug. I see no reason to believe, with equal probability, he wouldn’t do the same to any other show in the genre.
People are allowed to complain about things that you like, you know.
But I haven’t even watched the show! I’m not motivated to argue because I have something to defend (other than a preference for neat arguments). The point was that it just seemed too nitpicky to single out one example of media for not having enough of something you like, unless you could generalize that criticism to the whole genre, in which case there remains no alternative for people who have different preferences. And that’s just not economically reasonable.
Wait, so what’s the right way to complain about something, then?
Edit: specifically, if you think that there are too many shows of type A, and not enough of type not-A.
You look at the whole market, understand that your kind not being catered to is a problem of the market as a whole and not of individual works that do cater to other market segments (or of the entire collection of such individual works), and find other not-A-fans and see whether there are more people among them who are interested in / good at producing stuff you like.
Thank you Kindly :D
As a brony, I’d definitely appreciate more shows that base their humour on characters taking their virtues too far, or in the wrong direction.
One thing that worries me is whether the downvotes are disapproving to the topic, or to myself as a person?.
I’m guessing at least some downvotes on the post are primarily disapproving of the rule that prohibits downvoting of the post. I would be surprised if any significant number of people would be driven by something that could be described as “disapproving of you as a person” (I’m not sure what this even means).
So they are disobeying the rule because the rule (or rather, the request to follow the rule) exists? If the OP hadn’t requested that people not downvote the main post, they wouldn’t have downvoted it as much?
In general, requests to not downvote are akin to “don’t register your disapproval of this.” I think most people generally disprove of requests to not register disapproval. Particularly because such requests are (likely) correlated with sub-par content.
That said, I think neutral karma discussions are an interesting idea. Trying to shield the OP itself from downvotes was a mistake.
By the way, I think openly saying things like “I liked your post” or “Thank you, [handle]” is a good way of getting around the not-upvoting limitation if you want to make your fellow poster feel better about themselves, and lighten up the atmosphere. Similarly, if you’re unhappy about a post, just say it.
[My immediate reaction was the urge to up-vote this comment.]
Mine too. And to upvote yours too.
And you resisted it! Thank you, Paragon!
No, thank you for the good comment, Brony!
EDIT: someone down-voted this comment chain. Bwhahaha, the irony—I love it.
Some people like conflict for the sake of conflict, reward cleverly insulting posts and punish posts that are kind for the sake of kindness.
Put yourself in the shoes of the person downvoting these comments. If the thought you’re thinking as you’re doing so is “Gah! Kind comments! Must downvote!” then you don’t have a very good model of what that person thinks like (I’m guessing, based on my own model).
They wouldn’t phrase it that way. They’d say “meaningless self-congratulatory fluff, eugh, tastes like diabetes, I don’t want to see it”. I’ve spent some time on the Something Awful fora, and I can tell you there are people who genuinely and explictly think what makes discussions meaningful and interesting is conflict and drama, as if it was some piece of fiction. When faced with kindness and fuzziness, they react violently, as if it would weaken them; to them, it’s “indulgence” and “weak-mindedness”. It’s the sort of people that would call “charity” “handouts”, and “forgiveness” “idiocy”. It sounds like I’m describing cartoon supervillains, but there’s lots of people who actually advocate this.
Generally when faced with that sort I try to act even nicer than usual, and deliberately interpret every thing they say in the most charitable light I can, regardless of how obviously it was intended to be offensive and anger me. Doing this got me banned in the places where this philosophy is shared by the moderation… and kept me from being banned in the places where it isn’t. So I guess it served me well.
Did the people who down-voted that stream belong to that particular category? I wouldn’t know, because they didn’t come out and say why they down-voted. But my money is on that hypothesis.
Fair enough, I agree with that assessment, although not necessarily with the entirety of your interpretation.
I admit that this reaction crossed my mind as well. It continues “All this being excessively nice to people is creepy. It’s like being greeted by someone with an obviously fake smile.” Maybe there’s a better way to have gotten the same intent across?
Let’s examine these notions:
fake smile: a fake smile is threatening, if you know it for what it is, because it signals benevolence when there is none. The response to threats is either thrill (if you’re confident you can overcome them) or fear (if you aren’t).
obviously fake smile: not only is it threatening, it also shows social incompetence on the side of the smiler. A plausible fake smile that you know to be fake is an invitation to a clever battle of manipulation (although you run the risk of an illusion of double transparency).
A fake smile that is too easy to recognize as fake is distressing because you know the smiler is hiding something, but the smiler doesn’t. You don’t really know how to deal with the asymmetry of the situation, you feel some kind of pity/contempt, and this adds a component of uneasiness to the threat.
It stops being thrilling/scary and it becomes creepy; the sensation you associate with threats of a vague magnitude that are quite easy but also quite unpleasant to deal with, such as arachnids, roaches, some reptiles and amphibians, rodents, or a very infatuated and very low-status person of the opposite sex (or, worse if you’re straight, the same sex) asking you to be their partner for the prom dance.
A tiger isn’t creepy. A stampeding elephant isn’t creepy. A rapist with a knife isn’t creepy. A cokroach is creepy. A mouse is creepy. A proselytizing person is creepy, and so is anyone who’s trying to sell you something you think you don’t want. A stalker who built a shrine to your image is creepy.
Dealing with the threat is easy; just say “No, thank you.” or “Stop doing that!”. Just squash the bug and move on. And yet, you’re paralyzed by the unpleasant expectations of squishing that bug, which are only marginally better than letting it crawl all over the place.
As it turns out, there’s more complicated, delicate ways of dealing with the threat that involve capturing the creepy crawly and releasing it somewhere where its presence won’t bother you.
Ahem. Sorry, I had to get the “creep” theory out of my head.
Being excessively nice to people is basically forcing upon them an inconditional gift that they will feel pressured to reciprocate. You’re non-forcefully/passive-aggressively forcing them to do something their guts tell them they do not want to do.
Obviously, if you’re a malevolent asshole, you’ll find it very unsettling that other people reciprocate your violence with kindness. You’re comfortable with reciprocal violence, it makes you feel righteous, balanced, competitive, on edge, etc. People turning the other cheek at you, on the other hand, are forcing you to reciprocate their kindness, which you do not want to do. This “creeps” them out.
Initially, I did not understand why seeing others treat each other in nicer ways than are routine for you would cause you to actively express disapproval of their action. But there might be a peer pressure effect going on; maybe they feel pressured by the strange-acting pair to reconsider the way they do things, and don’t like that pressure, and act against it. From that perspective, it is perfectly possible to threaten someone without meaning to and perhaps without even being aware of their existence.
I would like to analyze my instinctive reaction here rather than express it. Please support me in this.
I don’t think my idea of “obviously fake smile” maps to social incompetence. It just implies insincerity. Many people, even those who are not malevolent assholes, dislike seeing insincerity.
That’s the first-level idea, and I am prepared to reject it because of the possibility that you may, in fact, be sincere about saying things like that. But being excessively nice is not always an incidental choice to make. In fact, I believe that I would pretty much never be able to sincerely say something as saccharine as the early comments in this thread. Thus, if many people behave in that way, I would be forced to choose between being rude and being insincere.
Oh, come on, you call that saccharine? This is saccharine XD
As for insincerity, it’s not that I’m insincere, it’s that I’m very profuse in my demonstrations of affection, respect, and so on. The emotion behind is genuine, I’m just very openly demonstrative about it. If the other person has codes where only a much greater favour is deserving of such open displays of positivity, they see the discrepancy and deduce that I am sending false (or exaggerated) signals.
The same is true in reverse. Some people have a norm of violently lashing out at anything they dislike, and, when meeting people who react to offence by silence or by shifting their attention elsewhere, some very unfortunate misunderstandings can happen.
Essentially, it’s a misunderstanding.
I don’t think it’s insincere if you contain your attempt at rudeness and yet endeavour to convey your misgivings and negative feelings to the other person clearly and sincerely. To take an exaggeratedly dramatic example, when Iñigo Montoya says “Hello. My name is Iñigo Montoya. You killed my father. Perpare to die.”, he’s being perfectly sincere. More so, in fact, than if he’d said “YOU FATHER-MURDERING PIECE OF SHIT, I’LL SWORDFUCK YOU TILL YOU LOVE IT!”, because it’s more precise and accurate. Even though his first impulse might have been to say the latter rather than the former (we know it wasn’t, but that’s beside the point).
Another cartoony but very nice example of someone very angry still being polite about it, and not in a passive-aggressive or insincere way, but in an open and assertive way, is Finn the Human from Adventure Time. There’s plenty of force behind “NO, MAN” or “GET OUT” without having to intercalate “fucking” and “asshole” and so on inbetween.
You misunderstand. If everyone suddenly became over-the-top nice but me, then even if I had no intention of being rude, I would either have to go against the norm or say things I don’t mean.
if only we had some sort of system for indicating approval of what people say!
If you’re referring to the karma system, I think that too is rather worthless if you don’t say why you approve. I’ve found some of my posts upvoted way more than I expected, and I found that rather distressing, not knowing what I had done right. Some of them I wasn’t even very proud of, being sarcastic, insulting, contemptuous, or lazily including geek-appeal references or cheap wit. When those get approval, it fills me with shame.
Also, for the love of everything lovable, please spare me the sarcasm.
What’s wrong with sarcasm?
It leads to misunderstandings, it’s passive-aggressive, annoying, petty, condescending, and whiny. It also adds zero value to communication, and many languages fail to include it entirely; you will never find a sarcastic phrase in Arabic or Japanese, for instance. If you have something to say, say it clearly and concisely.
I sincerely and unashamedly hate sarcasm and I wish for it to grow extinct as a form of expression.
If you want to use snark, however, you can do so easily without resorting to saying the exact opposite of what you mean. Thorstein Veblen was very good at unsarcastic snark, and he would copiously insult the elites of his time without them even noticing.
This sounds dubious to me.
It would; we often make the mistake of thinking our culture is universal. Let me rephrase it; I have a fairly decent passive understanding of both languages, and I have never come across an example of sarcasm, in either language, that I can remember noticing. Snark, yes, there is plenty of snark. Sarcasm, saying “I am happy” and meaning “I am sad”, “You are so smart” meaning “You are so dumb”? No. Never. As far as I recall.
If you don’t believe me, I challenge you to present me with evidence to the contrary.
It seems very unlikely to me that a language as well-known as Japanese or Arabic has no such thing as irony and these guys somehow missed that. How confident you are that if you had heard it in Japanese or Arabic you would have noticed and remember that?
“These guys” took care to clarify what they meant by “irony” and “sarcasm”, these terms not being equivalent. If you backtrack and explore the branches of this discussion, you’ll see that their definitions are not equivalent to those I’ve used. They’re practically opposite.
This is, indeed, in my experience, universal. Though I call it “snark”.
I’m not saying they’re incapable of using what I call sarcasm (“A figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used”), I just saying that, as a norm, they don’t, in the same way that a speaker of Japanese is not incapable of not addressing other people with the proper grammatical forms and honorifics; it’s just that, rather than disrespectful, it comes off as stilted and agramatical. It’s just not done, and it just sort of doesn’t work.
I’m really seeing a problem based on a lack of consensus in common usage, here. (“such a broad definition will make it very hard to judge whether a culture lacks verbal irony”)
Either way, the post itself does not explicitly say that “A figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used” is a universal feature of all languages. Some comments seem to confirm my postulations;
No one seems to have replied to that comment.
Extremely confident, though of course studies prove that, for most people, confidence in one’s memories does not correlate well with precision. Which I found puzzling, because in my case it did; I’ve only been confident on a false memory once in my entire life.
The fact that your memory almost never has false positives doesn’t say much about how often it has false negatives. IOW forgetting (or not having noticed in the first place) may be more common than confabulating (or having hallucinated).
True, that. Still, burden of evidence is not on me here; if anyone finds instances of that black swan and falsify my hypothesis, I’d be glad to hear about them.
Wait, so insulting people by using longer words than they understand (as far as I can tell this is basically what Veblen did) is okay, but simple insincerity-based humor isn’t?
And although occasionally people wield sarcasm as a hammer (mainly 10-year-olds who just discovered the concept) it is basically a form of humor: it works when it’s funny. I’m going to rephrase most of your criticisms (some of which make no sense: I mean, what about drethelin’s comment is “whiny”, for instance?) as a complaint about instances when sarcasm just wasn’t funny.
In an ideal use case, one employing sarcasm would take the other’s point to a logical conclusion, but to do it in such a way that the hidden incongruity is exposed. This is where the humor arises (Isaac Asimov’s definition of humor is “a sudden change in point of view”) and it is often the most direct way to point out the logical flaw.
Unfortunately, the Internet lacks tone of voice, so sometimes it’s unclear when someone is being sarcastic. I don’t see that as a problem with drethelin’s comment, though, so obviously it’s possible to do it well.
The problem is that using sarcasm assumes that the opposition (and it’s always an opposition; sarcasm is offensive and antagonistic) is blind to the faults of their argument, and that you’re teaching them something they didn’t know. This can backfire if the incongruity just isn’t so, and the opposition would have been easily able to explain it to you, had you used a normal communication mode. By using a sarcastic tone, you’re creating obstacles for the opposition to normally argue with you.
It is possible, and in fact advisable, to use “reductio ad absurdum” without a sarcastic tone, because the absurdity should be able to stand up for itself.
Sarcasm about one’s own feelings (“I’m reeeeally enthusiastic about this!”) does not employ reductio ad absurdum, it’s just obnoxiousness for the sake of obnoxiousness.
I think you’re ignoring the potential for friendly antagonism, here. Both good-natured ribbing and cruelty can employ sarcasm.
I’ve only taken to “good-natured ribbing” recently; it’s an acquired skill that does not come naturally to me; it’s conspicous consumption of overabundant defenses, and I think there are less wasteful ways of showing personal strength or demonstrating the studiness of a freindship.
Do you have a point?
The usefulness of conspicuous consumption is closely linked to its wastefulness. The broader point, that conspicuous consumption is necessary or desirable, is too long to productively discuss here.
Linkie?
I’d be interested in this discussion, or a link to an existing one.
So drethelin’s comment earlier, the one that provoked this whole discussion, offended and antagonized me? I don’t feel offended.
Why not? He was, at the very least, accusing you of obliviousness in not remembering that there is the already-present karma system to perform the function you require. You can choose to not feel offended, like a giant mecha can ignore small arms fire harmlessly bouncing off, but the bullets were real.
Much as I enjoy being compared to a giant mecha, I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. My comment was in fact conspicuously oblivious to the function of the karma system. Pointing that out was funny. And I can’t think of a way to make that joke without the use of sarcasm that wouldn’t fall flat.
It wasn’t, because I’ve spent a great deal of time arguing that the karma system is deficient in serving that purpose. Bringing it up, in that context, was equivalent to ignoring everything I have been saying about it. I thought your not considering it was obliviousness, but acknowledgement of what I was trying to do and exploration of other alternatives.
Pretty sure that happened in response to the comment being made, not prior. In any case, the point stands that it might not be deficient in serving my purpose.
It can be a combination of some of those things. It isn’t always all of them.
It communicates a lot, which certainly adds value to some of the people doing said communicating.
Technically this is probably true. But only because I’m not likely to look.
Not replying to Ritalin because he argues misleadingly and with sockpuppets about literary matters, but I’ve read a great deal of Japanese literature and it never occurred to me that there was no sarcasm in it, and quite the opposite (especially in satirical or humorous works, as one would expect, like I Am a Cat). Heck, they do sarcasm just with the honorifics—switching from a normal -kun or -san to -sama, or worse, -dono/-tono. (If one doesn’t like literature, one won’t have to go long in watching anime to spot sarcasm; KyoAni seems to have a lot of sarcastic male protagonists...)
True, but that’s what the cluster labeled “sarcasm” looks to me. Atypical examples don’t justify the dismal centre.
… I’m having trouble phrasing this. When you say “communication” you’re thinking of all those social thingies and dominance games When I say “communication” I’m thinking of “conveying facts and arguments”. Let me then rephrase it; sarcasm doesn’t enrich your argumentation, it doesn’t make you right, it only signals that you’re confident that you’re right, which is a very unreliable and therefore worthless datum on whether you’re actually right. In the larger context of social games, however, I can see how it can considerably “enrich” or rather “sophisticate” the interaction, but I’m a simple guy and I like talking straight.
Again, I challenge you to.
The messageboard would be basically unreadable if every karma was replaced by a comment saying “Right on!” or “fuck you!”. People who want to tell you why you’re right or wrong will tell you regardless, what karma does is provide an additional means of feedback that way more people can use without having to go over the threshold of writing entire responses to everything. It gives you MORE information, not less.
“Right on” and “fuck you” are about as useless as “upvote” and “downvote”, if not more so. If people don’t think their opinion of a post is important or intense enough to go through the effort of explaining why they have that opinion, then they should treat is as neutral and keep it to themselves. Upvotes and downvotes are about as useless a means of feedback as can be provided; they don’t tell you what they think needs to be changed, they don’t tell you why they think it needs to be changed, all they tell you is that there is an absolute difference (not even a proportion) of people who like or dislike what you did.
That’s feedback is feeding you a lot of hay and little grain. If the fault you’ve made is so obvious that that sort of feedback can make you notice it, you wouldn’t do it in the first place.
Karma is not feedback. Karma is a way of promoting what you like and rejecting what you dislike; it doesn’t serve the poster, it serves you.
Well, first off I have no problem with karma serving me. Doesn’t it serve you too?
Second, it IS feedback. If you make more than one comment, you get to see what gets upvotes and what gets downvotes. If you make a lot of comments, you get a sense for what people approve of and what people disapprove of, and insofar as that correlates to quality you get a sense of how to make quality comments. Not every comment deserves other users expending their time providing constructive criticism, and I don’t see why it’s necessarily better that people spend their time responding in ways that are good for YOU instead of good for them.
The only times I downvote are when I think the poster is being deliberately rude or cruel, but I don’t like doing that and would rather have a moderator take care of what I see as a dirty job. And unless a post is exceptionally uninteresting, I upvote posts simply as a way of keeping track of those I’ve already read. So no, it doesn’t serve me very well, and the use I make of it is not conductive to prOtherwise, I don’t use it, because I’m not interested in punishing posts simply because I don’t enjoy seeing them here. I do reward posts that teach me something I didn’t know.oper feedback. When I really like what someone does, I go and tell them. When I really don’t like it, I tell them. The threshold of like is smaller than that of dislike. All in all, I’d be happier and more comfortable if the upvote-downvote system didn’t exist, and the threads were linear rather than in trees.
That’s a pretty big if; one poster’s quality standards may be very different from another, and may not deserve to be called “quality” standards at all. In fact, they might be downright contemptible. If people disapprove of me for unworthy reasons, I do not want them to hold power over me.
When you downvote, you’re merely pushing away stuff you don’t like. When you tell people what is wrong, they’ll be quicker and more effective at correcting what they do. Said people will also propose reasons for or against stuff that are actually avowable in public, which gives a better guarantee that those reasons be good rather than petty.
And since that’s a lot of trouble, I honestly prefer systems where there are a few moderators and some very strict rules of conduct, and people who misbehave are swiftly punished according to those rules. Giant In The Playground are fora that have formalized this very well IMHO, and the contents in there may not always be thrilling and excellent, but they are never bad, because bad stuff gets punished, and the punishments are always explained and justified.
As a reference point: when someone pseudo-stalked me on the GitP fora back in the day, I spoke to a mod, who applied straightforward algorithms to the situation, added up points, and banned the offender. It worked very well, at least within the context of the site.
Thank you, Alicorn, that was helpful and I appreciate it.
(The role of expressing approval/disapproval is more efficiently played by voting than by commenting. See this comment for details.)
I agree. Good comment.