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?
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.
Thus, if many people behave in that way, I would be forced to choose between being rude and being insincere.
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 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.
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.
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.
As for sarcasm, [snip]I’ll take it here to mean “A sharp, bitter, or cutting expression or remark; a bitter gibe or taunt”
This is, indeed, in my experience, universal. Though I call it “snark”.
For the purposes of this discussion, irony means “A figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used”, [snip] Although cultures stereotypically differ in their affinity for irony, I’ve never heard or read that any group completely lacked the capacity to produce and understand it.
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.
Grice’s analysis of irony as an overt violation of the maxim of truthfulness is a variant of the classical rhetorical view of irony as literally saying one thing and figuratively meaning the opposite. There are well-known arguments against this view. It is descriptively inadequate because ironical understatements, ironical quotations and ironical allusions cannot be analysed as communicating the opposite of what is literally said. It is theoretically inadequate because saying the opposite of what one means is patently irrational; and on this approach it is hard to explain why verbal irony is universal and appears to arise spontaneously, without being taught or learned
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;
My limited experience in Japan was similar to Kel’s in Russia. Sarcasm (“That was just great” and the like) baffled people.
No one seems to have replied to that comment.
How confident you are that if you had heard it in Japanese or Arabic you would have noticed and remember that?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It wasn’t, because I’ve spent a great deal of time arguing that the karma system is deficient in serving that purpose.
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.
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...)
It can be a combination of some of those things. It isn’t always all of them.
True, but that’s what the cluster labeled “sarcasm” looks to me. Atypical examples don’t justify the dismal centre.
It communicates a lot, which certainly adds value to some of the people doing said communicating.
… 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.
Technically this is probably true. But only because I’m not likely to look.
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.
and insofar as that correlates to quality you get a sense of how to make quality comments
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.