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 think he takes creator feedback as automatically inadmissible, so much that he treats it as unreliable
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”:
Barthes’s essay argues against traditional literary criticism’s practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of a text, and instead argues that writing and creator are unrelated.
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 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
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.
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.
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”.
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”.