original poster johnswentsworth wrote a piece about people LARPing their jobs rather than attempting to build deeper understanding or models-with-gears
aysja added some discussion about people failing to notice that words have referents, as a further psychological exploration of the LARPing idea, and added tow/toe the line as a related phenomenon. They say “LARPing jobs is a bit eerie to me, too, in a similar way. It’s like people are towing the line instead of toeing it. Like they’re modeling what they’re “supposed” to be doing, or something, rather than doing it for reasons.”
You asked for further clarification
I tried using null pointers as an alternative metaphor to get at the same concept.
No one is debating the question of whether learning etymology of words is important and I’m not sure how you got hung up on that idea. And toe/tow the line is just an example of the problem of people failing to load the intended image/concept, while LARPing (and believing?) that they are in fact communicating in the same way as people who do.
When I asked for clarification (your number 3), I said here’s some things aysja might mean, if they mean thing A then I agree it’s bad but I don’t agree that “tow the line” is an example of the same phenomenon, if they mean thing B then I agree “tow the line” is an example but I don’t think it’s bad, is aysja saying A or B or something else?
You replied by focusing heavily on “tow the line” and how it demonstrates a lack of understanding and that’s bad, but not saying anything that appeared to argue with or contradict my explanation of this as an example of thing B, so I interpreted you as basically accepting my explanation that “towing the line” is an example of thing B and then trying to change my mind about whether thing B is bad.
Your summary of the conversation doesn’t even include the fact that I enumerated two different hypotheses so I’m guessing that the point at which we desynced was that those two hypotheses did not make the jump from my brain to yours?
To recap:
original poster johnswentsworth wrote a piece about people LARPing their jobs rather than attempting to build deeper understanding or models-with-gears
aysja added some discussion about people failing to notice that words have referents, as a further psychological exploration of the LARPing idea, and added tow/toe the line as a related phenomenon. They say “LARPing jobs is a bit eerie to me, too, in a similar way. It’s like people are towing the line instead of toeing it. Like they’re modeling what they’re “supposed” to be doing, or something, rather than doing it for reasons.”
You asked for further clarification
I tried using null pointers as an alternative metaphor to get at the same concept.
No one is debating the question of whether learning etymology of words is important and I’m not sure how you got hung up on that idea. And toe/tow the line is just an example of the problem of people failing to load the intended image/concept, while LARPing (and believing?) that they are in fact communicating in the same way as people who do.
Does that help?
When I asked for clarification (your number 3), I said here’s some things aysja might mean, if they mean thing A then I agree it’s bad but I don’t agree that “tow the line” is an example of the same phenomenon, if they mean thing B then I agree “tow the line” is an example but I don’t think it’s bad, is aysja saying A or B or something else?
You replied by focusing heavily on “tow the line” and how it demonstrates a lack of understanding and that’s bad, but not saying anything that appeared to argue with or contradict my explanation of this as an example of thing B, so I interpreted you as basically accepting my explanation that “towing the line” is an example of thing B and then trying to change my mind about whether thing B is bad.
Your summary of the conversation doesn’t even include the fact that I enumerated two different hypotheses so I’m guessing that the point at which we desynced was that those two hypotheses did not make the jump from my brain to yours?