The summary has been edited with the offending line removed. The rest of this comment is not an excuse so much as self-analysis to figure out how I made that mistake:
Addressing the issue in the comments is of course the obvious thing to do if I had thought of doing so. At the time I was feeling an editorial obligation to say more than a single sentence about each essay, especially if that first sentence is rather content-free e.g. “A humorous story.” I had faced the same problem with “A fable of science and politics.” However in this case there was very little to work with even after a good-faith effort to pull out some well-intentioned meanings. The post didn’t seem to serve any purpose except at best as you put it, “masturbatory blogging,” and at worst was advocating for or advertising techniques of pickup artistry [sic]. So I decided to do my job of accurately summarizing without op-ed the content of the article, knowing that it would (and should) cause debate. But somehow I failed to realize that I could have left out the offending line and sparked the discussion myself. Availability heuristic :\
It is a real life example of what happens when you point out to someone that their beliefs and anticipations are out of sync. Real life examples of discussions with people and seeing how they think, are useful in a setting that discusses people and how they think.
The summary has been edited with the offending line removed. The rest of this comment is not an excuse so much as self-analysis to figure out how I made that mistake:
Addressing the issue in the comments is of course the obvious thing to do if I had thought of doing so. At the time I was feeling an editorial obligation to say more than a single sentence about each essay, especially if that first sentence is rather content-free e.g. “A humorous story.” I had faced the same problem with “A fable of science and politics.” However in this case there was very little to work with even after a good-faith effort to pull out some well-intentioned meanings. The post didn’t seem to serve any purpose except at best as you put it, “masturbatory blogging,” and at worst was advocating for or advertising techniques of pickup artistry [sic]. So I decided to do my job of accurately summarizing without op-ed the content of the article, knowing that it would (and should) cause debate. But somehow I failed to realize that I could have left out the offending line and sparked the discussion myself. Availability heuristic :\
This seems an uncharitable reading. What’s the issue with just having a fun example post?
What is it an example of?
It is a real life example of what happens when you point out to someone that their beliefs and anticipations are out of sync. Real life examples of discussions with people and seeing how they think, are useful in a setting that discusses people and how they think.