Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2

Alicorn

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

July Part 1

This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.

July Part 1

I don't watch House nor much TV at all.

I'm a native English speaker, but people often do say I sound "foreign" (usually German, for some reason) and that I speak with a more "intelligent" and "upper class" tone.

I remember messaging you a lot a while back, noting your eerie similarities to me in terms of personal experience. AFAICT, the only real differences between you and me are:

You show more restraint.
I'm less proactive about my Japanophilia.
I didn't give up after I found myself unemployed and living with my parents (though, ashamedly, it was more out of hatred that I didn't give up than any noble kind of willpower).

As for being less asshole-ish, I do believe I can pull it off with minimal effort. The problem is that I cannot be significantly less asshole-ish, while also

1) impressing on others the importance of updating in my direction, and/or
2) posting like everyone else does, i.e., if I made my posts less asshole-ish, I would have to avoid making posts like Rain's recent ones, due to mistakenly classifying them as asshole-ish.

Regarding 1), a lot of you believe that my tone of posting is likely to do the opposite, as it turns people off from agreeing with me. While that might be true for social issues like who-"likes"-Silas, I strongly disagree that it holds on substantive issues.

I've spent a lot of my internet posting career , years ago, being "nice" in arguments, which, yes, I'm capable of. I found that, rather than turn people on to my views, it simply legitimized, in their minds, the ridiculous positions they were taking, and allowed them to confidently go away believing it was just a case of "reasonable people disagreeing about a tough issue".

In contrast, when I used my regular, "asshole-ish" tone, then yes, at the time they resisted my point with all the rationalization they could muster. But shortly afterward, they'd quietly accept it without admitting defeat, and argue in favor of it later. For example, I'm famous, under a different name, among the Linux community, for my rudeness toward a Linux forum when I ran into problems trying to switch. I made a number of criticisms of the distro, which were predictably ridiculed.

But then a few years later, most everyone believes those criticisms are valid, but if I point out how I (under that name) made them long ago, giving stark, early insight into what Linux needed to do to gain widespread acceptance in the home PC market, all they do is sling mud at me. Yet at least one Linux consultant has saved the famous thread for use in showing clients why they shouldn't deploy a Linux distro without a reliable support contract.

Or for an example here, does anyone remember Daniel_Burfoot's brilliant epiphany about how to do AI the right way, and my asshole-ish criticisms thereof? And how he stubbornly disagreed every step of the way? Well, what happened to that series? It was abandoned midway.

So therein lies the problem: do I want to change minds, or do I want to be liked? Do I want to murder my karma to point out flaws in Alicorn's advice, or do I want to be "part of the tribe"? I think you know what decision I've made, and why you haven't done the same.

In contrast, when I used my regular, "asshole-ish" tone, then yes, at the time they resisted my point with all the rationalization they could muster. But shortly afterward, they'd quietly accept it without admitting defeat, and argue in favor of it later.

Note that this does not automatically mean that it was you who changed their minds. I've had similar experiences to you, but I just assume that it means reality in the long run is more convincing than I am in the short run. It's really pretty narcissistic to assume that you're changing anybo... (read more)

4xamdam16y

Do you notice that you ooze aggression? Just look at the sentence above. It will clearly be interpreted as "intended to hurt" by 99% of observers. Update. A general advice on being more civil: in any post (or a list of things) that you write, erase the last item before posting. It's usually the one you sneak aggression into. I think it will do wonders to your karma. ETA: quickly edited to remove some of my own unproductive aggression

17HughRistik16y

My experience is different. I used to post online in a more critical and uncompromising fashion. Yet over the years, I came around to a more pleasant and accommodating style, and I find that it works better. Even though I have to swallow things I would like to say on the spot, I often look back on the thread later and feel glad that I took the high road. I can't convince everyone that I debate with, but I've managed to pull a bunch of people in my direction, which I don't think I could have accomplished with a more bombastic style. Furthermore, my view is that even if I can't convince a particular person I'm debating with, I can still convince the lurking fence-sitters. [...] In a top-level post that you will remember, I criticized Alicorn's advice in a way that only gained me karma. This sort of thing can be done.

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Open Thread: July 2010, Part 2

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