And like Nancy, you didn't finish reading the comment! . . . .

Does it make sense now?

I did read your whole comment and I understand that you were making the point that men with wide feet face indirect prejudice because they can’t buy fashionable shoes and society judges people on their fashion choices. What I didn’t understand was how that point related to the issues of manufacturer bias and incentives originally being discussed in the thread.

Nancy’s original post was to the effect that the lack of clothing choices for fat women reflected a bias (among clothing manufacturers and more generally) against fat women, and that this bias resulted in the manufacturers ignoring what could be a lucrative market. (Several people who commented on the thread posted interesting ideas suggesting why such bias was probably not the whole story.)

When you made your first comment in the thread, I thought it was possible that you were making a related comment about the biases (or lack thereof) that influenced manufacturers of both women’s clothing and men’s shoes. I initially misunderstood your comment in that I thought that by highlighting this other failure to meet market demand (for wide fashionable men’s shoes), you were suggesting that there are all sorts of such failures, and ascribing these failures to some prejudice in society missed the mark.

When Nancy asked about bias against people with wide feet, and you described the indirect route by which such people experience bias, I realized that I may have misunderstood your point. I continued to not understand exactly what point you were making until you expanded on it in some of the other comments in this thread. I now understand that your comment was something to the effect that men with wide feet suffer indirect prejudice because they can’t have fashionable shoes but they aren’t throwing a “pity party” about this situation the way that fat women are.

I guess the reason it took me so long to understand this point was that it was sufficiently tangential to the main points being discussed in the post that I just didn’t leap there immediately. I was particularly confused because it seemed like you ignored the opportunity to make a post that discussed a failure to meet market demand that could not be ascribed to prejudice, which would therefore provide some evidence that at least part of the explanation for the failure in plus-size women’s clothing is also not due to prejudice.

(That being said, I don’t know if you can wear ordinary wide-size men’s shoes or if you need wider shoes than that, but for athletic shoes, I know New Balance carries wide sizes, and for other shoes, Cole Haan does. I’m not an expert on fashionable men’s shoes, but Cole Haan seems fashionable to me. You might also try Zappos, which gives you the option of searching by width.)

Moving on to the other question, the main reason I perceive you as “trolling” was that I am familiar with the longstanding issues between you and Alicorn. (I suspect that most regular Less Wrong readers who have been here for a sufficiently long time are similarly aware of those issues.) You engaged in behavior that I would deem “trolling” or perhaps “passive-aggressive” by making these comments:

And frankly, when the asymmetic bra issue came up, I got pretty scared. Some of the commenters -- and I'm not going to single anyone out -- sound like really angry people in general and I fear that being around them would make their rage spill on to me.

They have this entitlement mentality, where everyone has to make clothes that they like. I think it's what motivates a lot of the crime against retailers.

I looked through the asymmetric bra sub-thread, and despite your reference to multiple commenters and assertion that you would not single anyone out, it is hard to come up with any other idea than that you were indirectly baiting Alicorn, the instigator and main proponent on the asymmetric bra issue.

Moreover, when HughRistik indicated that he didn’t perceive the anger on the issue that you described, you responded:

Good. It was satire to make a point. The people who are being mocked know who they are.

And again, the most reasonable interpretation is that you were baiting or mocking Alicorn here.

Which brings us to your question:

Would you consider it trolling for someone to say this (reworded to obscure origin; comes from an actual LW comment):

If someone makes a leap from, "Man, I wish you were better able to sell your product" to "someone should feel so bad for you that they buy your product", that is a problem. It's bad if someone is trying to make a living selling a product but can't -- yet I would never equate that with an obligation for people to buy! That mentality is downright scary, because it leads to all kinds of evil, like rape.

Because that logic is just as tenuous ... and makes a more serious accusation. For those who have made such comments -- and some are probably reading -- I hope they get the message.

Given the rest of the thread, it will probably not surprise you to know that I was able to discern that the author of the original comment was most likely Alicorn. Alicorn’s actual comment was:

It's the mental leap from "aw, I feel bad that you are having trouble selling your product" to "aw, someone should take pity on you to the point of buying your product" that presents the problem. I do feel bad for people who have trouble selling, but I categorically refuse to translate that into an obligation on the part of the target market! That kind of thinking scares the crap out of me, because that is the kind of thinking that leads to various evil behaviors up to and including rape. source

The context was that the “product” being sold was oneself as a sexual partner. So, if you don’t mind, I’m going to address whether I consider the actual comment made by Alicorn to be trolling, rather than your translation of the comment presented without context. And whatever flaws that comment might have, I wouldn’t consider it trolling.

I don’t read the comment as directed at anyone personally (as I read your comment to be designed to bait/mock Alicorn), although perhaps you disagree on that point. I don’t think it’s designed to mock or bait more generally either. If you have evidence that the comment was directed more particularly at you or other LWers, or was intended to mock or bait, I would be interested in seeing that evidence.

On the other hand, I agree that the rhetoric might be somewhat over the top. The use of “scares the crap out of me” may be too much. I personally don’t read it to suggest that the sort of thinking described inevitably leads to evil behavior in every person who has such thoughts, although perhaps that reading is debatable. Softening the language to make that point more clear may have improved the comment’s palatability.

But my ultimate conclusion is that it’s an interesting point, worthy of debate, and indeed it resulted in a long, involved, and more or less productive discussion. So no, not trolling.