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MBlume comments on Help, help, I'm being oppressed! - Less Wrong
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To introduce a (hopefully) less political data point, I find the way Apple's "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads skirt the underdog issue to be fascinating.
Hodgman's PC is strongly cast as the underdog. It is, of course, the point of the ads that PC comes out the worse in every encounter, but what interests me is that we are clearly supposed to pity him, even to love him. Hodgman, bespectacled, round-faced, slightly pudgy, fits the part perfectly. We basically want to give him a big hug. Long's Mac seems reluctant to make himself appear too superior to PC, constantly afraid that he'll hurt his fragile feelings somehow. The ads give the appearance of trying to be as kind to PC as possible.
And yet, when we go to buy a computer, however much we may have sympathized with PC, we choose to ally ourselves with Long over Hodgman (or at least, so Apple hopes, and I assume they would not have paid to run the ads for three years had the effects been otherwise)
--Orson Scott Card, "Characters and Viewpoint"
EDIT: yes, I realize the irony of quoting Card on this, given his own utter failure to respect this principle in his own polemical writings on things like homosexuality. But it's still true.
Are you sure that this is true in general?
My impression is that polemic has been a lot more raw in other times and places.
This is true (American political discourse has been astonishingly crude in in the past).
But was it more effective? That is the issue. To use a Revolutionary War example, it was not one of the crude blood-libelous circulars that sold 500,000 copies, but Paine's Common Sense.*
* It struck me as pretty well argued and reasoned when I read it in middle school, but that was a long time ago.
Viewing the PC with pity would seem to be incompatible with viewing it as an effective employee.
Awesome point. Worthy of Robin Hanson.
Agreed.
thanks ^^