Emile comments on What is the best programming language? - Less Wrong

4 Post author: lsparrish 26 May 2012 12:58AM

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Comment author: lsparrish 26 May 2012 06:06:50PM 14 points [-]

Snark isn't the same as rationality.

Let's break it down, shall we? The comment contains the following three things:

  1. A joke insinuating "rational programming" is the same as "rational toothpaste". No claim is made explicitly, so no rebuttal can be made. This is pure dark arts if you ask me.
  2. Negative instruction: Don't do this. No attempt to explain why.
  3. Positive instruction: Do that instead. Again, no attempt to explain why.

And you think this is more rational than the detailed, respectful, intelligent comments made by people who actually thought about the questions for five minutes and shared their expertise?

I'm appalled.

Maybe it's obvious to you that having "most rational X" in the title is stupid. And to be honest in hindsight it seems a bit silly to me as well, now that I have explicitly thought about the reasons for it. But it wasn't obvious when I wrote it, and it surely isn't self-evident to everybody.

I'm not against setting up norms and rules, and yes they are gonna change on people, and yes people need to be humiliated from time to time for breaking them flagrantly, but it's simply unfair to make humiliating jokes in retaliation for breaking them when there is no actual reason for the person to have known about the norm's existence.

Note that Konkvistador didn't even have a link to a top level post to substantiate the claim that this norm exists, just "I think this has been mentioned before" -- am I supposed to read every comment on LessWrong to see what norms I'm supposed to be following?

Give me a break!

Comment author: Emile 26 May 2012 07:54:07PM *  4 points [-]

Hmm, I guess people that follow most of the discussions here might be overestimating how much "community lore" others are aware of (or they may mistake "opinions shared by a few posters" for "community lore").

For prior discussions of this see here:

We are one step closer to the glorious time when a thread titled "Most rational choice of footwear" will appear.

or here:

This might be the most blatant misuse of "rational" in a post title I've ever seen.

Now that's a challenge ...

  • Rational snorkeling
  • Rational hash brownie preparation¹
  • Rational weasel appreciation
  • Rational captchaloguing
  • Rational cache flushing
  • Rational cash flashing
  • Rational rasher rationing

Most people seem to have liked the suggestion to use "optimal" instead.