= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Rational_Brony comments on NKCDT: The Big Bang Theory - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (206)
And you resisted it! Thank you, Paragon!
No, thank you for the good comment, Brony!
EDIT: someone down-voted this comment chain. Bwhahaha, the irony - I love it.
Some people like conflict for the sake of conflict, reward cleverly insulting posts and punish posts that are kind for the sake of kindness.
Put yourself in the shoes of the person downvoting these comments. If the thought you're thinking as you're doing so is "Gah! Kind comments! Must downvote!" then you don't have a very good model of what that person thinks like (I'm guessing, based on my own model).
They wouldn't phrase it that way. They'd say "meaningless self-congratulatory fluff, eugh, tastes like diabetes, I don't want to see it". I've spent some time on the Something Awful fora, and I can tell you there are people who genuinely and explictly think what makes discussions meaningful and interesting is conflict and drama, as if it was some piece of fiction. When faced with kindness and fuzziness, they react violently, as if it would weaken them; to them, it's "indulgence" and "weak-mindedness". It's the sort of people that would call "charity" "handouts", and "forgiveness" "idiocy". It sounds like I'm describing cartoon supervillains, but there's lots of people who actually advocate this.
Generally when faced with that sort I try to act even nicer than usual, and deliberately interpret every thing they say in the most charitable light I can, regardless of how obviously it was intended to be offensive and anger me. Doing this got me banned in the places where this philosophy is shared by the moderation... and kept me from being banned in the places where it isn't. So I guess it served me well.
Did the people who down-voted that stream belong to that particular category? I wouldn't know, because they didn't come out and say why they down-voted. But my money is on that hypothesis.
Fair enough, I agree with that assessment, although not necessarily with the entirety of your interpretation.
I admit that this reaction crossed my mind as well. It continues "All this being excessively nice to people is creepy. It's like being greeted by someone with an obviously fake smile." Maybe there's a better way to have gotten the same intent across?
Let's examine these notions:
fake smile: a fake smile is threatening, if you know it for what it is, because it signals benevolence when there is none. The response to threats is either thrill (if you're confident you can overcome them) or fear (if you aren't).
obviously fake smile: not only is it threatening, it also shows social incompetence on the side of the smiler. A plausible fake smile that you know to be fake is an invitation to a clever battle of manipulation (although you run the risk of an illusion of double transparency).
A fake smile that is too easy to recognize as fake is distressing because you know the smiler is hiding something, but the smiler doesn't. You don't really know how to deal with the asymmetry of the situation, you feel some kind of pity/contempt, and this adds a component of uneasiness to the threat.
It stops being thrilling/scary and it becomes creepy; the sensation you associate with threats of a vague magnitude that are quite easy but also quite unpleasant to deal with, such as arachnids, roaches, some reptiles and amphibians, rodents, or a very infatuated and very low-status person of the opposite sex (or, worse if you're straight, the same sex) asking you to be their partner for the prom dance.
A tiger isn't creepy. A stampeding elephant isn't creepy. A rapist with a knife isn't creepy. A cokroach is creepy. A mouse is creepy. A proselytizing person is creepy, and so is anyone who's trying to sell you something you think you don't want. A stalker who built a shrine to your image is creepy.
Dealing with the threat is easy; just say "No, thank you." or "Stop doing that!". Just squash the bug and move on. And yet, you're paralyzed by the unpleasant expectations of squishing that bug, which are only marginally better than letting it crawl all over the place.
As it turns out, there's more complicated, delicate ways of dealing with the threat that involve capturing the creepy crawly and releasing it somewhere where its presence won't bother you.
Ahem. Sorry, I had to get the "creep" theory out of my head.
Being excessively nice to people is basically forcing upon them an inconditional gift that they will feel pressured to reciprocate. You're non-forcefully/passive-aggressively forcing them to do something their guts tell them they do not want to do.
Obviously, if you're a malevolent asshole, you'll find it very unsettling that other people reciprocate your violence with kindness. You're comfortable with reciprocal violence, it makes you feel righteous, balanced, competitive, on edge, etc. People turning the other cheek at you, on the other hand, are forcing you to reciprocate their kindness, which you do not want to do. This "creeps" them out.
Initially, I did not understand why seeing others treat each other in nicer ways than are routine for you would cause you to actively express disapproval of their action. But there might be a peer pressure effect going on; maybe they feel pressured by the strange-acting pair to reconsider the way they do things, and don't like that pressure, and act against it. From that perspective, it is perfectly possible to threaten someone without meaning to and perhaps without even being aware of their existence.
I would like to analyze my instinctive reaction here rather than express it. Please support me in this.
I don't think my idea of "obviously fake smile" maps to social incompetence. It just implies insincerity. Many people, even those who are not malevolent assholes, dislike seeing insincerity.
That's the first-level idea, and I am prepared to reject it because of the possibility that you may, in fact, be sincere about saying things like that. But being excessively nice is not always an incidental choice to make. In fact, I believe that I would pretty much never be able to sincerely say something as saccharine as the early comments in this thread. Thus, if many people behave in that way, I would be forced to choose between being rude and being insincere.
Oh, come on, you call that saccharine? This is saccharine XD
As for insincerity, it's not that I'm insincere, it's that I'm very profuse in my demonstrations of affection, respect, and so on. The emotion behind is genuine, I'm just very openly demonstrative about it. If the other person has codes where only a much greater favour is deserving of such open displays of positivity, they see the discrepancy and deduce that I am sending false (or exaggerated) signals.
The same is true in reverse. Some people have a norm of violently lashing out at anything they dislike, and, when meeting people who react to offence by silence or by shifting their attention elsewhere, some very unfortunate misunderstandings can happen.
Essentially, it's a misunderstanding.
I don't think it's insincere if you contain your attempt at rudeness and yet endeavour to convey your misgivings and negative feelings to the other person clearly and sincerely. To take an exaggeratedly dramatic example, when Iñigo Montoya says "Hello. My name is Iñigo Montoya. You killed my father. Perpare to die.", he's being perfectly sincere. More so, in fact, than if he'd said "YOU FATHER-MURDERING PIECE OF SHIT, I'LL SWORDFUCK YOU TILL YOU LOVE IT!", because it's more precise and accurate. Even though his first impulse might have been to say the latter rather than the former (we know it wasn't, but that's beside the point).
Another cartoony but very nice example of someone very angry still being polite about it, and not in a passive-aggressive or insincere way, but in an open and assertive way, is Finn the Human from Adventure Time. There's plenty of force behind "NO, MAN" or "GET OUT" without having to intercalate "fucking" and "asshole" and so on inbetween.
You misunderstand. If everyone suddenly became over-the-top nice but me, then even if I had no intention of being rude, I would either have to go against the norm or say things I don't mean.
if only we had some sort of system for indicating approval of what people say!
If you're referring to the karma system, I think that too is rather worthless if you don't say why you approve. I've found some of my posts upvoted way more than I expected, and I found that rather distressing, not knowing what I had done right. Some of them I wasn't even very proud of, being sarcastic, insulting, contemptuous, or lazily including geek-appeal references or cheap wit. When those get approval, it fills me with shame.
Also, for the love of everything lovable, please spare me the sarcasm.
What's wrong with sarcasm?
It leads to misunderstandings, it's passive-aggressive, annoying, petty, condescending, and whiny. It also adds zero value to communication, and many languages fail to include it entirely; you will never find a sarcastic phrase in Arabic or Japanese, for instance. If you have something to say, say it clearly and concisely.
I sincerely and unashamedly hate sarcasm and I wish for it to grow extinct as a form of expression.
If you want to use snark, however, you can do so easily without resorting to saying the exact opposite of what you mean. Thorstein Veblen was very good at unsarcastic snark, and he would copiously insult the elites of his time without them even noticing.
The messageboard would be basically unreadable if every karma was replaced by a comment saying "Right on!" or "fuck you!". People who want to tell you why you're right or wrong will tell you regardless, what karma does is provide an additional means of feedback that way more people can use without having to go over the threshold of writing entire responses to everything. It gives you MORE information, not less.
"Right on" and "fuck you" are about as useless as "upvote" and "downvote", if not more so. If people don't think their opinion of a post is important or intense enough to go through the effort of explaining why they have that opinion, then they should treat is as neutral and keep it to themselves. Upvotes and downvotes are about as useless a means of feedback as can be provided; they don't tell you what they think needs to be changed, they don't tell you why they think it needs to be changed, all they tell you is that there is an absolute difference (not even a proportion) of people who like or dislike what you did.
That's feedback is feeding you a lot of hay and little grain. If the fault you've made is so obvious that that sort of feedback can make you notice it, you wouldn't do it in the first place.
Karma is not feedback. Karma is a way of promoting what you like and rejecting what you dislike; it doesn't serve the poster, it serves you.