Comment on Politics Discussion Thread January 2013

Richard_Kennaway
Sun, 06 Jan 2013 11:22:14 GMT

I don't really hang out anywhere like PUA forums or racist blogs or anything like that, so maybe I only encounter the good stuff that has enough sensibleness to it to filter into the rest of the internet?

Like cracked.com and 4chan? Sensibleness is not the filter for popularity on the internet.

That article is fucking gold. Thanks for the link. Now unfortunately that was not the point you were trying to make...

Different people respond to different forms. Some are suckers for a man in a white coat intoning "studies have shown". Some will lap up Deep Wisdom from anyone in Tibetan robes. Some will believe anyone who shouts at them loudly enough. (Makes for some interesting dynamics on PUA and NLP forums, where assertion is alpha, but both agreement and disagreement are beta.)

However, I don't think it's a good idea to dismiss an article because you can say the same thing without 99% of the article.

It's more that you can write the same content with a completely different 99%, with many completely different 99%s. Ayn Rand, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Feynman could have written the same content, in different ways. How does one determine whether one is responding to the clothing of the message, rather than the content? The red pill idea is particularly attractive to anyone who thinks they're smarter than those around them. And look where we are, LessWrong, where "contrarian" is a compliment, as if reversed consensus were intelligence.

I can believe that that article is not written in a way that works for everyone, but I think that for some people (the target audience, for example), it's exactly what they need to hear, and anything nicer wouldn't get the point across.

Skilful means, as the Buddhists put it. But of those who think they learned something from that article, how many would have learned whatever message the writer might have expressed in the same style?

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